In a recent interview with Baptist Press, SBC President Bryant Wright listed his five primary goals as president:
- I want to call Southern Baptist Christians to return to their first love of Jesus Christ. We’ve let so many other priorities and influences of the world become more important than our relationship with Jesus Christ. That relationship is what is most important for us all.
- I hope to challenge our convention to have a radical reprioritization of fulfilling Christ’s Great Commission. When we love Jesus, we love the lost. This will call all of us as individuals and churches and associations and state conventions to reprioritize missions giving so that more dollars go where the need for a witness for Christ is the greatest.
- I’m encouraging every church to have hands-on involvement in missions by going on at least one mission trip in 2011, especially if the church has not taken part in one before. I’m hoping that the pastor of each church will lead that trip.
- I’m challenging pastors throughout our convention to pray about setting the largest Lottie Moon offering goal in the history of their churches and challenging their congregations with those God-sized goals.
- I’ve been praying diligently for God’s men to be selected to serve as presidents of the North American Mission Board and the International Mission Board. I’m so excited that Kevin Ezell has been called to serve as president of NAMB. I really believe that he is God’s man for this hour. I ask all Southern Baptists to pray with me for the IMB search committee as they continue to seek God’s man to serve as IMB president. No two decisions are more important for leading and challenging us to fulfill Christ’s Great Commission in the next generation.
It seems to me that Wright’s priorities are spot on: Jesus and the Great Commission. He says that Southern Baptist Christians need to return to Jesus first and let all other peripheral issues become second. Rightly so! If your first love is Christ, everything else falls into the correct worldview. Charles Spurgeon once said (and I paraphrase) that Christians should love Christ and then do whatever they want, indicating that “whatever you want” would be the same a Christ’s. What a great picture of Christian freedom!
In your opinion, what are the issues taking the SBC and its supporters away from Jesus?
How can we as churches, leaders, and a convention remedy these distractions?