This June Baptists and Roman Catholics will hold major conventions at at the Birmingham Jefferson Convention Complex (BJCC), separately. There are two national meetings of Baptists and a diocesan meeting of Catholics. While the meetings are not at the same time, it will be unusual to have a trio of major religious meetings in the same complex in the same month.
The national meetings of the Southern Baptist Convention and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship will be held at the BJCC in the middle of June and at the end of the month the Catholic Diocese of Birmingham celebrate its fiftieth anniversary by holding its first-ever Eucharistic Congress in complex. I expect this is the first time Birmingham has seen so many major religious gatherings in one month.
The Southern Baptist Convention is the first group to meet. Its annual Pastor’s Conference is June 9 & 10. This is followed immediately by the Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention on June 11 & 12. The Pastor’s Conference is free and open to the public.
This will be the first time that the SBC’s annual meeting has been held in Birmingham since 1941. According to a 2010 study, Alabama was second only to Mississippi in the percentage of people who were adherents of Southern Baptist churches (29.1%, Mississippi was 30.5%). This helps explain why the SBC has not meet here, many recent meetings have been in cities where Southern Baptists are not numerous so that Baptists can use the opportunity to bring their witness to that city. Other meetings have been in Southern cities with better transportation connections than Birmingham.
Over all this is the forth time the SBC annual meeting has been in Birmingham. The other meetings occurred in 1891 and 1931. The 1891 meeting is memorialized by a sidewalk marker at the northwest corner of First Avenue North and Eighteenth Street. The marker commemorates the creation at that meeting of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board, now known as LifeWay Christian Resources.
The convention met in O’Brien’s Opera House which was located on this corner. The auditorium was built in 1882. It operated for almost thirty years before being closed in 1911. Four years later it was razed. and razed in 1915. Some of its bricks were reused to build a gymnasium at what is now the University of Montevallo (“O’Brien’s Opera House,” Bham Wiki). The opera house’s former site is now a parking lot.
The week following the Southern Baptist Convention, the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship will hold its General Assembly from June 17 to 21. The CBF was formed in 1991 by Baptist churches dissatisfied with the way the Southern Baptist Convention had been transformed by conservatives over the preceding fifteen years. It is unusual for the CBF to meet in the same city as the SBC. I am not sure how they both ended up in Birmingham this year. The CBF has been to Birmingham twice before, in 1999 and 2003.
Just a week after the CBF assembly ends, the Diocese of Birmingham in Alabama of the Roman Catholic Church will hold its first Eucharistic Congress on June 28 & 29. The event will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the diocese. It was separated from the diocese of Mobile on June 28, 1969. It is a significant date because June 29 is the Solemnity of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. Saint Paul is the patron saint of the Birmingham diocese. With June 29 falling on a Saturday in this anniversary year, it is an ideal time for the celebration.
The schedule for the congress has not been released, but the dioceses’s Alex Kubik explains eucharistic congresses typically “include a procession with the Eucharist in a public setting, a significant amount of time for Eucharistic Adoration, significant availability of the sacrament of reconciliation, talks and catechisis on important matters of faith, and a Holy Mass with the bishop or bishops with all in attendance.” The announced speakers include the papal nuncio to the United States, the bishop of St. Augustine, Florida, and Scott Hahn, a popular Catholic professor and author.
The theme for the congress is “The Eucharist and Missionary Discipleship.” While Alabama is #2 in terms of Southern Baptist affiliation, it is #46 in Catholic affiliation among the fifty states. Only 4.2% of Alabama residents were adherents of the Catholic church according to the 2010 study. This helps explain the missionary theme. Of course in terms of overall religiousness, Alabama is a national leader. In 2010 it had the third highest rate of religious adherents among its residents, trailing only Utah and North Dakota. So if the number of Catholics grow here, it may well be that other groups, such as Baptists decline. It will be interesting to see if any of these meetings leave a lasting mark on the city.
