Paranoia is when you think about you and your church. Vigilance is when you think about protecting the Kingdom and ensuring that the Christian faith is passed from generation to generation.
At least that is the distinction Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary President Paige Patterson made during a public discussion with Mark Dever during the recent Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) annual meeting in Phoenix. Dever is the self-identified Calvinist pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church, Washington, who asked Patterson the difference in the two terms.
Patterson went on to share his concern that the SBC has been in decline since the 1950s and offered his prescription for vigilance. The next day, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Daniel Akin offered a different prescription for vigilance. He contended Southern Baptists have been “so pragmatically driven that we have been on mission without the gospel.”
For Patterson, the SBC’s problem has been the lack of expository preaching since before the 1950s. The outcome is that Southern Baptists know less and less about the Bible and their faith. In turn, the resulting spiritual “anemia” has led to a lack of discipline and lackadaisical baptismal policies in churches.
Returning to expository preaching with an emphasis on Baptist doctrine is one way Southern Baptists should express vigilance for the Kingdom, Patterson explained.
Concern for what is preached and taught among Southern Baptists was the topic of a panel discussion that focused on problems within the SBC in Phoenix.
John Piper, another leader of Calvinist Baptists and pastor for preaching of Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, joined a group of SBC leaders for the discussion and urged Southern Baptists to guard against “unintentional drift” into heresy. He said believers have to be vigilant to ensure that content is correct because “content matters more than motive.”
The panel, which included Akin; Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Kevin Ezell, president of the North American Mission Board; and David Platt, pastor of The Church at Brook Hills, Birmingham, concluded that Southern Baptist churches needed to recover the gospel.
Akin said it most plainly. He declared, “Southern Baptists, for much of our history, have been so pragmatically driven that we have been on mission without the gospel. We need to recover the gospel in our churches.”
Comparing the SBC to a large flywheel, Akin said the convention “stopped rolling and we didn’t notice it.” For the panel members, vigilance is churches recovering the gospel message.
In the background of both discussions was an article by Ed Stetzer of LifeWay Christian Resources released the week before the annual meeting (see the June 23 issue of The Alabama Baptist, page 10). Stetzer analyzed SBC statistics and concluded Southern Baptists have been in decline for more than 60 years. While membership has grown from 7 million to 16 million in that time, the percentage of membership growth has been on a slow decline and the number of baptisms has been steadily declining for more than a decade.
The highest number of baptisms in SBC history was recorded in 1972 and the only time Southern Baptists recorded five consecutive years of 400,000 or more baptisms was 1971–1975, he reported.
For Patterson, the growing SBC membership of the past 60 years masked a serious problem that only now is becoming visible as the numbers turn downward. For Akin and the other panel members, the downward trend in baptisms and growth rate proves Southern Baptists have lost the gospel.
No Southern Baptist, and certainly not this one, is content with any number short of all. Our Lord’s command is to take the gospel to all people. But Southern Baptist reactions are not determined by numbers. It is God who gives the increase, after all. Southern Baptist reactions are determined by faithfulness in sharing the message. A lost person’s reaction to the gospel does not determine a Christian’s obedience to God or the worthiness of the message.
Since 1950, Southern Baptist statistics have been surprisingly level. Most years, the SBC has baptized between 350,000 and 400,000 people. According to Stetzer’s chart, only seven times has the number of annual baptisms dropped below 350,000 in that time frame. Sixteen times the number has been higher than 400,000. That such steady numbers would result in a slowing growth rate is to be expected. The 334,892 baptisms of 1949 equaled about 4.8 percent of the total SBC membership of just under 7 million. But a similar number in 2010 was only 2.1 percent of the SBC’s 16 million members.
Looking at the baptismal statistics by decades, one sees the 1950s had an upward trend. So did the 1970s and 1990s. The 1960s, the 1980s and the first decade of this century show downward trends.
This writer is unwilling to conclude that Southern Baptists of the 1970s were more faithful to God than Southern Baptists of the 1980s or that Southern Baptists of the 1990s were more faithful than Southern Baptists today.
Certainly a passion for Christ leads to sharing the good news that Jesus saves. The desire to share grows out of the overflow of worship, and worship is all about cultivating one’s relationship with God through faith in Christ. A passion for Christ also expresses itself in humility, compassion, righteousness, obedience and more. No single gift or action is the total embodiment of the gospel.
Perhaps this writer is paranoid according to Patterson’s definition — concerned about self and one’s ministry and church. But we are unwilling to conclude that the people with whom we serve the Lord have abandoned the gospel message just because Southern Baptist baptismal numbers are trending downward.
Personally I want Southern Baptists, Alabama Baptists, this Baptist to be vigilant for the Kingdom, to ensure that Christian faith is passed to the next generation and the generation after that. We do that with passion for the Lord nurtured in worship in which God is loved and enjoyed forever. We do that through studying His Word — the Holy Bible — and praying. We do that with compassion for others that reveals God’s love for all people. We do that by loving our brothers and sisters in the Lord. We do that with righteousness and humility.
Paranoia is always a vice. Vigilance is a virtue. Please pray that all of us — you, me, Alabama Baptists, Southern Baptists — will be vigilant for the kingdom of God.
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