If you missed the CBF of Georgia meeting March 13-14 at First Baptist Columbus, you missed one of the great proclaimers/teachers/historians/story tellers in Baptist life. Dr. Walter “Buddy” Shurden was outstanding in two messages that followed Michael Novak’s metaphors “The Flight of the Dove” and “The Ascent of the Mountain.”
On Friday night, Shurden shared his personal story of faith, a powerful and gripping re-telling of his coming to Christ as a student at Delta State University. In his brilliant narrative style, he effectively made the point that if we are not careful, Fellowship Baptists will lose the connection with our own individual stories of being caught up in Christ’s love, the Flight of the Dove, by placing too much emphasis on social justice issues. The crowd of more than 300 provided a sort of homecoming for Shurden, who was a previous interim pastor there.
He followed up Friday night’s exhortation with a message on the struggle of the Christian life in his Saturday luncheon address titled “The Ascent of the Mountain.” Again, he used his personal narrative as a backdrop for the struggle that the journey of faith could be. One of my favorite quotes from the address was “The reputation of the saint is largely dependent on the silence of his family.”
Overall, it was an outstanding meeting. I’m looking forward to watching the progress of a new church start by Carrie and Nathan Dean in the in-town Edgewood neighborhood of Atlanta. I liked the “MEL Talks” format – brief presentations on missions, education or leadership followed by discussion sessions with the presenters. I enjoyed seeing old friends and former colleagues. They will posting videos of the presentations soon at http://www.cbfga.org/about/cbf-ga-meetings/mel-talks.html.
But as a CBF employee, the one nugget of inspiration I will take away from the meeting was in the brief report of Frank Broome, CBF of Georgia’s coordinator. His status update for the state organization, which is in the black financially although behind budget, was “It’s getting harder and harder, but better and better.” I’d say that’s true for us an individual Christians as well as a movement of free and faithful Baptists.
If you want more details of the meeting, logon to www.twitter.com, sign-up for an account and follow “lancewallace.” You’ll see my “tweets” throughout the meeting.