GREENSBORO, N.C. (BP)–The word that two task forces will focus on the spiritual needs of African Americans energized the 150 people at the 2006 annual meeting of the National African American Fellowship of the Southern Baptist Convention (NAAF-SBC) in Greensboro, N.C.
A North American Mission Board task force on African Americans has completed its work and a report on its findings and recommendations for strategy planning is expected soon, said Dennis Mitchell, NAMB church planting team leader.
NAAF President Mark Croston chaired that task force.
Croston announced plans by LifeWay Christian Resources to soon begin a study tailored to ways it can help meet the spiritual needs of African Americans.
“It’s an exciting time, to know our agencies are reaching out and being helpful to the African American community,” said Croston, pastor of East End Baptist Church in Suffolk, Va. “This report from NAMB shows its great zeal and great desire to reach African Americans in the United States.”
A six-month study of African Americans in the United States recently completed by Chris McNairy was the research foundation on which the task force developed its strategy. McNairy presented some of his findings during NAAF’s business session at Greensboro’s Sheraton Four Seasons.
The nation’s 39.2 million African Americans are the most assimilated ethnic group into the nation’s culture, McNairy said. NAAF members discussed the merits and drawbacks of that, and determined that assimilation is an issue that needs more study by the fellowship.
NAAF’s strategy as a fellowship within the Southern Baptist Convention includes strengthening and starting churches, understanding and impacting SBC life, and mobilizing African Americans for short-term, lifestyle and career missions.
An ad hoc committee centering on Hurricane Katrina response reported that it contacted the 150 displaced African American pastors in the Gulf Coast region and tried with less than complete success to pair them with an unaffected church through NAMB’s Adopt A Church program.
“This is an ongoing work,” said Winston Rudolph, NAAF vice president and pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church of Christ in Pompano Beach, Fla., in making the report. “We ask you to pray about it and contribute to it. The work in New Orleans is still lacking significantly; 1,400 churches signed up [to be adopted] and a number of African American churches fell through the net again.”
Eddie Scott, New Orleans native and pastor of Christian Bible Fellowship Ministries, was the guest speaker at NAAF’s annual evening worship service June 11 at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Greensboro.
Scott, preaching from Daniel 3, spoke about the necessity of going through the furnace. Furnaces allow the saints of God to show others who God is, Scott said; they provide God a stage to do what only He can do. Furnaces remind Christians that they are protected “because He’s right there, giving you what you need. … Your answer is in the one in the furnace with you.”
Croston, in his presidential address, spoke from 1 Peter 14:17 on judgment.
“It is time for us to get serious about what God is doing around us,” Croston said. “Use it, lose it or chose it. … I know God’s got a blessing for every life; if we use the Word of God.”
During a banquet at the Sheraton, Croston introduced John Kramp, vice president for church resources at LifeWay Christian Resources, who spoke of a fresh awareness of the need to be racially inclusive in curriculum and training.
“I work reasonably hard to view people the way the Lord Jesus sees them and I’m constantly amazed how blind I am,” Kramp said. “God has convicted me to see I need to have eyes like His.”
Changes to racial inclusivity in curriculum, training and reaching out to pastors can’t occur immediately in an organization as complex as LifeWay, Kramp said, but he encouraged NAAF participants to “think what is possible in 5, 10, 20 years.”
Officers for NAAF’s 2006-07 term include Croston, president; Rudolph, vice president; Roscoe Belton, Middlebelt Baptist Church, Detroit, secretary; Leon Johnson, Bread of Life Baptist Church, Chicago, treasurer; Wayne Chaney, Antioch Baptist Church, Long Beach, Calif., parliamentarian; Robert Wilson, Sandtown Baptist Church, Atlanta, historian; Stephen Hardnett, New Christian Bible Baptist Church, Baltimore, eastern region director; Rev. Willie Jordan, St. Mark Cathedral Baptist Church, Harvey, Ill., central region director; and E.W. McCall, St. Stephen Baptist Church, La Puente, Calif., western region director.
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