This summer in Tampa we will light 20 candles, make a wish and celebrate two decades of mission and ministry of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. What a birthday celebration it will be! As we prepare to celebrate, I pause to reflect on three chapters of our Fellowship and offer you my CBF birthday wish list.

CBF 1.0: Refuge
In August 1990, the Fellowship was born after ten years of public controversy among Baptists. We needed a new home, and we found refuge in CBF. While courageous Baptists were forming this new Fellowship, I was learning to drive and applying for college. The first time someone mention the letters “CBF” was when I entered Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond in1996. CBF became real for me through my professor, Dr. Cecil Sherman. He vividly described the purpose and passion of this new Baptist family. Dr. Sherman was our voice. However, we developed a bad habit of defining CBF by who we fought against, instead of by what we stood for. Twenty years later, we still wrestle with this bad habit.

CBF 2.0: Movement
As we distanced ourselves from the battles, fresh voices emerged within our Fellowship. These voices called for something new and different than another denomination. A slogan on my 10 year-old CBF ink pen says it best: “A New Way to Be Baptist.” Dr. Daniel Vestal helped us embrace our new identity as a movement – a Jesus movement. While there was great pressure to become denomination, Dr. Vestal helped center our mission and ministries on “being the presence of Christ.” That phrase has allowed us to a uniquely Christian movement, while preserving our historic Baptist identity. Movement energizes most Fellowship Baptists, but like the ancient Israelites on their epic journey we are beginning to ask two questions: 1) Where is the movement going? and 2) Is the movement going to end?

CBF 3.0: Community
Which brings us to where we are today. As we look to the next 20 years, consider CBF as community. “Community” is the word I hear younger Baptists and key leaders use to describe our future, and for some it is the only Baptist community they have ever known.

Now, think about community for a moment. My colleague in Missouri, state coordinator Harold Phillips, says every community has assets, and every community needs infrastructure. Communities need roadways, water pipes, electric grids, telecommunications and other means of infrastructure so that the community can function and grow.

As a Baptist community, our greatest assets are the relationships we have with individuals and churches within the Fellowship. As a Baptist community, our infrastructure is relationship-based and is provided via our connections with our field personnel and partnerships with mission and education agencies that provide tangible services to our churches.

The community infrastructure I desire for CBF is light and lean. Our CBF community will work collaboratively with individuals and churches to provide grassroots and global mission and ministry engagement. Our CBF community will not be based on bricks and mortar models of denominational life. Instead, CBF will be known as an organic, sustainable garden of collaborative relationships and activities that provide fresh expressions of mission engagement in the 21st century.

My CBF Wish List
Now, I realize that kind of community may sound trendy or complex, but it’s actually very simple. When I asked my 9-year-old daughter to define community, she simply said, “Community is where you live, work and play.” As a Fellowship Baptist who is invested in CBF, I long for a Baptist community where my family and I can live, work and play.

Here are my three CBF wishes:
• I wish for my children to grow up Baptist and learn the stories of “real live missionaries” while also being challenged to consider themselves as missionaries, too.
• I wish for my children to attend youth camps and hands-on mission gatherings with like-minded Baptists as well as other Christians from various faith traditions who share a passion for God’s mission.
• I wish for my children to have opportunity to attend college (and maybe even seminary) where they can engage Baptist scholars and leadership programs that develop their calling and gifts in congregational mission and ministries.

And when my children are grown, and they walk the aisle to join a new church, I want them to say to their pastor, “Since I was a child, I’ve spent my life serving God on mission. So, today, I want to join this church to serve, not just to be served.”