By Marv Knox

Two feelings stand out as Becky Buice Hall looks back on her three-decade career at the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship—her persistent calling to care for CBF field personnel and the abundant blessing of relationships. 

Hall started working at CBF in August 1993 and continued through the end of January 2024. At 30 years and six months, hers is the longest tenure of any CBF employee.  

Across the years, Hall changed jobs as need demanded and opportunity allowed, evolving and maturing alongside the Fellowship.  

In 1993, Hall moved back home to Atlanta after a divorce and reached out to David Wilkinson, CBF’s communications coordinator and a former colleague at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. “I knew David well and wanted to work for him again,” Hall recalled. “So, I told him, ‘If you have a job opening, let me know.’” 

Soon, she was CBF’s first receptionist, one of the initial dozen or so employees in the Atlanta office. Not long after that, Keith Parks, CBF’s first Global Missions coordinator, asked her to join the Global Missions team, and she became the administrative assistant for Parks and associate coordinators Betty Law and Harlan Spurgeon.  

That move placed Hall in the middle of Global Missions just as CBF began to appoint its own mission workers—what CBF calls field personnel—after taking on the support of some foreign missionaries cast out of the Southern Baptist Convention.  

“I love CBF, and field personnel are my true heart because I worked with them for so long,” Hall said. “My calling to CBF was a calling to support them.” 

 That support meant learning to do whatever needed to be done to help field personnel function wherever they lived, in whatever circumstances they faced.  

“When I started at CBF, a computer network didn’t exist,” she reported. “Every email from Dr. Parks, Betty and Harlan went out from me, through my computer. I had to encrypt every email individually to keep the email secure. 

“In the early years, I was the ‘IT department,’ too. So, I can still remember when we appointed missionaries. I took their new laptops home, spread them across my living room floor and installed their software, one floppy disc at a time. I am not technical by any stretch, so for me to be the IT person was funny.” 

The passion that propelled Hall to learn enough about information technology to encrypt email and to install software pushed her to take on other responsibilities. “I always felt I needed to be learning something new and growing,” she said. “I wanted more responsibility; I wanted to do more.” 

Eventually, that translated into helping manage the Global Missions budget—from tracking income and expenses, to developing the next year’s budget, to working directly with field personnel on expense reporting.  

Wired as she is toward relationships and missions support, Hall focused on serving field personnel, virtually at any time. “Over the years, that meant checking my email regularly, telling field personnel: ‘I’m available when you need me. Here’s my cell phone number.’ I felt like if field personnel needed something in Asia, I needed to be available to help them get what they needed.”  

“I really believe this was my calling,” she added. “When it came to field personnel, God called them to tough places and hard situations, and if I could make their lives easier by being at CBF, I wanted to do it. My calling placed me in the CBF office to help field personnel fulfill their calling around the world.” 

In fact, when Hall thinks about her favorite times at CBF, her mind goes to Global Missions team meetings in various parts of the world. She loved hearing their stories, as well as seeing where many of them lived and served.  

One of the best experiences occurred within the last couple of years, when she attended a combined meeting of the Europe and Africa-Middle East teams in Spain. Her husband, Tony, planned to go with her, but the timing of Covid vaccines prevented his travel.  

They had planned to extend their trip by a few days, and when Tony couldn’t go, she considered cutting that part short. Instead, she joined up with four female field personnel, who also had extended their trips. “It allowed me to get to spend extra time getting to know each of them better, and this would not have happened if the circumstances had been different,” she said.  

Years ago, Hall stretched beyond Global Missions when she started managing the exhibit hall at CBF’s annual General Assembly. The exposure expanded her CBF relationships, providing an opportunity to get to know all kinds of vendors and to work with CBF’s partner organizations, most of which exhibit at the summertime event.  

Hall grew and stretched even more a few years ago, when she joined the CBF finance department. 

That move followed a sad season, when tight finances forced the elimination of some staff jobs in 2017. “It was a tough time,” she conceded. “There were folks let go who were near and dear to my heart. I began to question, ‘Do I need to stay?’ I questioned my call.” 

 But while attending the annual retreat for missionaries’ children, Hall spent a lot of time alone in prayer. “In my conversation with God, I said: ‘I don’t know what I need to do. I need you to make it perfectly clear this is where I need to be.’ When I got home, I had an opportunity to move out of Global Missions into finance—a broader role. God made it perfectly clear: ‘This is where you need to be.’”  

As if to emphasize that point, in 2020, Hall became CBF’s associate coordinator for operations. She oversaw finance/ accounting, budget development, human resources, information technology, data management and office functioning.  

“When Connie McNeill had this job years ago, I knew: ‘This is what I wanted to be when I grow up,’” she said. It completed her arc of CBF service—beginning as receptionist and ending as COO. 

Co-workers from across the years reflected on the blessing of serving alongside Hall. 

 CBF Executive Coordinator Paul Baxley said Hall has “given generously and sacrificially of her gifts, her time, her energy and her deep faith toward the thriving of CBF.”  

“In so many ways, she is the heart of our staff and an embodiment of what is best about us,” Baxley said. “She has seen our Fellowship from our very earliest years and has done exceptional work as associate coordinator of operations. I have counted it a privilege and honor to serve with her. We offer thanks to God and to her for her years of faithful and beautiful service.” 

“I don’t know of anyone who served CBF with more dignity and integrity than Becky,” insisted Daniel Vestal, who served as CBF executive coordinator for much of Hall’s tenure. “She has shown all of us what servant leadership looks like, and she has done it with humility and grace.” 

“Becky’s work was not done in public or on a platform. Her face was not shown on videos or in news magazines. She was not a preacher or musician who received recognition. But for those of us who have lived within the inner workings of the CBF organization in implementing ministry, we know who she is and what she did. And more importantly, God knew who she was and what she did.” 

At Hall’s retirement dinner, Clarissa Strickland, an early-CBF colleague, quoted Wilkinson as saying, “Becky eats work.”  

Acknowledging “devours work” might have been more accurate, Wilkinson elaborated: “For more than three decades, Becky lived up to that description. She was extremely productive, focused and efficient, repeatedly outgrowing her defined roles. She was steadfastly loyal and trustworthy, always honoring confidentiality, whether explicitly requested or implied. She made everyone around her better.” 

That’s because she cared so much about everyone around her, he added. “She believes in the people who comprise the Fellowship—its leaders, staff members and field personnel, and those congregations and individuals who have supported CBF as volunteers, advocates and financial contributors. For Becky, it’s always been about the people.”  

Hall always responded to those relationships and also to God’s design for her in CBF, Strickland added. “Especially in the early years of CBF history, those of us who were privileged to be ‘flying the plane as we built it,’ as first CBF Executive Coordinator Cecil Sherman was wont to say, had a strong sense that what we were doing was much more than a job,” she explained. “It was a calling. Nobody exemplified that more than Becky Hall.  

“Becky never really had a static ‘role’ at CBF. She was ever growing, maturing, acquiring new skills as she moved to different positions within CBF. I watched with admiration as she constantly ‘reinvented’ herself within her changing responsibilities.” 

 “Becky loves field personnel and shows it through her care and concern,” reported Dianne McNary, CBF’s Offering for Global Missions advocate and with her husband, Shane, former longtime field personnel in Slovakia and Czechia. 

“Becky cared about us, our children,” she said. “She treated all field personnel like they were her extended family as we are! Becky always made sure we were taken care of, even if that meant dealing with us on a weekend or holiday or vacation. Becky had a calling to make CBF great and to care for CBF field personnel. She has hung in there during some hard times.” 

That was a broad and inclusive calling, explained Rob Nash, who was CBF’s Global Missions coordinator during part of Hall’s tenure. 

“What struck me was her passion to support the work of field personnel around the world in ways that made their work easier and less stressful,” Nash said. “To this end, she assisted them with monthly reports in often-unheralded ways by approaching this challenge as her ministry to them.”  

“Before spending too long with CBF, we realized this was not a job for Becky: It was a passion,” said Suzie, who, with her husband, Kirk, are longtime CBF field personnel in Southeast Asia. “As field personnel, we had a call to serve the ‘ends of the earth.’ Becky likewise had a clear call to serve the nations through serving field personnel. The God who calls is the God who equips, and God equipped Becky for her unique and much-valued role.” 

Kirk emphasized Hall’s value to field personnel. “Becky was that unique person in the organization who knew everything,” he noted. “Over the past 27 years, we have said, ‘Better ask Becky’ more times than we can count.”  

“Becky’s presence has been a model of what we ought to mean by ‘long-term,’” stressed Shane McNary, now coordinator of ministry for Great Rivers Fellowship. “Beyond being a storehouse of institutional knowledge, Becky embodied CBF Global Mission’s institutional spirit, our ethos, in a way that provided stability for all of CBF. It was always interesting to me how often my go-to person at CBF is Becky. 

“Her role has been so crucial in the life of Global Missions and field personnel and, more lately, for all of CBF, that it really isn’t too far of a stretch to ask, ‘What is CBF going to do without Becky?’ She’s the leaven in the CBF loaf.”  

While others figure out what CBF will do without her, Hall will be learning what to do without CBF much closer to home. She and Tony live in Flovilla, Ga., an hour and a half from the CBF office in Decatur.  

At 56, she acknowledged, “I’m too young to retire” and said she will look for meaningful opportunities to invest her time without that long, long commute. And staying closer to home will allow her to spend more time with her family—her parents, both 81, her daughter, Emily, and son-in-law, Matt, who are expecting Hall’s first grandchild this summer. 

But Hall still will treasure the relationships that have sustained her across the years, she said, noting, “CBF is family and always will be family.” 

This article first appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of fellowship! magazine. Check out the issue and subscribe for free at www.cbf.net/fellowship.