As I continue to ponder why our young adults are not called to service and leadership in Baptist churches like our generation was, I come back to the same conclusion — “We are sending two different messages to them” and the wrong and minority message is the loudest.
Some of our Southern Baptist Convention executives and some of our Baptist pastors have succumbed to the devil’s lie that God should only talk directly to them, and then they should state His message to the people and the people should then follow them blindly with little or no accountability. That lie of Satan always leads to our sticking our imperfect foot in our mouths and making bad decisions. The congregations who are asked to follow a man instead of having an active quiet time and prayer life with God and then coming together to find God’s collective will become disenchanted with their imperfect CEO leader and look for something else.
This method may appear to draw a crowd for a while, but in the long term it will fail because the individuals are not growing to be more and more like Jesus.
Thank God that the majority of our Baptist pastors, while not getting the publicity that the CEO types are currently getting, are servant leaders who desire to see their congregation grow as individual followers of Christ. When pastors lead their congregation in finding and working within their own combination of spiritual gifts, passions, talents and experiences … to develop a personal relationship with our living Lord, the back door of our churches will be closed and the front door will have to be widened to accommodate the new members.
Ron Travis Sr.
Birmingham, Ala.
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