From Dave – in my advanced senility, I neglected to changed the author designation from my name to Dr. Terry’s. My apologies.
In this third part I’ll focus on three aspects of SBC life from sixty years ago. Again, these are my memories and experiences. My memory may fail me at times, and your experience might have been different. I should emphasize that I’m not contending that the past was great and the present is terrible. No, some contemporary things are better; but, then again, just because something is old does not mean it’s bad. Some things are just different.
Local Church Schedule
Sixty years ago, the weekly schedule in an SBC church was this:
Sunday
Sunday School–10:00 a.m.
Worship—11:00 a.m.
Training Union—6:00 p.m.
Evening Worship—7:00 p.m.
Wednesday
Prayer Meeting—7:00 p.m.
Girls Auxiliary and Royal Ambassadors (missions education)—7:00 p.m.
Adult Choir Practice—8:00 p.m.
The Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU) usually met on a weekday. The Brotherhood (Baptist Men) usually met on Saturday morning.
Comments: Training Union (later Discipleship Training) was meant to teach Baptist history and polity, as well as the responsibilities of church membership. It was not well-attended compared to Sunday School. The Sunday evening service typically drew about half or one-third of the Sunday morning crowd. I believe COVID killed off most of the Sunday evening worship services. I recall that lots of pastors expressed frustration that their deacons did not attend Sunday night services. I heard of one pastor who called the roll of deacons one Sunday night. They fired him the next week.
Training
Sixty years ago, Southern Baptists trained their folks like this. The Southern Baptist Sunday School Board (now Lifeway) would decide on a new program or project. The state convention Sunday school directors would travel to Nashville to learn about the new program. The state directors would return to their states and present the new program to the associational Directors of Mission (DOMs). The DOMs would teach the new program to the pastors and local church Sunday School Superintendents in their associations. It was very much top down. Today, lots of training is provided via the internet. State convention staff and DOMs say it’s hard to get pastors and staff to attend training conferences. Given that more than 50 percent of pastors are bi-vocational, the lack of attendance is understandable.
A key part of training in the SBC in those days was the conferences at the Ridgecrest and Glorieta conference centers. Ridgecrest was in North Carolina, near Ashville, and Glorieta was in New Mexico, near Santa Fe. Every summer the entities of the SBC sponsored training weeks at both conference centers; the schedule and content were the same at both. As I remember, the conference lineup was like this:
Sunday School (two weeks, same program each week)
Training Union
Church Music
Foreign Missions
Home Missions
Student Ministry
Church Recreation (not sure about this one)
Both Ridgecrest and Glorieta had youth camps as part of the conference center. Also, lots of Southern Baptist college students were hired to serve as the staff members. The training and worship were excellent, and many pastors and staff members looked forward to going to Ridgecrest and Glorieta as a way to combine training with a family vacation. My kids loved to go to Foreign Missions Week at Glorieta. We would make excursions in the afternoons, when we had free time. Sadly, over the years attendance at the conference centers declined, and the facilities aged. Eventually, the conference centers began losing money, and Lifeway decided to sell both facilities. I understood the reasons for the sales, but it still made me sad. What are your memories of Ridgecrest and Glorieta? Did I omit a week?
Cooperative Program Giving
Another big change in the SBC over these sixty years is the decline in giving to the Cooperative Program (CP). Back in the day, most churches gave at least 10 percent of their undesignated income the CP. That was considered the standard percentage, though some churches gave less. If a pastor wanted to progress in his career—be called to a bigger church, his current church needed to give 10 percent or more. If his church gave less, then the local DOM and state convention staff were less likely to recommend him to the Pastor Search Committee at a larger church. The same was true for using church literature not published by the Baptist Sunday School Board. A church that used non-SBC literature was viewed with suspicion. Today, the average percentage given by our SBC churches has dropped to about 5 percent. Of course, that raises the question—why the decrease? I believe one factor was that several of the mega-church pastors who were elected SBC president in the 1980s and 1990s served churches that gave a low percentage to the CP. Their low percentage giving was an issue in the elections in those years. Still, it became acceptable to give less. A second reason is that SBC church members don’t give as much to their local church as they did formerly. This means the churches have to reduce their budgets some way. A third factor is that many church leaders are frustrated with the bureaucracy of the SBC, especially the state conventions. They object to the state conventions retaining more than 50 percent of the CP money. I remember teaching Introduction to Missions at Southern Baptist Seminary about 18 years ago. In that course, I always include a unit on how Southern Baptists fund their missions efforts. During my scintillating lecture, a student arose and declared, “Dr. Terry give me one reason why my church should give anything to the state convention.” When he said that, a ripple of “yeahs” ran through the classroom. In answer, I explained about the ministries carried on by the Kentucky Baptist Convention—collegiate ministry, migrant ministry, church planting, pulpit committee assistance, counseling services for ministers, and others. Nevertheless, at the end my students remained unconvinced. They are serving as pastors now, and they are probably still unconvinced about the value of state conventions.
I believe the Cooperative Program has served the SBC very well for 100 years; however, unless we modify it considerably, I think its long, slow decline will continue. What do you think?
