In one of the North American Mission Board’s (NAMB) largest summer leadership gatherings in its history, 515 Southern Baptist leaders converged in Atlanta July 27–31 and heard NAMB President Geoff Hammond say “this is not your father’s North America anymore.”
Representing Southern Baptists from all 50 states, Canada and Puerto Rico, the attendees included specialists in evangelism, church planting, ministry and academics from state conventions, local associations, all six Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) seminaries and NAMB.
“North America is increasingly a lost mission field,” Hammond told the gathering at the Airport Westin Hotel. “North America has always been a mission field.”
Two thousand years ago, he noted, “(The world) was a lost mission field that Jesus Himself came to.”
Hammond challenged Southern Baptist leaders to pray for a spiritual awakening in the changing North American environment.
“Among the world’s industrialized countries, Canada and the U.S. continue to have growing populations, legally and illegally,” Hammond said. “Canada admits into their country 250,000 legal immigrants each year. The U.S. population is 303 million and will be 400 million in the next 35 years. Over 100 million will be Hispanic.”
Illustrating the continent’s exploding diversity, Hammond said 100,000 Ethiopians now call Atlanta home. Some 166,000 Armenians live in Los Angeles. In Toronto, 911 calls are handled in any of 150 languages.
Johnny Hunt, who was elected as SBC’s new president in June, voiced a wake-up call in his first address to state convention, local association and NAMB staff.
“If this denomination doesn’t get desperate for God’s Son and a movement of the Holy Ghost of God in our denomination again, we’re in trouble,” Hunt said. “The great evangelist Vance Havner said, ‘The great tragedy of our day is that the situation is desperate but the saints are not.’
“Attendance at the recent convention in Indianapolis dropped 20 percent. You can’t do that very often and not be in serious trouble.”
Hunt, senior pastor of the Atlanta-area First Baptist Church, Woodstock, said Baptists have to go back 50 years to find baptism numbers as low in North America. Evangelism, he said, is what Southern Baptists do as a result of what they’ve learned — to be obedient to the Great Commission.
“But revival comes when God touches,” Hunt said. “We need God to revive us personally, as churches and as a denomination, and give us passion for lost people … [to] let God come down and touch our hearts. … God’s going to have to wake us up, shake us and show us where we are.”
To meet the challenges of spreading the gospel throughout North America, NAMB’s senior strategists, under the leadership of Hammond, reviewed the mission board’s new National Evangelism Initiative (NEI), which was introduced at the SBC annual meeting in Indianapolis.
NEI will be launched in early 2009 for a 12-year time frame. Its theme will be “God’s Plan for Sharing” (GPS), with the goal of every believer sharing and every person in North America hearing the gospel by 2020. The four primary focus points of the initiative are praying, engaging, sowing and harvesting.
Marcus Merritt, an associate in the office of evangelism at the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, participated in the meeting and is excited about GPS.
“It is a national evangelism initiative that state conventions, associations or local churches can easily turn into a strategy,” he said. “The genius of GPS is that it will look differently in each of those applications. I am extremely excited to see what Christ will do through GPS in the associations and local churches in Alabama.”
“Is NEI going to be a challenge? Absolutely.” Hammond said. “Is it anything less than what God expects of us? No.”
Hammond told the leaders that they would not recognize the SBC in 2020 “if God helps us reach these goals.” (BP)
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