Southern Baptists in the future will mark their 2010 annual meeting as the beginning of a Great Commission Resurgence (GCR) in the same way they refer to 1979 as the start of the conservative resurgence that changed the face of the convention, panelists said during a GCR discussion at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., on April 28.
Just five days before release of the much-anticipated update of their recommendations, GCR Task Force members Daniel Akin, J.D. Greear and Al Gilbert were present to answer questions presented by John Akin, representing Baptist21, which put the panel together.
Another task force member, R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) President Johnny Hunt presented videotaped answers to questions they received earlier. Ronnie Floyd, the task force chairman, answered questions live via teleconference.
Panelists encouraged pastors to bring their maximum number of messengers to the SBC annual meeting in Orlando, Fla., to vote approval of the task force recommendations, which will be presented after lunch June 15.
“We need you to join in on this force so we can make a difference,” Hunt said. “You can become a catalyst to lead change.”
John Akin, Daniel Akin’s son and pastor of a Highview Baptist Church satellite in Louisville, Ky., moderated the panel and presented questions that had come from around the country.
Asked if task force recommendations simply rearrange SBC bureaucracies, Greear, pastor of Summit Church in Durham, N.C., said, “The cry of the conservative resurgence was ‘We don’t want to give money to liberal institutions.’ Now the cry is, ‘We don’t want to give money to bloated bureaucracy.’”
He said Rome was neither built, nor unbuilt in a day, and the task force recommendations are a “first step that will need to be followed by many more steps.”
Greear told the seminarians most of them would be able to grow a church without the SBC or the Cooperative Program (CP), “so what’s the point?” Then he encouraged them to spend time on the missions field or with an unreached people group and “very quickly you will conclude you need cooperation with other churches to reach those places. That will lead you back to the SBC for missional reasons,” he said.
Several questions related to the potential effect of task force recommendations on CP support. The CP is Southern Baptists’ voluntary giving method that provides the primary support for all missions, education and benevolence ministries.
Greear said younger churches are not as excited about giving through the CP because they no longer look to convention leadership as pastors did 20 years ago. “We live in a flat world with lots of other ways to communicate” and find resources other than by going to a denominational knowledge broker, he said.
The task force report is sending a “clear message to institutions that there is a real heart in Southern Baptists to spend more money in missions,” Greear said. “The days of a bloated kind of centralized bureaucracy that leads the mission … those days are a-changin.’”
Greear said CP needs to be more efficient in providing resources to the deep needs outside of Southern Baptists’ current strengths in the Southeast. Even if churches are “very Southern Baptist” they are not going to give to CP at the same level as the previous generation, Greear said, and there needs to be acceptable ways to cooperate in missions beyond CP.
Gilbert, pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, N.C., and a former executive staff member of the International Mission Board, said wording in the task force recommendations released May 3 “will talk about the local church being the global mission strategy center and the purpose of every board and agency is to facilitate the effectiveness of the local church.”
Any denominational structure changes “need to be addressed over time,” Gilbert said. Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Seminary, said “we will” ask boards of trustees to “rethink and reprioritize what they’re doing.”
Akin said he believes state conventions should forward more CP money to the SBC.
“The cry of this generation is they want to see more money going out of their state” to international missions and underserved areas of North America and Canada, he said.
The criticism that North American Mission Board (NAMB) cannot be a good national strategist from staff offices in Alpharetta, Ga., is invalid, the panel said, because they are recommending that NAMB staff be decentralized and work closely with state convention partners in local strategies.
Such strategy will use money more strategically, Daniel Akin said, and he advised those who fear they might lose their jobs in a strategy shift that “If you are doing a good job at penetrating lostness, why do you think we wouldn’t fund you? On the other hand, if you are out there not penetrating lostness, why should we fund you?”
Floyd reiterated his conviction that the task force work will provide a “compelling vision” for Southern Baptists, the lack of which has contributed to the inertia of past decades.
“We’re voting on the future of the SBC,” Floyd said. “This is step one. But it’s the most important step we’ll ever take.”
CLICK HERE for the full GCR report released May 3 or read next week’s print edition to read coverage. (BP)
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