- Knowing Hispanics
- Evangelizing Hispanics
- Congregationalizing Hispanics
- Training Hispanics
- Mobilizing Hispanics
- Sharing Christ
- Starting Churches
- Strengthening Leaders
- Strategically Impacting Convention and Culture
- Sending Volunteer Mission Teams
- Surrending as Vocational Missionaries
- Long term sustainability
- Eliminating competition
- A level playing field
- Alingment with Southern Baptist’s long-held guiding principle. We can do more together than we can alone.
- Appreciation of involvement of the small membership church and our ethnic churches.
- We need to believe God for the next Great Awakening. We must realize that we cannot fix ourselves. We need a mighty move of God. We need personal spiritual revival and a corporate move of God. We need God to move regionally and nationally in ways that we cannot orchestrate. Internationally, we must take the gospel to every person in the world before they die. All of this goes together. He then brought Jonathan Edwards into the discussion and his call to churches during the Great Awakening.
- We need to come together in Unity. We must value one another and respect and love another unconditionally. God will not bless division, envy, rivalry, or jealousy. We should not be filled with strife that results in camps and division. None of this honors God. It is how unbelievers act. We must cease rallying around human personalities. We must be Jesus people and focused on Christ.
- We need to recapture what it means to cooperate together. Read the Baptist Faith & Message 2000 on cooperation. We should work together in spiritual harmony and cooperation. We need to trade in independence for cooperation.
- We need to elevate the Cooperative Program, both its need and value. We can do more together than we can do by ourselves. We must work together and give together. We are in a funding crisis in the SBC. A divide is growing over this issue. All of our problems are not going away by telling people to give more money. We do not need to shame churches into giving more. Loyalty to a brand is no longer automatic. It is earned continually. We have a funding crisis not only in dollars, but also in philosophy. We must find a way to work together. We cannot be divided over the CP. We are committed to the Great Commission, but we must find ways to do that together.
- We need to recommit ourselves to personal and church evangelism. Each of us must take part in sharing the gospel with others and working to reach people with the gospel. We must make this a top priority. We baptized as many people last year as we did over 60 years ago when there were 160 million less Americans and thousands fewer SBC churches and millions fewer Southern Baptists. We must work together in this. October 14 is a day that Dr. Floyd is calling upon all Southern Baptists and churches to come together and share the gospel with someone that day. What can we do to lead our churches in this on that particular day? Students across Baptist Campus Ministries are working that day to share the gospel.
- We need to come to Columbus, Ohio, June 16-17, 2015. We have a cross-generational disengagement regarding what we are doing on an annual basis. The Annual Meeting must be a yearly celebration of what God is doing in the world. We need to get people to the Convention and get them excited about what the SBC is doing so they will go back to their churches and promote involvement in the SBC. Southern Baptists need to go to “exciting” Columbus, Ohio next year so that we can celebrate what God is doing and get motivated to share that. We will have 1,000 college students involved in Crossover Columbus and they will be staying over for our meeting at the SBC. Dr. Paul Kim and his wife Rebecca, from Boston, are going to mobilize 500 Asian American college students to participate in the Convention in Columbus. The IMB and NAMB will do a joint commissioning service at the Convention and the goal is to commission 100 new missionaries. We are asking all Southern Baptists to come to Columbus and celebrate God’s work and pray like never before for God to work and move in our churches and in America.
- We need to elevate before our churches the international crisis in Iraq and Syria. Like the Holocaust in Germany, there is devastation going on now. How could such obvious evil be ignored? We are witnessing a once in a thousand year destruction of the Christian church in Iraq and Syria. The situation is worse than we can imagine. Christians are being beheaded and cut in half and women are being raped and trafficked by the thousands. This evil of ISIS has gone from one Christian place to another and has killed or forced converted those who could not leave. This is genocide. This is happening in our world and on our watch. As leaders, we all some level of influence and we all must stand and be courageous. We should not sing louder in our churches while our Christian brothers and sisters are dying in the desert. 1. We must pray for them every day that God might deliver them from wicked and evil men. Pray in our worship services. When churches are placing more emphasis on announcements than on prayer, we are in trouble. 2. Pastors and Christian leaders must educate ourselves on what is going on so we can help others understand. 3. Provide generously to Baptist Global Response and Hunger Relief so that they can help those in need. When one member of the body suffers, then everyone suffers. We must speak for these people like we would hope that they would speak for us. Among them, it is a matter of life and death.
I appreciate your effort in this.
Re: CP
Page said we must do a better job communicating. I’ve paid fairly close attention to what our leaders have been saying over the past decade or so and this is a standard. The response to better CP education seems to be, in part, that churches are disappointed in allocations. Absent from the EC meeting reports were state conventions who consume most of every CP dollar.
Re: direct funding of missions personnel
IMB just voted to require this for some programs though Platt requested it be put on hold. Also, IMB works cooperatively with some large churches who directly fund personnel. These two policies undermine the statements about direct funding being undesirable.
Thanks for the report. It is interesting to contemplate what this meeting is like, in emphasis, in shared theology, in vision. Contrast that with what so many large denominations talk about when they meet together. We are fortunate to be as unified as we are and to have what I believe to be the main things at the center of our discussions and emphasis.
I will say that the Guidestone report contains a lot of inflated chest thumping, and that most people in the SBC (understandably) do not understand the strengths and weaknesses of Guidestone. A couple of years ago Guidestone expanded its ministry philosophy. It will be interesting to see what comes out of that.
The ethnic analysis is really interesting. That has great potential for the SBC’s future.
“It is interesting to contemplate what this meeting is like, in emphasis, in shared theology, in vision. Contrast that with what so many large denominations talk about when they meet together. We are fortunate to be as unified as we are and to have what I believe to be the main things at the center of our discussions and emphasis.”
Amen!
Alan,
I was wondering about this line:
“In China, there are 3 conventions of Baptists larger than the SBC.”
What is meant here? I read this to mean that there are three separate Baptist conventions in China with more than 16 million members each? I recall a Pew Forum study a few years back citing that there were 58 million “Protestants” – divided mostly between members of state-approved Protestant churches and independent “house” churches. Not sure what “conventions” are being referred to here?
The rumors are true. There has been a sighting of the elusive Weaver-squatch at SBC Voices.
Yanks can’t lose another game this year!
That is what I heard Gordon Fort say. He might have been including all of East Asia in that. He did not site any sources and it is possible that I misheard. I was typing fast and that is what I heard.
Did he mean that there are groups of Baptists in China who have more Chinese members than does the SBC in China?
Certainly, knowing what we do about Southern Baptists, “larger” can only mean “more populous.”
🙂
Yep.
Floyds comment number one is the far and away the need of the hour. It is my opinion without personal revival etc. all of our efforts are without life. Ron Dunn years ago in preaching on the Amos (I think, I am too tired to go check) passage of the lost axe head said he hears the sound of an abundance of work but little sound of falling trees. I too have heard the sound of much work, but only revival will bring the sound of falling trees.
I would encourage all of us to join Dr. Floyd in seeking personal renewal and revival.
Opps sorry 11Kings 6 not Amos
“All over the world, indigenous and national leaders are starting their own missions boards and movements. In Brazil, they are offering to pay missionaries on their own. ”
Why do we not combine with these other boards and conventions to enlarge the SBC from just an American thing to a worldwide convention? When our missionaries plant churches in other countries why do those churches not get to consider themselves a part of the SBC? It seems to me that we all to be bringing all of these churches around the world into our convention and make it international in scope. This would certainly eliminate in problem we have of ethnicity.
Joseph,
Not that the idea of bringing in churches from around the world is bad, its not, but I think the idea is that our churches here in the USA have more representation in our leadership.
There are those men who could be dynamic leaders left out of consideration because they are not part of certain networks.
-mike
Are you talking about making an alternative to the Baptist World Alliance? I suppose this would be good. If I remember correctly the SBC ditched the BWA due to liberalism. Connecting with conservative Baptists worldwide could be beneficial.
My understanding for what it’s worth is that it not our purpose to become an international denomination. The purpose we formed for as the SBC is to create a body for effective cooperation of Baptist churches to take the Gospel to the world. Becoming international in scope as idealistic as it is would actually hinder that goal for three reasons:
1) It hinders indigenization. Our goal should be exactly what is happening. Churches in each area taking ownership of their work and forming their own church bodies and associations whereby they can work together to win the world to Christ.
2) Effective representation. As difficult as it is to have an SBC annual meeting that is functional for the thousands of Baptist churches in the U.S. and having trustee led entities that work to reaching the world for Christ, imagine the difficulty in having SBC meetings in a way that messengers from Brazil, Nigeria, and Russia could be apart of. Just the logistics of travel would be prohibitive, much less language barriers. Then we have to reconfigure the trustee nature of our entities to account for these new regions. In the end would not help us in our purpose.
3) Finances. We exist as a means of supporting two mission boards, six seminaries, a publishing house, and a commission on ethics and religious liberty. Once we expand internationally then we run into the problem of converting money from foreign into dollars and transferring money from one country to the U.S. and for IMB work then transferring it back to the country the workers are in. It is far more effective for these churches to form their own associations whereby they are able to finance missions in their own way without the problem of currency rates and transfers.
In the end, our purpose of reaching the world for Christ is most effectively accomplished by churches voluntarily associating together in ways that are most conducive to fulfilling that purpose. Nothing prohibits us from partnering with local indigenous churches and/or associations/conventions if forming such partnerships helps in fulfilling our purpose.
I agree a worldwide convention is not a good move, especially with the SBC’s focus on local churches. But what about formal networking with foreign conventions, with this being initially built at the national level? I’m sure many local churches would love to partner with foreign conventions and mission boards, alongside their CP giving, but wouldn’t know where to begin. My thought is more having loose fraternal ties, rather than bringing the whole world into a single convention. It could be mutually beneficial.
As has been mentioned, Joseph’s idea is actually a violation of SBC polity and policy. It has been said that there are NO SBC churches overseas. They have their own conventions and associations. We are supposed to support them, not control them.
On the other hand, a BWA-type organization that has better doctrinal moorings might be a good thing, if one does not already exist.