I Just Want to Say One More Thing
Photo by Dawn Segrest.
My first encounter with the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America was in 1994, when I went to the Summer Conference (aka “Peace Camp”) in Granville, OH. Ken Sehested had been after me to attend ever since I began as the editor for Seeds of Hope three years before.1 He lured me to Peace Camp by asking me to join Jackie Saxon in leading the youth. Ken knew me; he knew that one conference would be all it would take for me to fall in love with BPFNA.
He was right, of course. Spending a week with hundreds of people to whom I didn’t have to defend my beliefs and lifestyle, talking with and hearing from people who had done unimaginable work in the farthest reaches of the world—well, it simply blew my mind.
In 1995, the BPFNA board invited me to become a member. My first board meeting was in February in Fort Worth, TX. I was assigned to the publications committee—and soon discovered that there was a plan for me to succeed Rachel Gill, who was retiring from the board, as chair. Feeling extremely inadequate, I finally agreed, after a good deal of encouragement from Rachel.
The next year, the Summer Conference theme was “And a Child Shall Lead.” The board decided that the winter issue of Baptist Peacemaker that year should be completely written by youth and children. They then asked the youth and children who they wanted for their editor. Because I had helped teach the youth that one summer in Granville, I was the only editor they knew.
So they asked me, and I said, “Sure. I’ll do that.” When it came time to start the layout, I sat in front of my computer, muttering to myself, “I can’t BELIEVE I told those people I could do this!” (I still have those fits occasionally.) But the issue came together, with a lot of help from David Teague, who was the communications person on staff at that time.
Then they approached me again and asked if I could do a year’s worth of Peacemaker issues as an interim editor. So I did that. And then they asked me if I would like to drop the “interim” part. And I once again said yes.
That was 23 years ago. I was the new kid in town, scared to death that I would do something really stupid. Now I’m the old lady, one of the keepers of the institutional history. I am, however, still not so sure I won’t do something stupid, even now, doing my last issue.
This job has occasioned a number of adventures over the years. When I walked into my first BPFNA board meeting in February 1995, the board members, along with several guests who I supposed were part of a task force, were discussing a statement on justice and sexual orientation. Within a few minutes of listening to the dialogue, I was struck by the fact that these people could exchange such a wide variety of feelings and thoughts with such candid courtesy. It also amazed me that they were working toward consensus, not a majority-minority vote.2
At that February meeting, the board issued a “Statement on Gay and Lesbian Issues.” In May of that year, I helped the board revise the February statement into the “Statement on Justice and Sexual Orientation” that, as far as I know, still stands. The organization was immediately defunded by several Baptist bodies, prompting Ken Sehested to begin to worry about the future of the BPFNA. He told me later, “I honestly thought for a while that there was a very good chance that the Peace Fellowship would go out of business.”
I had been on the board for three months. But we weathered that adventure and have come out stronger because of it.
Another adventure, mostly for the staff (okay; mostly for me) was much more recent. It happened when the publications began to be digital. For someone who, as a journalism student, came back from the beat and typed the stories on a manual typewriter and filed them by putting the paper in a box outside the KWBU control room, it was a challenge. I have been posting the digital issues for about two and a half years, and I might be about to know what I’m doing. For the fact that I know anything at all, I have to thank Allison Paksoy for her patient help.
A second publishing adventure for me happened when Peacemaker became completely bilingual. For an excruciatingly monolingual managing editor, this is not easy to negotiate. I am indebted to our fearless leader, Doris García Rivera; to our Spanish editor, Rubén David Bonilla Ramos; and Spanish Resources Manager Hortensia Azucena Picos Lee, who is our main translator. Without them, these issues wouldn’t ever go out.
While I was Peacemaker editor, I went on a human rights delegation to San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, shortly after the Zapatista rebellion. I attended two Global Baptist Peace Conferences, one in Rome, Italy, in 2009, and one in Cali, Colombia in 2019. I described those meetings as excruciating and wonderful.
The Peace Fellowship has taught me so many important things, I can’t begin to count them. It has given me opportunities I would never have experienced. It has given me deep friendships. It has stretched my worldview. It has brought me into contact with some of the most amazing peacemakers you can imagine. I remember once saying to someone, “I have been in meetings with people who literally stop wars.”
This summer’s Peacemaker issue featured the work of the Gavel Memorial Peace Fund. Working on that issue reminded me of the many people around the world who are connected with BPFNA, who work in harsh and violent situations with very few resources and very little support.
I have interviewed some of those people. People like the legendary J. Alfred Smith, then pastor of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, CA and unofficial pastor to the Black Panthers. People like Eleazar Ziherambere, who lived in Rwanda in 1994, when some 800,000 people were slaughtered by their own countrymen in a matter of 100 days. People like Kim Fuc, who was the little girl in the famous “napalm” photograph taken by AP photographer Nick Ut during the Vietnam war.
People like Malkhaz Songulashvili, a Baptist bishop who has taken a stand for LBGTQ rights and interfaith dialogue in the extremely hostile Georgian culture. People like Steve Shipman, who is a longtime member of a monastic peacemaking community with Baptist roots in Victoria, Australia. People like Charles Duplessis of Mount Nebo Baptist Church in the lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans, whom I interviewed shortly after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and the breaking of the levees—which were seven blocks from the church.
People like Javier Ulloa, who co-pastors Iglesia Shalom in Mexico City with his wife, Rebeca, and whose description of reading the Bible in a new way deeply affected my life. People like Boaz Keibarak, who mediates between warring tribes in Kenya, and Lance Muteyo, who conducts Conflict Transformation trainings in his native Zimbabwe—and, indeed, all over Africa.
I’m having to force myself to stop. There are SO many more.
For a number of years, we ran a series of feature stories in Peacemaker about BPFNA Partner Congregations. I wrote most of those features, and was able to visit the churches, attending worship and wandering around the buildings. (The architecture of a church will tell you more than you think about the nature of the church.)
I remember seeing Doug Donley preaching (barefoot) at Dolores Street Baptist Church in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS crisis, with paper cranes hanging from the worship area ceiling and photographic portraits of friends who had died of AIDS on the walls. I remember standing in a peace vigil outside of Central Baptist Church in Wayne, PA, and learning of the many justice projects there. I was fascinated with the baptistry at Binkley Memorial Baptist in Chapel Hill, NC, which is built both on the outside and inside of the building. And I still follow Binkley’s weekly Black Lives Matter vigils from afar.
There are so many churches that have inspired me. They toil in a myriad of ways, but all of them work for peace and justice: Oakhurst Baptist in Decatur, GA, where the Seeds office and the BPFNA office were once side by side; University Baptist in Minneapolis, MN, where the music is divine; First Baptist Granville, OH, where the imprint of sweaty Peace Camp shirts showed on the pews years later; Glendale Baptist in Nashville, where I visited so many times I almost became an associate member; Austin Heights Baptist in Nacogdoches, TX, a tiny church doing mighty things in East Texas; Pullen Memorial in Raleigh, NC, in the forefront of many justices issues for so long.
I’m leaving out many, many amazing churches and people. The list would fill a book.
When I begin to get discouraged by the events on the news and the crazy things happening in the world (and that happens a lot these days), all I have to do to regain hope is to think of the people I’ve met through BPFNA over the years. They echo with their actions, if not their words, what Georgian bishop Rusudan Gotsiridze said in Cali two years ago. Speaking about the Peace Cathedral, a Baptist church in Tbilisi, and its stand on LBGTQ rights, she said, “We decided that we can do what is easy, or we can do what is right.”
I could never have done those things or met those people if I hadn’t been editor of Baptist Peacemaker. Thank you for the opportunity and the honor.
Endnotes
Ken Sehested, before he was founding director of the BPFNA, was one of the original Seeds editors.
This is from “Our Long Journey into Inclusion,” Baptist Peacemaker, Vol 30 No 2, April-June 2010.
