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