Over 2,400 Gather for Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Annual Assembly
Nearly 2,500 Baptists on Wednesday met in Grapevine, Texas, for the 2005 Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly. Among other business, the members elected a female pastor from San Francisco and an African-American retired pastor to the top offices, and approved a $16.47 million operating budget for the 2005-2006 fiscal year.
Joy Lee, pastor of New Covenant Baptist Church in San Francisco was elected as moderator and Emmanuel McCall, retired pastor of Christian Fellowship Baptist Church in Atlanta, was affirmed as moderator-elect. McCall served 25 years at the Southern Baptist Home Mission Board prior to his pastorate at Christian Fellowship, and is vice president of the Baptist World Alliance.
The CBF is a gathering of Baptist Churches that formed in the early 1990s in opposition to the larger Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)s conservative resurgence. The nations 43,000 Southern Baptist churches each have a choice of aligning with either or both the SBC and CBF, and express that choice with their pocketbooks.