GREENSBORO, N.C. – New Orleans Pastor Eddie Scott has been invited to preach the keynote sermon at the worship service for the National African American Fellowship (NAAF), which will meet in conjunction with the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention June 13-14 in Greensboro.
By Karen L. Willoughby
Managing Editor
GREENSBORO, N.C. – New Orleans Pastor Eddie Scott
has been invited to preach the keynote sermon at the worship service
for the National African American Fellowship (NAAF), which will meet in
conjunction with the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention
June 13-14 in Greensboro.
NAAF counts more than 4,500 churches as members.
Pastors and church leaders from across the nation are expected to
participate in NAAF’s annual two-day gathering, which starts this year
with the June 11 evening worship service at Immanuel Baptist Church in
Greensboro.
“We’re excited to have Pastor Scott preach for us,”
said Mark Croston, NAAF president and pastor of East End Baptist Church
in Suffolk, Va. “Pastor Scott has a growing reputation as a fine
pastor, and we want people across the nation to hear what he has to
say.”
He was surprised by the invitation, but was glad for
the opportunity, said Scott, founding pastor in 1996 of Christian
Bible Church in the Upper Ninth Ward.
“It gives me something to think about that’s not
related to rebuilding,” the pastor said. “We had five feet of water in
the church and six feet in the fellowship hall, which stood there two
weeks.”
His home also had six feet of water swilling around
in it for more than two weeks because of the breached 17th Street
Canal, Scott said.
“We basically lost everything, including our
speakers that were hanging way up on the [church] wall. Looters got
them,” the pastor said. “It must have taken two to three strong guys to
get them down.”
The church has been gutted by Southern Baptist
volunteers and remaining church members. Scott has arranged for more
volunteers to come in, and for the supplies they’ll need to do
electrical, plumbing, dry walling and more.
“You never know how much you have accumulated until
you have to replace it,” Scott said. “In a sense our spiritual life was
disrupted, shattered, after Katrina. It’s not what it was.
“Friendship, fellowship and relationship all go
along with spiritual development,” explained the pastor. He has been
leading a Bible study for about 10 people in the apartment he and wife
Wendy Scott, a law professor at Tulane University, are staying at
because their home is uninhabitable. They have one son, Christian, 7, a
student at Memorial Baptist Christian School in Kenner.
More healing takes place each week, the pastor said, as people talk their way through their struggles.
Christian Bible Fellowship members were to meet in
the church for its tenth anniversary, but that didn’t happen. The next
projected date?
“The first Sunday in May we going to start meeting
on Sunday, even if it’s in our apartment,” Scott said. “Now we’re
meeting basically for prayer. I’m teaching on restoration and repair –
Ezra and Nehemiah.”