Begin at the Association: Reimagining the Body Closest to the Local Church
Re-imagining the Baptist Denomination within the African-American Tradition Part II
Ask a weary pastor where the denomination actually touches his week, and he will not point you to the national convention in some distant city. He will point, if he points anywhere, down the road, to the handful of churches near enough that he knows their pastors by name and their troubles by heart. That cluster has a name. We call it the association, and it is where any honest reimagining has to begin.
In a recent conversation, the distinguished pastor and church-growth specialist Dr. D.Z. Cofield put it to me with the clarity of a man who has spent three decades revitalizing churches: “Any reimagining of denominational work must begin with the closest body to the local church, and that’s the association.”1 He is right. The association is the capillary, not the aorta. It is the cluster of churches within reasonable proximity, usually three or four counties, close enough that their pastors can actually know one another. Whatever we hope to accomplish nationally will be an abstraction until it becomes real here, in the body a struggling church can reach by car in an afternoon.
WHERE THE ASSOCIATION CAME FROM
The story begins earlier than most of us realize. As early as 1834, free Black Baptists in southern Ohio organized the Providence Baptist Association, recognized as the first independent Black Baptist association in American history.2 This was no genteel fellowship of convenience. It was, in fact, the Providence Anti-Slavery Baptist Association, and the network of churches it knit together across the iron-furnace counties of Lawrence, Gallia, and Jackson doubled as a corridor of the Underground Railroad, moving freedom seekers toward safety.3 Fellowship and freedom were the same project. Illinois Baptists soon followed with the Wood River Association, and by 1840 Black Baptists were cooperating across state lines through the American Baptist Missionary Convention, driven in large part by a burning desire to carry the gospel back to Africa.4 The association was invented, in other words, so that small and vulnerable congregations could do together what none could do apart: educate, evangelize, and resist. That is still its charter.
WHAT THE BIBLE TEACHES: SETTING APART AND EQUIPPING
The association’s oldest work is the forming of leaders, and Scripture treats that work with great seriousness. When the apostles faced their first administrative strain, they did not improvise; they told the church, “Select from among you, brethren, seven men of good reputation, full of the Spirit and of wisdom, whom we may put in charge of this task” (Acts 6:3). The setting apart of tested, Spirit-filled servants, deacons and ministers alike, is association work of the most ancient kind. And the goal of that work is never the officeholder’s honor but the whole body’s health:
And He gave some as apostles, and some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ.
EPHESIANS 4:11–12 (NASB)
Equipping the saints is precisely what a cluster of churches, pooling what each has, can do far better than any one of them alone. With that charter in view, let us be concrete about what a reimagined association should offer the local church in the twenty-first century.
WHAT A REIMAGINED ASSOCIATION OFFERS
Fellowship that feeds, not just fills the calendar. The association should be the place where lonely pastors stop being lonely. Not another obligatory business session, but a genuine annual association picnic where families meet families and children see that the church is bigger than their building; and special seasonal worship gatherings that pool choirs and congregations for nights of preaching and praise no single church could mount alone. People will not drive an hour for a committee report. They will drive an hour for joy.
Resources the small church cannot build alone. Here is where adaptability lives or dies. The association should run virtual cohorts, small clusters of pastors and lay leaders meeting online through a season to work through preaching, administration, or discipleship together. It should offer real evangelism and outreach training, and, just as urgently, shared social-media and digital-ministry help, because the church of fifty members cannot hire a media team, but forty churches together can train and fund one. The independents won the last twenty years partly on competence in exactly these areas. There is no reason the competence cannot be pooled and shared.
Ordination and leadership formation done well. Few things are more consequential, or more neglected, than how we set apart leaders. The association is the natural home for serious deacons’ training and ordination, and for the training of associate ministers who too often are licensed and then abandoned to figure out ministry on their own. A tested process, shared across churches, protects every pulpit in the cluster.
Worship and fine-arts development. The musical inheritance of the Black church is one of the treasures of world Christianity, and it is being lost for lack of formation. An association can sustain a worship and fine-arts guild: training musicians, ministers of music, praise teams, dancers, and audio technicians; preserving the hymns and the gospel canon while equipping a new generation to lead. What the conservatory does for the orchestra, the association can do for the choir loft.
Youth activity and outreach with real weight. The generation we lament losing is lost first in adolescence. Pooled youth ministry, retreats, mentorship, sports leagues, tutoring, and summer outreach give young people a peer community of faith larger than the dozen teenagers in their own church. A teenager who has never met another believing teenager will not stay. An association can make sure she does.
And there is more that a bold association might attempt: a shared benevolence and emergency fund for member churches in crisis; pulpit supply and interim-pastor coordination so no church goes dark between shepherds; joint community-development and disaster response; a bank of shared equipment; even a small legal and financial clinic to help bivocational pastors navigate housing allowances and church incorporation. The principle is simple. Ask the local church what it cannot do alone, and then do that, relentlessly.
NEXT IN THE SERIES · PART III: THE ARTERY
NOTES & SOURCES
Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible (NASB). Sources are listed in order of first appearance.
1. Dr. D.Z. Cofield, personal conversation with the author. Dr. Cofield has served as senior pastor of the historic Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church, Houston, Texas, since 1994, and is a certified church revitalization strategist. Good Hope Missionary Baptist Church; Denver Seminary directory.
2. “Baptist Power” and “Christian History Timeline: Black Christianity Before the Civil War,” Christian History (Christian History Institute); “National Baptist Convention, U.S.A., Inc.,” Encyclopedia.com.
3. “Union Baptist Church,” Appalachian Freedom Heritage Tourism Initiative, on the Providence Anti-Slavery Baptist Association and its Underground Railroad network across Lawrence, Gallia, and Jackson Counties, Ohio.
4. “Baptist Power,” Christianity Today, April 1999 (Wood River Association; American Baptist Missionary Convention, 1840; Leroy Fitts, A History of Black Baptists).
A much needed resource and ministry sharing vision for small congregations!