Supporters of the Great Commission Resurgence (GCR) Task Force took a final opportunity to garner votes for the report when they encouraged 1,300 primarily younger pastors attending the B21 conference June 15 to leave the luncheon and become fixtures in the meeting hall.
“Please get into that hall, sit in a chair and do not leave until somebody prays and we go eat,” said Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
Mohler was one of eight panelists who answered questions presented by Jon Akin and Jed Coppenger, two leaders of B21, a movement intended to help participants discern what it is to be Baptist in the 21st century.
The task force report was the primary topic of conversation, along with frank discussions about reasons to continue being involved with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) or to support its Cooperative Program (CP) missions channel.
Because changes suggested in the report would require painful adjustments in some entities’ budgets because of a shift in priorities, Pastor David Platt was asked to explain how he made such changes in the budget for his church, The Church at Brook Hills, Birmingham.
Platt’s church determined to shift $1.5 million from its budget that was spent on comfort and convenience for members “to go to urgent spiritual and physical needs.”
Mohler called the decades of the 1950s through the 1980s “fat” years in Southern Baptist life when Southern Baptists could put money into good ideas.
Today “everything’s got to be provisional” and open for reconsideration in the light of gospel scrutiny, Mohler said, because “I don’t think we’re ever going to be there again.”
B21 panelist Jimmy Scroggins, senior pastor of First Baptist Church, West Palm Beach, Fla., said he resents that “to be considered a good soldier” in Baptist ranks, he has to cooperate in too many things he doesn’t believe in and support departments in his state convention he sees no reason to have.
He said the task force report gives him hope that such a network “will be the Cooperative Program.”
Mohler called the CP a “great economizer” and “great exercise in stewardship” when it was created in 1925. But it is “toxic for a denomination” to “focus on the vehicle rather than on the trip.”
He said Southern Baptists have made the CP “worse than a golden calf” — not because they worship the unified budget but because they simply think they have to defend it.
“Who wants to sell a product you can only sell if there’s no other option?” he said. “The CP is worthy of support but only as a means to get somewhere we need to go.”
Mohler urged the group to “pray this becomes a model for how Southern Baptists can reason together and do the right thing and go home and lead our churches to reason together.” (Editor’s Network)
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