You’ve seen the tweets from NAMB:
We are launching a new Evangelism and Leadership team that will equip and mobilize pastors and churches for evangelism. More news coming this weekend on who will be leading.1:30 PM – 10 Aug 2018
Steve Gaines’ Evangelism Task Force recommended that “senior level leadership” be hired in this area. I made the wild conjecture that NAMB would do this. No heavy lifting required for that, since NAMB is very responsive to the convention’s wishes.
NAMB’s focus on church planting hasn’t ignored evangelism. New plants baptize at a much greater rate than established churches.
I’m not sure if a national leader, even a very high profile one, along with a new staff and programming at our second largest entity can move the needle on evangelism. Couldn’t hurt and I’ll be optimistic about this. The more critical national entities that should make a laser beam focus on evangelism are the seminaries. No excuse for all seminary faculty and students not to be required to witness and report on it.
Kevin Ezell’s photo.
Brother William,
Once again it’s a great post.
However, I do have to disagree with one assumption you stated.
You present that “NAMB’s focus on church planting hasn’t ignored evangelism. New plants baptize at a much greater rate than established churches.”
NAMB’s church planting baptism numbers do not reflect the truth.
If a new church plant has like 25 to 50 members of course it’s baptism numbers are going to look higher when compared to an established church with 200, 500, or even 1000 members. The ever-popular “Baptism to Member Ratio” will always come up short in this comparison.
The data is flawed. Baptisms are at a 70 year low and even church planting is at a 40 year low.
And then, NAMB has cut evangelism funding across the board by 65% and defunded all evangelism staff, including collegiate ministers, except for states in the South and the Northwest Convention.
Through all of this, the Conference of Southern Baptist Evangelists was also hit. The North American Mission Board, under the directives of the Great Commission Resurgence, defunded the “Baptism Assistance Project,” which was a COSBE-NAMB partnership. That initiative provided COSBE-certified evangelists a modest, pre-determined honorarium with travel and lodging expenses to preach at any Southern Baptist church requesting assistance to reverse a church’s lack of baptisms.
Nevertheless, simply hiring a person and a staff for that person will not effectively address this issue.
Jesus said “Go” (Matthew 28:19-20).
Thank you again for your articles Brother William, and keeping issues at the forefront of everyday ministry!
Data is always flawed, especially any pre-current NAMB admin numbers.
It is accurate to say that church planting is one key in evangelism because it’s tough to get an established church to suddenly start doing more of it. That’s one reason I’m not all that enthused about NAMB-level evangelism staffing and programs…but let’s see what is planned.
A new church is always more aggressive and has more results. NAMB shouldn’t be criticized for making planting their emphasis.
I don’t buy the criticism of NAMB no longer being a cash funding stream for a few COSBE members. There were already plenty of reputable VEs whose policy was to accept any church for an engagement regardless of the ability to pay. State conventions or associations could do this funding if they wished.
Thanks for the comment and thoughts.
Shouldnt NAMB “have been” an evangelism team way before Now?
NAMB, if I understand it right, would say that churches evangelize and their role is to plant churches.
I strongly disagree with that approach, and I agree it is NAMB’s position.
In my view – NAMB exists to *help* churches cooperate with one another to evangelize and plant SBC churches.
It is not the responsibility of Namb, as an organization, to plant churches or evangelize – this is the responsibility of individuals who make up our churches.
Conventions, associations, and/or entities don’t plant churches…churches plant churches. The former should be all about helping the latter… The latter does not exist to prop up the former.
NAMB only plants churches and uses planters in connection with existing churches. It’s a partnership. Sure, they exercise their influence through funding.
The evangelism guy talks of the same system. We’ll see.
Sure, it’s a partnership….IF churches want to plant where NAMB says they must plant, with the pastor/leadership NAMB determines, under the strategies NAMB sets….Churches can partner with NAMB.
NAMB would say that their job is to assist churches to start churches, not to start them on their own.
Glenn,
The Old HMB (now NAMB), at one time, employed preaching and singing evangelist. They were trained by the entity and sent out as requested. Now, don’t misread my words NOR read into them what I am not saying – I am not arguing the OLD Home Mission Board was superior because of the name (probably the name NAMB – is very appropriate to their assignment). This is simply an opinion – It would be nice to see this entity focus, once again, on evangelism. it has been a long time coming…:)
Amen, Jerry!
Ok then, please let me be clear
These men say that they have been called to christian ministry shouldnt they actually be doing evangelism as an extension of that calling?
I would think that they would want to as a matter of conscience. Hard to point the finger of the masses when youre not doing it either
I will leave it at that
I applaud this move by NAMB. Back in the day the HMB/NAMB had a strong Evangelism Division. Yes, it was a full division at the Board. Then, in the last reorganization of NAMB (I’ve lost count of them.) the Evangelism Division was eliminated, and the responsibility for promoting evangelism was handed to the state conventions. At the same time NAMB funding was restricted to church planting efforts. So, funding for evangelism was phased out over time. Of course, the strong state conventions in the South were able to maintain their state evangelism departments, but many of the state conventions outside the South depended on NAMB funding for their evangelism departments. Some of those had to be closed. Our SBC evangelism statistics are so low, that any move to improve the situation should be well received.
A cursory look at SBC baptisms through the years demonstrates there was always a spike in baptisms when the Dept. of Evangelism and the HMB promoted simultaneous revivals. A few of the simultaneous revivals I remember that really had an impact were Good News America – ’86, Here’s Hope – ’90, and Celebrate Jesus – ’00.
It seems, from my perspective, as a convention we have focused more on personal evangelism and church planting than mass evangelism.(Don’t read that statement as pitting one against the other, Philip did both in Acts.) I wonder if we have arrived at a time when mass evangelism is considered to be no longer an effective way to evangelize?
IT’s not my intent to argue this, and I do not have the statistics on file.
But, I can tell you this. I was on the Iowa state board when all the changes were taking place in NAMB strategy. We were not happy at the abandonment of the Fund-a-DOM strategy that had been the focus of NAMB work in new-work areas for about 50 years or so. (Not sure exactly how long). NAMB had done research and demonstrated that the effectiveness of the HMB/old-NAMB strategy was pretty limited. I remember thinking that as much as we wanted to keep the DOM-based strategy and the other aspects (including, I think event-evangelism and other such aspects) that had been part of NAMB partnerships, it was hard to argue that these were so effective that they should not be changed.
It is possible to argue that what NAMB has done is not the best approach, perhaps. That’s a different discussion. But the old ways that NAMB had been using back into the HMB days were not showing much success.
I don’t know where we’d be today if we’d kept the old system together but based on what I was told back then, I wonder if things might not have been even worse. When numbers are declining it is easy to say that what we used to do was better but research has shown a number of cultural and national factors that affect our numbers, beyond just “we don’t do things the way we used to.”
I’m not the kind of strategery expert to argue all of this, but I do know that definitive studies left enough concern about the effectiveness of strategies that a change was warranted.
The simultaneous revivals worked a generation ago. Not sure how they would fare today but couldn’t hurt. I think less and less churches schedule annual revivals.
NAMB is, I think we could agree, a target rich environment for the SBC brethren/sistren. While not all are on board with the church planting emphasis, let’s at least note that their plan is to devote only half of the budget to it.
And, really, some long for the earlier NAMB? Which dysfunctional version do you prefer? In those days, money was shuffled from the churches to the states to the EC to NAMB and then back to the states. Hardly an inspiring system. And the states funded jobs, good folks all I’m sure, seldom with any performance standards.
The last sentence says it all
State workers need to drum up support for church planting, help churches learn to evangelize. I am NOT advocating for numbers of conversions (I went to a seminary that did that. YUCK), but there needs to be tangible evidence of ministry.
If you plant a church w 7-8 members. GREAT! Hopefully, it will grow. A church w 10 Laotians. AWESOME! 25 GERMANS GREAT!! Etc. etc. etc
William, Your closing statement is, “No excuse for all seminary faculty and students not to be required to witness and report on it.”
Let me affirm your observation by giving some good news.
I direct The Caskey Center for Church Excellence at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. We assist smaller membership churches, which are the heartbeat of the SBC. Part of our work allows us to provide full-tuition scholarships for pastors in our surrounding states. As part of their scholarship, these pastors agree to have weekly gospel conversations with a report. So for the last four years, these small church ministers pray each Monday morning, “Lord. this week, put someone in my path, lay someone on my heart, open their hearts and give me boldness to share the gospel.”
Here is what has happened: these pastor/students have had over 24,000 gospel conversations, with over 2,600 professions of faith. Praise the Lord!
My only question to you, William is this: Why limit your challenge to seminaries? Why not challenge seasoned pastors, laymen, state convention employees, and IMB and NAMB missionaries to do the same?
Dr. Tolbert is professor at NOBTS and Director of the Caskey Center there. I’m all for challenging all SBs to witness but those in our employ as seminary faculty and admin, along with students, could be required to do so and report on it as a part of their employee or student agreement. Louisianan and former NOBTS prof Gray Allison, founder and President Emeritus of Mid-America BTS, pioneered this concept. Each week faculty and students would report their witnessing opportunities. Seems like a good practice to instill in prospective pastors and others the discipline of sharing the Gospel. Those elite enough to be teaching seminarians would, one expects, already be committed to the same and have no difficulty with being required to do this.
I’ve never been on the NOBTS campus and only know of The Caskey Center from their work at the past two conventions I’ve attended but I like what I see from the initiative.