Baptist Briefs: BWA, CBF collaborate on UN

BWA & CBF collaborate on UN work. The Baptist World Alliance and Cooperative Baptist Fellowship have joined forces to enhance a Baptist presence at the United Nations, leaders of the two groups announced recently. BWA and CBF leaders finalized a partnership agreement to collaborate in advocacy of shared concerns such as religious freedom, poverty and human rights on an international scale. For 11 years the Atlanta-based CBF sponsored Ana and David D’Amico, a couple who obtained nongovernmental organization status for the Fellowship and ministered to the diplomatic community in New York until their retirement in 2007. The BWA, a worldwide fellowship of Baptist conventions and unions in 121 countries and territories, has held special consultative status with the UN since 1974. BWA recognition places it in a setting in which nongovernmental organizations may make policy recommendations on world economic, social and environmental challenges.

Past CBF leader praises SBC racial progress. A past moderator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and pioneer in black church relations in the Southern Baptist Convention prior to a 1991 schism attended the recent meeting of a Emmanuel McCalltask force on race appointed by SBC Executive Committee President Frank Page and came away impressed. Emmanuel McCall, interim pastor of Friendship Baptist Church in Atlanta who presided as moderator at the 2007 CBF General Assembly, expressed appreciation for Page’s 2012 initiative to assemble the African-American Advisory Council to advise him on ethnically relevant issues. McCall was the first African-American professional staff member of the SBC when he joined the Home Mission Board in 1968. “I live with the hope that the SBC continues to realize its unique opportunity to change the worldview of what being ‘in Christ’ can mean,” McCall said. “Such a worldview is absolutely necessary for heartfelt evangelism. That momentum could greatly empower the Baptist witness beyond all current denominational divides.”