A Letter from April

Dear Alliance of Baptists,

Thank you to everyone who participated in our listening sessions during the Annual Gathering, both in person and online. Your voices are a vital part of the work we will be engaging in the coming weeks and months. I want to give you a brief description of what is happening as we work with our consultants from the Center for Congregational Health. 

Once the Board shared that Carole and Elijah were no longer our Co-Directors, it was evident to many of us that we needed some support and expertise in navigating what lies ahead. In complicated circumstances where information cannot be shared as freely as we are accustomed, tensions and fractures arise quickly. We are tempted to rely on the wisdom and expertise within our groups to address those, and at times that is sufficient. This is not one of those times. We are grateful to have skilled consultants who know us but are not intimately involved in the Alliance. They are helping us resist some of those natural inclinations to react quickly and try to fix something, and they are leading us to careful and caring responses rooted in the shared values we hold.

The first phase of the consultants’ work with us has been listening to hear – really hear — all of us. They held listening sessions with groups of Board members, with our Executive Committee and Personnel Committee, and with each Staff member. The consultants then held the three listening sessions for Alliance members during the Annual Gathering. 

After hearing Board and Staff, the consultants provided a set of recommendations for leadership that will be part of shaping our ongoing work. Currently they are compiling the comments, questions, and insights from what we heard from each other in the broader listening sessions last weekend and will be sharing those with the Board and the Staff in the next week. 

In the coming days you can expect to hear the consultants’ distillation of the questions and comments from the listening sessions with the Alliance membership. The Board and Staff will begin work with the recommendations from the Center for Congregational Health as we develop, articulate, and share a plan for addressing the challenges before us and working toward healthier and whole ways of being the Alliance. 

Rather than prematurely asking for your trust in a process that is only beginning, I’ll ask for your patience and your input as we best determine how we will traverse the paths ahead. Please continue to communicate with us. Pray for those who are leading this process. Hold close all who are feeling hurt, angry, left out, uncertain, anxious, fearful. We carry fragile hopes for who and what we can be together. As the Desert Mothers and Fathers taught us, the closer we are to one another, the closer we are to God; and the closer we are to God, the closer we are to one another. It’s my hope that through the work we do in these days we move closer not only to one another and to God, but to the witness of Love that is ours to bear in the world.

In hope,

April

Rev. April Baker, Interim Director