The Vision Committee

April 26, 2011

Wow! Time gets away from me in doing these blogs. I was busy early last week then took more personal time at the end of the week because a friend was visiting, and the blog was not done!

I promised to talk about mission statement and structure. What I really want to talk about though, was the good work of that New Region Task Force assigned by American Baptist Churches of the Northwest. They were an unbalanced group, with one locally church ordained African-American, two Asian-American laymen, and the rest Euro—American. We became aware that the group was out of balance with Seattle Baptist Union (SBU) which at the time had about half African-American congregations, the other half, Euro-American congregations, with a few Asian churches thrown in! So, after the first year, the Task Force decided to call together a “Vision Committee” to do three things:

• ·          Develop a Mission Statement
• ·          Decide on a name
• ·           Propose a structure

They proposed, since SBU’s make-up was what it was, that the Vision Committee should have 4 representatives from the African-American churches, 4 from the Euro-American and at least 2 from the Asian Churches. Only the Euro churches met to choose their representatives and they specifically chose representatives who were predominately lay people (Chrystal Cooper, Larry Sims, Heidi Cleveland and Rev. Curtis Price). The one clergy was an associate pastor at the time they chose him. The African-American representatives came from interested groups and parties and 2 of the 4 were very faithful in their attendance, being as I recall at every meeting (Rev. Dana McClendon and Rev. George Noble). The Asian representatives were one layman and one clergy (Dr. Akira Ishimaru and Rev. Romero Macalinao). They met at least 2 six hour Saturdays and several other evenings. The first task was to come up with the Mission Statement. Although it was edited up until and even at the Covenanting Convention in May of 2002. They did the work well.  It continues to serve us today.

Being a culturally diverse people who are one in Christ and who value the liberties of our American Baptist heritage, the Evergreen Baptist Association will build bridges between communities; provide resources to equip member churches to share Christ and teach God’s word; and translate our unity to the world.

They also proposed the structure that gives us what we call our “caucus” system. The structure includes an Executive Committee that has two representatives from every caucus and a quorum at every level that includes at least one representative from every caucus be present in order to do business! When people of color hear this about our structure, they say “Wow, you are really serious about wanting us to help make decisions!”

One of our gifts was having the time for this unique group of people to do their work and they did it prayerfully and well. Many times I’ve been grateful for how God worked with this group and continues to work with us each step of the way.

Marcia

The Evergreen Story: Beginnings

April 14, 2011

            Last week I was at General Executive Council (GEC) meetings followed by a special Design Team meeting for the launch of a new missional initiative by American Baptist Churches—watch for the launch at the Biennial. My intention is to add to this blog about weekly, but it has been much longer than that, since my last post. Thanks to those who are reading this, I hope you find it helpful to learn more about Evergreen Association.

            There is on the Evergreen web site a history of Evergreen, but I think it important to tell some of the poignant stories of Evergreen, which is what I hope to do in these next few blogs. Evergreen is blessed as an organization, especially blessed as an American Baptist Region because of our beginnings. We were born out of the controversy surrounding acceptance of gay/lesbian/transgendered/bisexual peoples in American Baptist life. The American Baptist Churches of the Northwest in an effort to keep people at the American Baptist table made a decision at their 2000 Biennial Convention to restructure the region. The subsequent meeting held in December of 2000 was to ask Seattle Baptist Union (SBU) (an already existing organization of American Baptist Churches in Seattle) to form a new region. There was a caveat that any church in SBU could opt out of the new region and any church in the greater ABC Northwest could opt into the new region. That started the Evergreen journey. It was blessed at the beginning to be given this gift of invitation to churches, very few of which were actively engaged in the controversy, to form a new region. This was a gift of a clean slate, an empty place, in which to build something new. This gift allowed us to begin with renewing relationships and work slowly toward organization. The gift of time and a blank slate on which to create something new is a rare thing and one that helped Evergreen become what it is today. The task force asked to begin the new Region worked slowly. Although they began meeting in January of 2001, it was not until May of 2002 that the name Evergreen was proposed as a name—all that came before then just did not fit or were too close to names already in use. Although the name is geographically based because Washington is the Evergreen State, it calls forth a wealth of other possibilities for us.

            In the next blog I’ll reflect on how we came to our mission statement and caucus structure.

Marcia