At the Alabama Baptist Pastors Conference on Nov. 11, Al Jackson said he wanted to pull back the curtain and take a good look at how Southern Baptists are doing missionally.
But he warned pastors up front that it wasn’t a pretty scene.
“I attended my first Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Norfolk, Virginia, in 1976,” said Jackson, pastor emeritus of Lakeview Baptist Church in Auburn. “In that convention we adopted Bold Mission Thrust to take the gospel to every person on earth by 2000. We didn’t do it.”
In 2010, Southern Baptists heard the report of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force and “voted overwhelmingly to win the world to Jesus,” he said. “But we didn’t do it.”
Not only that, but the International Mission Board has 2,000 fewer missionaries on the field now than it did 20 years ago, and Southern Baptists are only spending 3 cents per dollar for missions, Jackson said.
“It’s one thing to vote to win the world to Jesus,” he said. “It’s another thing altogether to mobilize our churches to leave family and friends and homeland and familiar surroundings and go to the hard places where the gospel has never been proclaimed.”
Southern Baptists say they are a convention that believes in the Great Commission given by Jesus, but Jackson said he believes “our actions suggest that we’ve failed to live up to our talk, our votes.”
He said he believes Southern Baptists have several blind spots, including materialism, which he called the blind spot of misplaced priorities.
Preaching from Matthew 8:18-22, Jackson shared about how Jesus called His disciples to leave possessions and family behind to follow Him. Jesus is not the great American success story, he said.
“Have we forgotten that Jesus is enough? Do we have to have more than Jesus for contentment? We are the shepherds who have to set the pace for our sheep,” Jackson said.
He said another blind spot is that of procrastination — delayed obedience.
“Do we understand that 2,000 years have passed since the Lord Jesus told us to go to all nations and make disciples? How long will it take?”
About 4.6 billion people are still unreached, Jackson said.
“My heart grieves that 50,000 Southern Baptist churches can only send out 3,600 missionaries,” he said. “Is it unreasonable to expect that every church have at least one missionary? How about half have at least one missionary? Surely that’s not too much to ask. Why do we not have them?”
He suggests that perhaps it’s because Southern Baptists haven’t taken to heart what Jesus said — the harvest is ripe, the workers are few and we should pray to the Lord of the harvest to send workers into the field.
Jackson challenged pastors to have a white-hot passion for taking the gospel to the nations, explaining that every church, if they stay there long enough, will take on the same passions as the pastor.
“Is [missions] our primary purpose? Is it our consuming passion? Is it what wakes us up in the morning thinking what can I do today to mobilize the people whom God has given me to shepherd to take this good news to those who have never heard of the Lord Jesus?”
Earlier in the evening, Jackson was named the fourth recipient of the Fred Wolfe Lifetime Pastoral Ministry Award.
The award is named in honor of Wolfe, a longtime Alabama Baptist pastor and SBC leader who died in 2021. It is given annually to a pastor who has invested through mentoring, discipling and encouraging other men of God.
Matt Haines, president of the ABPC and pastor of Central Park Baptist Church in Decatur, said if someone was writing a textbook for future pastors and wanted to describe a faithful pastor and minister of the gospel, that person would probably use Al Jackson as a case study.
He called Jackson “a loving shepherd of God’s people, a sound expositor of God’s Word at Lakeview for 42 years, a man who has demonstrated a heart for the nations and whose missional heart led the way for Lakeview to send out dozens of missionaries to the mission field.”
Jackson has also mentored dozens of men over the years who are serving in pastoral ministry today, Haines said.
“In an evangelical ministry culture where most ‘successful pastors’ are too busy building their personal brand, politicking for position and prestige within the denomination or are focused solely on growing the size of their personal ministry flock, Brother Al Jackson is a delightful and welcoming exception to the CEO model,” he said. “Humble, winsome, evangelistic, sound in both his character and his exposition of the Word of God, intentionally standing outside the spotlight so he can look for and shape the next generation of faithful pastors.”
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