2010 CBF-NC General Assembly

Our General Assembly this year was a blast. This year marked the 16th year of CBF-NC. This year is also the last year that my mom helped with the setup of exhibits as she is rotating off of that committee next year.

If you haven't read them yet Tony Cartledge has two excellent postings on the 2010 CBF-NC General Assembly. Here is a snippet from the main posting---Baptists Today Blogs: CBFNC at "Sweet Sixteen":

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina (CBFNC) celebrated its sixteenth year March 19-20 by affirming core partnerships, approving a record budget, and looking to a hopeful future. More than 950 persons packed the ornate, historic sanctuary of First Baptist Church in Winston-Salem for the opening session on Friday night, and the house was comfortably filled for the closing worship on Saturday morning.

Built on the theme "Generations Connected: One Family, One Faith, Many Journeys," the annual assembly recognized the founding generation of the CBF movement by hearing from from Cecil Sherman, CBF national's first coordinator, and gave attention to emerging generations with a closing message by Craig and Jennifer Janney, a young couple who serve as both ministers and instructors at Chowan University.

Sherman noted that the national Fellowship movement is now approaching 20 years of organized existence, and reflected on the importance of remembering how CBF emerged from a conflicted Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), even though some younger people "don't want to hear our war stories." Sherman related both the "face of conflict" from in an SBC overtaken by conservatism and credalism, and the "face of growth" that emerged as moderate Baptists coalesced around the historic principles they believed had been violated.

Although some early participants wanted CBF to focus on single issues, Sherman said, its early and continuing focus has been to provide a "missions delivery system for the churches" that defined missions as more than evangelism and church starts, to support Baptist theological education, and "to teach Baptist polity to people who have forgotten it or never knew it."

Sherman acknowledged that his generation will be off the stage as the next generation of CBF leadership emerges, but he advanced three ideas "that I hope some of you will keep in mind" as future decisions are made. "I hope you stay in touch with mainline Baptists," he said -- not just an elite group and big churches, but Baptists across the spectrum of size and locality. "If the decision makers know Baptists, they'll make good decisions," he said.

The second posting is about the presence of female ministers and female ministries within the CBF world in NC. Here is a snippet from that post:

There may be more, but the number of Anglo Baptist churches in North Carolina I know of who have women pastors can be counted on my fingers with some left over. A few others have women serving as co-pastors. There is no question that churches would be well served if there were more. The eleven moderate seminaries established in the past two decades have helped to train and prepare a number of God-called women for ministry roles -- including that of pastor -- but the churches willing to call them are few and far between. I know several women who are convinced of their call and standing ready to serve, but most of the churches willing even to consider them still conclude "We're just not ready for a female senior pastor."

In my more cynical moments, I think they're just chicken. There's no guarantee that all women pastors will be pulpit stars or effective leaders, but there are some real gems out there who could be, if they were just given a chance.

I've seen, and I believe.

North Carolina's Constitution Anti-Separation Of Church And State

Weird stuff all around:

No faith, no service?

I was surprised to learn that the North Carolina Constitution has a provision that disallows persons who don't believe in God from public service. The issue came to light after Cecil Bothwell, who describes himself as a "post-theist," was elected to the Asheville City Council, creating a stir among some conservatives and making national headlines.

Bothwell is a long-time environmentalist, resident, and author. He has been a syndicated coumnist, wrote a best-selling guidebook to Asheville, and in 2007 published a biography of evangelist Billy Graham, who lives in nearby Black Mountain. Bothwell belongs to the Unitarian Universalist Church, which is home to many folks who are skeptical about God's existence but still value spirituality, fellowship, and social justice. That's not enough to satisfy critics, including Mark Creech, who leads the North Carolina-based Christian Action League. I appreciate Mark, especially with regard to his opposition to alcohol and the lottery, but I have to disagree with him on this one.

It's true -- and a bit mind-boggling -- that the N.C. Constitution seems to think belief in God is an essential characteristic for all office holders. You can look it up:

Article Six, Section 8 says
The following persons shall be disqualified for office:
First, any person who shall deny the being of Almighty God.
Second, with respect to any office that is filled by election by the people, any person who is not qualified to vote in an election for that office.
Third, any person who has been adjudged guilty of treason or any other felony against this State or the United States, or any person who has been adjudged guilty of a felony in another state that also would be a felony if it had been committed in this State, or any person who has been adjudged guilty of corruption or malpractice in any office, or any person who has been removed by impeachment from any office, and who has not been restored to the rights of citizenship in the manner prescribed by law.

It's interesting to note that atheists are disqualified even before would-be candidates who aren't qualified to vote or who have committed treason or other felonies.

Dr. Cartledge goes on to state:

Relying heavily on David Barton's The Myth of Separation, which argues against church-state separation, Creech holds that "the founders" intended only that there should be no denominational test (Anglican, Presbyterian, etc.), assuming that all potential office holders would be Christian. In addition, he suggests (with the late D. James Kennedy) that those who don't believe in God have no external basis for life-affirming values and thus have no business serving the public.

Read the full article here: Baptists Today Blogs: No faith, no service? Mark Creech's arguments are typical theocratic nonsense.

Tony Cartledge Posts On The CBFNC General Assembly

Baptists Today Blogs: CBFNC challenged to share gospel, use words

Here is some of that post:

It’s not enough for believers to “walk the walk,” Fred Craddock told participants attending the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina’s 2009 General Assembly Mar. 20-21. “Somebody needs to talk the talk.”

Craddock, a retired professor perennial cited as one of America’s top preachers, spoke to an enthusiastic group of more than 1,000 registrants to Snyder Memorial Baptist Church in Fayetteville. In two sermons packed with his trademark stories, he focused on the difficulty of hearing Christ’s message and the challenge of sharing it with others.

“The principle pain in hearing is that we just don’t want to hear some things,” Craddock said. “We avoid things we don’t want to hear because they might disturb us.”

Read More: Here.

Here is an article on Craddock's preaching style from Wikipedia:

Preaching Style

There are at least three major features of Craddock's new homiletic that distinguish it from traditional homiletics. First, instead of using a traditional deductive approach, in which three points are named and illustrated, in his sermons, Craddock advocates an inductive style. Critiquing traditional homiletics--called the "old homiletic"--Craddock turned toward induction, in which the preacher re-creates for the listener the inductive process of study used to create the sermon itself. A second unique feature of Craddock's new homiletic is that a sermon should seek to create an experience for the listener, rather than attempting to gain the listeners' assent through sermons utilizing deductive, linear logic. As a result of Craddock's inductive model, the role of the listeners fundamentally changes: no longer are listeners passive recipients of a conclusion already reached by the authoritative preacher, to which they must acquiesce. Rather, in Craddock's scheme, the listeners are active participants in the sermon by virtue of the sermon form itself, which enables the hearer to "finish" the sermon that is intentionally left open-ended. Third, Craddock emphasizes that the form or genre of the biblical passage to be preached should shape in some way the form taken by the sermon. While Craddock does not require that a sermon slavishly adhere to the biblical form--a psalm need not be preached entirely as a poetic sermon--he argues that various biblical forms seek to accomplish a variety of rhetorical aims and as such, the sermon should attempt to "do what the text does" in both the "what" (content) and the "how" (rhetorical strategies) of the text.

Craddock offers an inductive approach to preaching with an aim of active participation by the listener in the movement of the sermon as well as in the discerning of the message. His grounding principle is that good preaching is a socializing force that creates community.[3]

Often characterized as preaching with a style that is "folksy,"[4] Craddock is a strong supporter of using humour in sermons.[5] Newsweek ranked him as one of America's greatest preachers.[2] Craddock's new homiletic has influenced further generations of homileticians who have developed new sermon forms while holding to certain values found within the new homiletic: narrative preaching, phenomenological preaching, and conversational preaching, to name a few.

Craddock's style like Harry Emerson Fosdick's style fits in well with the blended styles of CBF including it's welcoming embrace of the Emerging/Emergent Movement and Postmodern language and it's acceptance of the good parts of traditionalism.

Fundamentalists want to turn back time

By Marv Knox
Associated Baptist Press

Despite all their theological and cultural differences,fundamentalists of every faith share at least one common characteristic: resistance to modernity. That’s the assessment of scholars and firsthand observers who have evaluated the
varieties of religious expression. “Fundamentalism worldwide is religious
anti-modernism,” noted Roger Olson, professor of theology at Baylor University’s George W. Truett Theological Seminary. “Fundamentalism reacts against various types of modernity,” echoed Bill Leonard, a church historian and dean of the Wake Forest
University Divinity School. Whether it’s Baptist preachers J. Frank Norris and Jerry Falwell calling America to return to pre-scientific Christianity or Ayatollah Khomeini and Muqtada al-Sadr calling Muslims to resist the intrusion of Western ecadence, fundamentalism finds a home in most major faith groups.
“In Christianity and Judaism, the battle with modernity in terms of elaborate militancy is the battle against pluralism — the idea there
are multiple ways to come to faith and that a given religion must come to terms with, and indeed conform to, society,” Leonard explained. The battle extends all the way back to 17th-century England and “a very painful process in the struggle between religious establishments and religious dissenters,” he said, an observation affirmed by Olson. The battle raged on American soil about a century ago, when Protestant fundamentalism resisted “the liberal modernist effort to
change theology in light of new scientific and rationalist theses,” Leonard added.
So, the more recent rise of Islamic fundamentalism is neither unique nor surprising in the relatively younger faith, he added. “Militant action against dissent and pluralism and certainly modernity has worked itself through major elements of Christianity worldwide.… The Muslims are just now confronting that.”...

Read More Of This Insightful Article: Here.