If you are a Southern Baptist, by now you know that next week at our annual convention in Orlando we will vote on recommendations from a "Great Commission Resurgence Task Force" that was appointed at last year's convention in Louisville. The Task Force's work has been the focus of our attention for the last twelve months because the recommendations they put forward in their report have lasting ramifications for our denomination in the years to come.
If you aren't familiar with the group's report, I urge you to visit the
GCR Blog and watch or read the entire report. If you would like to read several opposing viewpoints, go to
Baptist Press.
I have a keen interest in the report and have read and prayed over it carefully for two key reasons: 1) I'm a lifelong Southern Baptist and a product of God's work in this denomination. Her mission is near and dear to my heart. 2) I'm being nominated next week to serve on our North American Mission Board as a trustee. As you'll see in the report, the mission and even the very existence of NAMB has been a key focus of the discussion.
I have good friends, fellow pastors and leaders in our state conventions, who strongly disagree with many of the key components of this report. And I will go on record as saying that I hope there will be consideration given to strengthening the language concerning the Cooperative Program as our key funding strategy. But at the end of the day, my conviction to support this initiative is three-fold:
First, Southern Baptists aren't the hope of the world. Yes, I said that. Jesus is the hope of the world. As I've pored over many of the opinion pieces on Baptist Press and other places, I'm often grieved that many of our leaders seem to feel that the preservation of a denominational structure should take priority over the spiritual darkness of the world. I know that there isn't a single one of them that actually believe this, but if our passion for the Great Commission is continually limited by our unwillingness to ruthlessly evaluate "sacred cows" (like cooperative agreements and the key mission of longstanding bodies like the Executive Committee) then will we ever really discover the true potential God has given this great denomination?
Second, the people of God should always be on a mission to seek God with fresh eyes and a pure heart. For too long I think we've been unwilling to consider a better way simply because it would require us to make changes that would put a strain on longstanding relationships between state conventions. My concern about "cooperative agreements" simply reflects my bewilderment at how we can keep doing something at the state and national level that we have already seen fail at the local level. For instance, how effective would our church's mission giving be if there were "cooperative agreements" with the student ministry, Sunday School classes, and committees? We would have to require that a certain amount of our missions giving each year be sent back to these groups so that they could fund their own mission projects. This obviously still gets some mission work done; it even involves and develops our own peope in missions, and there isn't anything wrong with that. But would it surprise us if our missions giving actually went down because people began to see that much of their giving never actually made it to missionaries and church planters on the field? Yet this is essentially how a great deal of our missions giving to foreign fields comes right back to the state level. Are good things being done? Absolutely. Is this the best way to fund missions work in the most spiritually lost places? I just don't think so.
Finally, time is short and Jesus is coming back soon. No one who has tracked the health of our convention over the last decade could argue that we are at a critical crossroads. We have to be willing to make the hard choices that give us the greatest potential to impact the world while God grants us the opportunity. I totally agree that if every individual would tithe, if every church would give at least a tithe or more to the CP (our church gives 14%), then it may have never occurred to us that we needed a Great Commission resurgence. But obedience to God has always meant that there is a crucial devotion to stewardship--stewardship of monies, personnel, as well as stewardship of our thinking and planning.
We all recognize that these recommendations aren't a cure-all. Nothing can replace our personal devotion to loving God with our hearts, souls, and strength. But my prayer is that if they pass, they might become a launching platform for the greatest Great Commission movement of our lifetimes. May we all come together under Jesus to make it so.
