Bart has just posted an article called, ” A Bloated Baptist Bureaucracy We Could Do Without.” Wow! You may love it like I did. You might get mad at it, as I am sure some will. But you ought to read it without question.
I’m not going to have comments open here – follow the link to Bart’s site and read what he has written and comment there if you so desire. But read it!
A couple of quotes:
If the Southern Baptist Convention’s leaders are really serious about getting more resources out to reach the most lost areas of the world, they ought to reject entirely the notion of widespread church planting (apart perhaps from language work) within the strength areas of the SBC and labor hard to curtail it—and yet a steady stream among our seminary graduates eschew established churches and choose to create yet another local church bureaucracy in communities already served by multiple congregations, reducing with each new work the funding available to send to the nations.
This one will make you think!
I predict that you won’t soon see the following multi-campus sites opening: Fellowship Church Wilmer-Hutchins Campus, Saddleback Watts Campus, NorthPoint Community Church Bankhead Campus, or Second Baptist Houston Third-Ward Campus. The multi-site movement and the preponderance of domestic SBC church planting is focused like a laser upon those areas where people with lots of money live in church-friendly cultures—places where it is easy to fill a church with rich people.
And this:
Indeed, if Prosper, TX, already has 8 Baptist churches within 10 miles of the town center, is the cause of the Great Commission really best served by another Prestonwood campus locating there? Forget the fact that this multi-campus business is nothing more nor less than the concoction of an ecclesiology from someplace other than the New Testament and just look at the economics of the thing. Yes, there are some lost people left in Prosper. Yes, the churches already there will not reach them all (nor will 1,000 churches if we plant them all there). But comparatively, can we really say that the wealthiest fringes of the urban South are the highest priority for the Great Commission?
Bart then engages in a pro-con discussion of consolidating smaller churches or those formed by church splits.
Bart was once one of the more active bloggers. He doesn’t write often, but from the evidence here, he writes when he has something powerful to say about which he feels passionately.
Go read Bart Barber at Praisegod Barebones!
