FSW’s first regular board meeting features new leader Reeves

Fellowship Southwest will build its advocacy efforts on three key bases, the organization’s new executive director, Stephen Reeves, told the FSW board of directors April 12.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship launched Fellowship Southwest in 2017 as a network covering Arizona, New Mexico, Northern Mexico, Oklahoma, Southern California and Texas. FSW incorporated as a freestanding organization late last year in order to more fully embrace its mandate to provide an ecumenical, multiracial, multicultural presence across the region.

FSW’s unofficial steering committee became its controlling board Jan. 1. In a called meeting Feb. 22, it elected Reeves, CBF’s associate coordinator for advocacy, to succeed founding Coordinator Marv Knox. Reeves started with FSW March 15; he and Knox will overlap until Knox’s retirement late this year.

At the board’s first regular meeting, held via videoconference, Reeves cast a vision for how FSW will do advocacy, and Knox reported on key developments across the past year.

Reeves is beginning his tenure by learning details of the still-young organization, he said, lifting a large binder full of reports and other documents. His priority in the next few months will focus on building relationships—with pastors in FSW’s immigrant relief network on the U.S.-Mexico border, with pastors and churches across the region, and with the organization’s supporters.

Looking forward, FSW will base its advocacy work—also a key component for forming ecumenical and multiracial relationships—on three bases, Reeves said. They are:

• Missions. “Advocacy for migrants should be our strongest focus,” he noted. “Predatory lending also is terrible in the region, and we need to pay attention to it.”

• Partners. “Many of our partners already are engaged in advocacy, and we should work with them,” Reeves added. As examples, he cited Pastors for Texas Children, the Baylor Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty, the Christian Life Commission, Texas Impact and partners in states across the Southwest.

• Racial justice. “We claim to be multiracial,” he reported. “If an overwhelmingly white organization wants to be multiracial, we must be deeply involved in advocating for racial justice.”

Reeves cited initial results from a church survey FSW conducted last fall, asking congregations across the network to state their key commitments in missions, ministry and advocacy. Those responses will form the backbone for prioritizing FSW’s work and gathering individuals and churches to collaborate around those issues, he said.

“I felt good about work we already have done,” he added. “Folks seem to value those same issues—ministry to immigrants and refugees, border work, disaster response and racial justice.”

Knox outlined several areas of ministry and infrastructure-building Fellowship Southwest has focused on in the past months:

• Ministry to immigrants on the U.S.-Mexico border. FSW created and supports a network of pastors who provide feeding programs and shelters from the Gulf of Mexico to the Pacific Ocean. Due to increasing numbers of refugees, this ministry is growing, Knox said, pointing to two expansion ministries in the past three weeks.

• Ministry preparation. FSW has formed the Fellowship Center for Ministry Development, he reported. The center focuses on helping churches cultivate a sense of calling in members, collaborating with seminaries and churches to educate ministers, and providing nurture to strengthen young ministers in the early years of their careers.

• Ecumenical relationships. FSW aspires to build on its Baptist base and involve individuals and congregations of other denominations and other faiths in its ministries. FSW has succeeded most notably when it has engaged hands-on ministries and advocacy, which call like-minded people together to achieve more than they can do alone, he noted.

• Governance, in addition to incorporating separately, FSW has obtained tax-exempt status from the state of Texas and expects to receive confirmation of federal tax-exempt status from the IRS in May, he said. 

The board elected officers to serve alongside founding Chair Meredith Stone, executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry. They are Vice Chair Amy Jacober, a professor and co-pastor of Harbor Church in Phoenix, and Secretary Kristin McAtee, associate coordinator of CBF Oklahoma.