First person: Can aggressive ‘polity police’ and the Great Commission coexist?

The moment remains seared in my mind, and I’m having trouble letting it go — Wednesday of the SBC Annual Meeting between 11 and 11:30 a.m. That’s when a group of Baptist messengers hurt my heart.

It wasn’t related to the widely discussed vote itself — or even the result of the vote. We’ve got a year to flesh out the full realities and details surrounding the proposed Mohler Amendment, which seeks to revise the SBC constitution to further specify how a cooperating SBC church functions. I’ll save those discussions for later.

Emotional experience

For now, I’m attempting to process the emotions from that Wednesday morning and am so grateful I was in the room to experience the striking blow of sadness that hit me unexpectedly.

In what I have to believe was an attempt to assure our female Baptist missionaries serving internationally that they are valued and supported, Paul Chitwood, president of the International Mission Board, commended them during his IMB report to messengers.

IMB currently employs 2,027 women, and 1,803 of that number serve overseas, which is more than half of IMB’s 3,500 international missionaries.

“No organization or institution in Southern Baptist life employs more females in vocational ministry than IMB. Not one of them is in a pastor/elder role or carries the function of pastor/elder,” Chitwood said.

But noting the recent heightened rhetoric related to women’s vocational ministry roles, Chitwood asked messengers to affirm “female IMB missionaries who have left their country, their culture, their church, their American comforts and for some, their adult kids and grandkids to answer God’s call upon their lives to take Christ to the nations.”

Affirming in this moment meant applause and messengers complied — but not with the enthusiasm I expected.

After all, a mere 24 hours earlier, the beloved Mark Clifton — author, advocate, mentor and encourager of pastors and church planters — shared with convention messengers how at six years old at the SBC Annual Meeting in Detroit in 1960 he became mesmerized with missionaries floating through the halls.

“As a little kid, I would see home missionaries with green ribbons and foreign missionaries with red ribbons. I would look at those missionaries, and I would see them as heroes, and I desired to be like them,” Clifton said as he moved his point along about bivocational pastors. Maybe they could wear blue ribbons and “we would see them as the heroes they really are,” he said about bivocational pastors.

Beautiful memory

While Clifton’s focus wasn’t technically about missionaries, his memory was genuine and represented so beautifully how we’ve typically referred to our missions force in Baptist life.

In fact, countless Baptists on-site in Orlando referenced with great admiration the IMB Sending Celebration and commissioning of 63 new missionaries that took place about an hour after Clifton’s remarks.

Fast forward back to Wednesday morning. In some sections, several people stood and applauded loudly. But throughout the hall, about the same number or maybe more (at least in the scope of my view) stayed seated and offered what I would describe as mild applause.

Less than a half hour later, a massive roar complete with a whoop and a holler rolled across the convention hall when the vote count on the Mohler Amendment was announced.

“YEAH!” complete with the satisfactory fist shot in the air could be seen and heard clearly.

Competitive, must win, do whatever it takes to win, achieved the win — “YEAH!” — versus what now seems like an obligatory acknowledgment by some toward more than half of our international missionary force.

“It feels good to win,” one aggressive advocate for the proposed amendment is quoted as saying, while a few others describe those expressing concerns about it in a negative and potentially derogatory light.

So, is it a competition with winners and losers, or is it a shared mission with some disagreements along the way that won’t interfere with the mission?

As I continue processing the full scope of the experience, I’d love to hear from you about how to reconcile the current conversation in the Baptist ecosystem with the call on our lives as described in the Great Commission (Matthew 28) and the Great Commandment (Matthew 22). Email me at jrash@tabmedia.group or give me a call at 800-803-5201.