DECATUR, Ga.—The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship nominating committee recommended Gary Dollar, a nationally recognized nonprofit leader and former executive, as the organization’s next moderator-elect.
Fellowship members will vote during the June 30 morning business session at the CBF general assembly on the moderator-elect, along with a slate of nominees for the organization’s governing board and various councils.
Gary DollarDollar is a partner with St. Louis-based EMD Consulting, which assists nonprofit groups in fund-raising, leadership development and building organizational strength.
He retired in 2013 as CEO of the United Way of Greater St. Louis after leading the organization 12 years and building it into the nation’s fifth-largest United Way chapter. During Dollar’s tenure, the United Way of Greater St. Louis raised more than $1 billion and grew its annual revenue to more than $70 million.
Dollar is a graduate of North Central College in Naperville, Ill., and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. For more than 20 years, Dollar has served both as a full-time and bivocational pastor and associate pastor for CBF churches in the Midwest.
He has served on numerous boards of faith-based and other nonprofit organizations. Dollar is a former member of the CBF governing board and an adjunct professor at Washington University’s Brown School of Social Work in St. Louis, where he teaches a graduate course in marketing, resource development and community relations.
Dollar lives in Glen Carbon, Ill., with his wife, Gale, a CBF-endorsed chaplain serving at St. Luke’s Hospital in St. Louis. The Dollars are members of Dayspring Baptist Church in St. Louis, and have two adult sons—Jordan, a CBF-endorsed hospice chaplain, and Nathanael, an adjunct professor of anthropology—and two grandchildren, Callum, age 5, and Aidan, age 3.
‘Exhilarating, dynamic and challenging time’
Dollar expressed his excitement to begin his anticipated term as moderator-elect.
“This is an exhilarating, dynamic and challenging time for CBF as we seek how God will use our unique Baptist witness in the 21st century,” Dollar said. “CBF can be and should be a leading, clear voice as we share the broad and all-encompassing love of God with a diverse and rapidly changing world. I look forward to working with (Executive Coordinator) Suzii Paynter and her team. Suzii’s energy and passion offers the leadership CBF needs to move us forward in fulfilling our mission.”
The CBF governing board also is recommending Katie Sciba, a medical social worker in Stafford, to serve alongside CBF officers for a third one-year term as recorder.
At the conclusion of the June 26-30 annual general assembly, CBF Moderator-Elect Shauw Chin Capps will assume the role of moderator, the Fellowship’s highest-ranking office. Capps will succeed Dortch, who will transition to the position of past moderator and serve as an ex-officio member of the nominating committee in 2017-18.
