By Aaron Weaver
ST. LOUIS — Standing a few blocks from the Mississippi River, Rev. Melissa Hatfield, senior pastor at First Baptist Church, Jefferson City, Mo., opened Wednesday morning worship at the 2025 CBF General Assembly with an image that never stops moving.
“The mighty and muddy Mississippi River flows just a short, five-minute walk east from this hotel,” she said. “It begins quietly in Minnesota and winds 2,340 miles south through the heart of this country. It shapes land, transports goods and carries
dreams.
Hatfield paused before repeating the river’s paradox: “The river divides, yet it connects. It erodes, yet it builds. It is always in motion, and yet always here.” The image framed her sermon, “Come to the Waters,” which explored how physical rivers and spiritual currents invite the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship to live its 2025 Assembly theme, You Belong Here, with deeper resolve.
Beneath the wide current of the Mississippi River, she added, “there are secrets forever buried in its riverbed graves,” yet the river keeps pouring “into the wide, open waters of the Gulf of Mexico.” In St. Louis, Hatfield said, the Mississippi is “more than water–it’s witness.”
That witness once anchored the imagination of John Berry and Mary Meachum. Hatfield shared how the enslaved son of a Baptist preacher purchased his freedom at the age of 21 and walked 700 miles to Virginia to free his father, and eventually followed his still-enslaved wife and children to St. Louis with just three dollars in his pocket.
“Two went to pay the fare to cross the river, and with one dollar left, he worked until his family was free,” she said.
Freedom, John and Mary Meachum believed, was “more than just physical–it was educational, it was spiritual and it didn’t just belong to them,” she added. “It belonged to everyone.”
When Missouri outlawed BLack education in 1847, John was arrested and their basement school closed.
“John looked toward that mighty, muddy Mississippi River and an idea washed over him,” Hatfield said. “He bought a steamboat, he filled it with desks and books, and he anchored it just offshore in the river,” creating what newspapers soon called the Floating Freedom School–”a floating sanctuary of education and belonging for hundreds of Black children…radical hospitality afloat just beyond the reach of unjust laws,” she noted.
“When Missouri said, ‘You don’t belong,’ John Meachum said, ‘Come to the waters.’”
Naming hard truths downstream
Hatfield turned the lens on her own congregation in Jefferson City, 130 miles west on the Missouri River.
“Our early story includes at least four pastors who were themselves enslavers,” she said. “While the Meachums risked everything for liberation and belonging up here, our church downstream was silent–or worse–complicit,” Hatfield acknowledged.
“I say that not with shame but to name it, because healing begins by telling the truth,” she continued. “Our story–you story–must always begin there–not just where we are but where we’ve been and, more importantly, where we are going.”
Rivers as horizons, not barriers
Linking the Mississippi to the “rivers of Babylon,” Hatfield read Isaiah 55’s exuberant invitation–”Come everyone who thirsts, come to the waters.”
Against the exiles’ dulled hope, the prophet offered not “fiction,” she said, but “vision–where all are fed with abundance and goodness, not by merit but by mercy; a vision that sees rivers not as boundaries but as horizons; a vision that tells the people of God, ‘Your vision is too small.’”
Quoting Isaiah 49, she reminded listeners that God refused cramped expectations. Small visions, Hatfield warned, “are for small gods, and comfort is no substitute for calling.
Hatfield then moved to the Fellowship’s own story.
“When CBF was born 25 years ago, doors were closing everywhere–on women in ministry like me, on autonomy, on freedom, on the wide and wild welcome of God,” she said. “We are here today because there were some who said, ‘This boundary is not an end; it’s a horizon of what God is doing.”
The movement they formed, she continued, “is not a fortress; it’s a fellowship. It’s not a feast for the elite but for the empty. It’s not an immovable museum. It is a steamboat in motion. This is not a gated community but a Gospel current.”
Yet comfort, she cautioned, “can be just as dangerous as exile. Comfort dulls our thirst and shrinks our vision.” If congregations cannot stretch “wide enough to welcome those who look and love and vote and advocate and worship differently, then friends, our vision is too small.”
The river, Hatfield added, remains under God’s jurisdiction alone, “and God says ‘Come, all who thirst.”
A liberated imagination
Hatfield quoted theologian Walter Brueggemann who wrote: “The central task of ministry is the formation of a community with an alternative, liberated imagination, that has the courage and the freedom to act in a different vision and a different perception of reality.”
That task, Hatfield told Cooperative Baptists, is “to cultivate a holy alternative, liberated imagination–to be steamboats of belonging, faithfully living out our call regardless of unjust laws. We deny the rights and worth of some; to be a fellowship soaked in grace with a different vision; to be church full of coruage even when the waters are murky. Imagine a steamboat pulling up to all the forgotten places in the world, not with lectures, but with love, not with walls, but with welcome…congregations gathering with wet footprints in their sanctuaries, proof that we’ve been to the water.”
Love that wades in
Pointing to the Mary Meachum mural north of downtown, Hatfield noted that the artist painted her “not on the bank but out in the water, immersed in it, calling others to cross.” That, she said, is “the most faithful image of the Gospel we have–not a God who shouts from the shore, but a God who wades all the way in through Jesus Christ with arms wide open, saying, ‘Come to the waters.”
Music and Communion 
Music during the worship service threaded the morning’s theme of thirst and welcome, opening with Jordan Feliz’s “The River” and including Gateway Worship’s “Living Water,” The Worship Initiative’s “To the Water,” and The Many’s “All Belong Here.” Responsive readings repeated the refrain “You belong here,” while Isaiah 55 and Ephesians 2 served as scripture anchors. A simple “Litany of Living Water” likened God’s presence to a current “swift and strong, carving paths of possibility.”
Jason Edwards, senior pastor of Second Baptist Church, Liberty, Mo., and Lita Sample, CBF field personnel in the San Francisco Bay Area, led the Lord’s Supper. At a table described as “a well for the thirsty,” they broke bread, lifted the cup, and prayed that General Assembly attendees would “carry water-marks of grace” into the city and beyond.
“Jesus knew he wasn’t just blessing a meal, but inaugurating a movement…every time we gather at this table and break this bread and pour this cup, Jesus does it again, with us among us and through us,” said Edwards.
“We come to this meal not because we’ve earned a place, but because we’re welcome to one,” Sample concluded.
Watch the Wednesday morning worship service and other sessions on our CBF YouTube page.