The following post is from Jeanie Miley, a Houston-area resident who will be leading a workshop at CBF’s General Assembly (July 2-3 in Hosuton) called “Joint Venture: Practical Spirituality for Embracing the World.”

At the CBF Assembly in Houston this July, Marquette Bugg will receive the Addie Davis Award for Excellence in Preaching. She was chosen from a group of female students from the seminaries with which CBF partners. That is an impressive award.

After visiting with Marquette by phone this afternoon and hearing about her plans to go to Ghana after graduation, I am really impressed. I’m proud that she is a graduate of Truett Seminary; I am both moved and thankful that this young woman has had the courage and stamina to follow God’s call. I am eager to meet Marquette Bugg. 

I met Marquette’s parents, John and Mary Bugg, at University Heights Baptist Church in Stillwater, Oklahoma, in March of this year, so they are new friends. Instantly, however, we had a connection with each other because my daughter, too, is a graduate of Truett Seminary. I could feel their pride in her; I also understand what it’s like to have a daughter who has experienced a calling to ministry.
John Bugg is the pastor of UHBC, a church I have respected and admired for a long time. However, I would not have had the opportunity to meet John and Mary Bugg or the other wonderful people at that church if I hadn’t met a dynamo of a woman, a member of UHBC, at the CBF Assembly only last year.
Jeane Yates introduced herself to me at a workshop I was leading. Instantly, I felt a connection with her when she told me that her father-in-law was Kyle Yates, Sr. Jeane told me about a lecture series at UHBC that had been established in honor of her husband, Kyle Yates, Jr., chair of the Religious Studies department at Oklahoma State University for twenty years. Jeane asked me to be the speaker for this years lecture series, and because of her, I had the privilege of experiencing the warmth and wonder of a group of what my dad , a Texas Baptist pastor, called “like-minded Baptists” at UHBC.

I didn’t know Jeane Yates until last year, but I didn’t hesitate to respond to her invitation because when I was a child, my father spoke of her father-in-law with respect and admiration. Dr. Yates was trustworthy; he was someone we could follow. When I was a Baylor student, Dr. Yates was one of the great men on our campus; meeting Jeane Yates was like meeting a part of my family that I’d never met before.

This is part of what I love about being a part of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship – and this is what I look forward to every year when we gather together to encourage and support each other. Each time we meet, we connect with a history that is rich, meaningful and important, a history that we share across the generations. And each time we gather there is the possibility of meeting a new, young friend in whom the possibilities and potentialities of a bright, open-minded and open-hearted future is being revealed.
Marquette and I will meet for the first time at the Assembly  this July, but our lives are woven together through the threads of Baptist life that stretch out over decades. My prayer for her is that the threads of love and support, encouragement and pride will wrap her heart with love and that this family of faith known as the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship will give encouragement and support, tender care and careful attention to the call of God that she has experienced. It is a sacred call, after all.
You just never know who you will meet who will give you another strand in the tapestry we are weaving together.

What a fellowship? Indeed.

For more information or to pre-register for the Assembly, visit www.thefellowship.info/assembly.