As you may have heard, the nomination process officially begins on Monday. You can read more about it here and here. For this post, I wanted to give you a sneak preview of the nomination form questions and a brief explanation and rationale for the things we are asking. We are looking forward to your participation in this selection process as you introduce us to some of the faithful pastors of our Southern Baptist family.
When you log in to sbcpc2017.com, here’s what you will be asked:
Name of person making the nomination
Self-explanatory – we want to know who you are. You are free to make more than one nomination, but you must submit a separate form for each.
Email of person making the nomination
In case we need to contact you for any reason.
Name of preacher
Also self-explanatory – we need to know who you are nominating.
Is the person willing to be nominated?
We want to know if this person is willing to be nominated and attend the entire Pastor’s Conference, June 11-12, 2017, and Preaching Colloquium at Southwestern Seminary, date TBA.
We aim for this to be an experience for a group of pastors to experience together and provide mutual support and encouragement. To that end, we plan to hold a colloquium in the winter in which all the speakers will gather at one of our seminaries to study and work together. During the Pastor’s Conference itself, we want all of the speakers to arrive on Saturday and stay through Monday, to view themselves as a team, to encourage one another as they attend the conference together. Note that the expenses for both the colloquium and the pastor’s conference participation will be fully covered.
This question asks whether the nominee is willing to participate in such an endeavor.
Name of SBC Church where he serves
Another Self-explanatory question – we want to know where your nominee serves.
Average weekly attendance
Note that our evaluation of church size is based on attendance and not membership. Please indicate the average weekly attendance for the past reporting year. Because “smaller” is a relative term, we are using the guideline of 500 or less in average weekly attendance. Though we may stray a bit higher, we will certainly go lower. Given the average size of SBC churches is much smaller than 500, we fully expect that many of our preachers will be pastoring churches of less than 200 and encourage you to nominate pastors from churches of all sizes on the “smaller” end of the scale.
Mailing address of church
This question helps us see both where the church is located and also gives us an address to send the official invitation should your nominee be selected.
Phone number of the church
We may want to speak personally with the nominee.
Email address of the nominee
Another way for us to communicate with the nominee if necessary.
Three most recent sermon series
We are looking for evidence of expository preaching here – include the sermon texts, books, or sections not just the title. They don’t have to be preaching through books of the Bible, but their sermons/series should be derived from the text. If you want to know what we mean by expository preaching, you can read a good explanation here.
Where can we find sermons online?
We cannot travel to all the churches of nominees nor do we have a way to receive sermon tapes, CDs or DVDs. We need a way to observe the preaching electronically. Sermon video will give your nominee the best chance of being selected. Ideally, post the web address where such sermons can be observed online. Because we realize that many smaller membership churches do not yet have the ability to post sermons online, we offer a second alternative. Using Google drive (if you’re not familiar with Google drive, google it), upload a sermon video to your drive account and then submit the “share” link so that we may view the sermon. We suggest 2-3 sermons if at all possible. Videos can be as simple as using a smartphone to video and then uploading to Google drive. We want to make this as simple as possible for you to nominate your preacher, but we do need a way to evaluate the preaching so you’ll need to provide some way for us to do that online. For those of you that have to do extra legwork to make that happen, we thank you in advance.
Best online example of preaching
We could potentially receive hundreds, maybe even thousands, of nominees. That’s a lot of sermons to review. If we only evaluated ONE sermon, which one should it be. Again, provide the web address, or upload to google drive and submit the “share” link. Be sure the sermon you submit here is an example of expository preaching.
Give a brief explanation of why you are nominating this preacher for the PC2017
This is your last opportunity to tell us why we should choose your guy. Don’t write a book here. But do, in 2-3 compelling sentences, tell us why your nominee should be selected for the Pastor’s Conference.
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That’s it folks – those are the questions you’ll need to answer. We hope we will get a great response and we encourage you to participate in the process. For our part, though we only have 12 sermon slots to fill, we are looking forward to being introduced by you to pastors we didn’t know before. We know that God has blessed the SBC with godly men who faithfully serve churches all across our Convention. We want you to introduce us to some of them and we in turn will introduce 12 of them at the 2017 Pastor’s Conference. We are excited about the process and the opportunity.
Nominations open Monday, Sept 12 and close on Sept 30, 2016.
You can make nominations at http://www.sbcpc2017.com/
