Southern Seminary will host a very interesting discussion panel on the GCR at 10 am EST (7 am PST) tomorrow morning. You can listen along here.

Below are details from the Baptist 21 blog:

On Thursday October 22nd at 10:00 am, Southern Seminary will be hosting a panel discussion titled “Southern Baptists and the Great Commission Resurgence” during chapel. At the request of Dr. Albert Mohler, Baptist21’s very own Jonathan Akin and Nick Moore will be on the panel representing younger pastors in the SBC. Other panelists include Dr. Chuck Lawless, Dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions and Evangelism at Southern and Dr. Russell Moore, Senior Vice President for Academic Administration and Dean of the School of Theology at Southern. Dr. Mohler will be moderating the panel discussion.

We want to encourage every pastor and seminary student who is in the Louisville area to make this chapel service a priority. For those of you who cannot attend, you can live stream the Southern Chapel services at www.sbts.edu. Jon and Nick, along with the rest of the panel will address important issues about the future of the Southern Baptist Convention. We are grateful to Dr. Mohler for allowing us to be apart of the conversation, and our hope is that in a small way this panel will further the conversation about change within the SBC. Please pray for the panelists and ask God to grant them grace and wisdom.

Al Mohler held a forum this morning at Southern Seminary on the “Future of the Southern Baptist Convention.”

Mohler observed that the world has changed dramatically in the last 60 years, and that the SBC is at a crossroads. If we continue to embrace a corporate mentality, the SBC will quickly become extinct. But if we return to a more biblical model of doing church, our brightest days may lie ahead. The Great Commission Task Force has been given a unique opportunity to talk about denominational structure and efficiency, but this conversation must be founded upon a strong theology and unflagging commitment to the Great Commission.

Here are my full notes from his message:

Introduction
What does it mean to be a Southern Baptist in the 21st century?
First, an expression of gratitude to all those who have been faithful over the years, and to all those who have been giving, praying, going, sending
John 9:4 says “work the works of Him who sent Me while it is day” – a very urgent warning about time. Asking about the SBC is an urgent and strategic question about the gospel and the Great Commission. Yet many feel an urgency that we should be doing more. The issue is faithfulness.

Some Historic perspective
1845 – founders in Augusta established a mission statement for the “eliciting, combining, and directing of energies toward the propagation of the Gospel.” Missions was the reason for the SBC.
Home Mission Board was originally designed to reach the frontier. America did not exist the way it does now.
Late 1800s – began to meet annually; SBC begins to broaden; seminaries established
1914-1919 – Great shift of logic in SBC; a new word entered our vocabulary: “efficiency.” Efficiency experts rose in America – time, systems, organizational management. An infusion of a business culture entered into the life of our denomination. It is helpful and relevant, but has limited application in spiritual matters.
1925 – Executive Committee was established. Necessity for an ongoing, coordinating entity. Also year Cooperative Program was established.
1926-27 – Executive Committee was given enormous expansion of powers.
1950s – Formation of Committee to Study the Total Church Program, chaired by Douglas Branch. Goal: to recommend a massive restructuring. Used the Booz Allen Hamilton consulting firm. Again, “efficiency” was the main concern. Some of the recommendations: an office building in Nashville (headquarters); inter agency council; program assignments to entities. What would be our mission? “To bring men closer to God through Jesus Christ.”
1995 – Program and Structure Committee – reduced entities from 19 to 12. Mission “SBC exists to facilitate, extend, and enlarge, Great Commission ministries of local churches.” Sounds less bureaucratic, more richly theological, and urgently evangelistic.
2009 – A Great Commission Task Force was assigned to bring recommendations of how churches may be more effective in the Great Commission.

Consider 1945. By this time, the SBC had developed a programmatic identity. The basic ethos/energy was programmatic unity (you’re SBC because you do certain things, have certain features, uses certain literature, etc.). It was assumed you hold to certian doctrines. A corporate management mentality. This came out of a social context. Post war, the SBC became something like a Catholic Church of the South. A cradle-to-grave approach to Southern Baptist identity (starting with “pre-cradle roll”). Sunday was at least a four-fold activity. Youth choirs. Missions organizations. Offering envelopes with check boxes. College and Universities had Baptist Student Union. Families had Camps, Brotherhood, WMU. Retirement Centers even established. The planning concept: “The key church (or model church).” Had all organizations. Reported in Annual Church Profile. Resulted with great solidarity, denominational identity, incredible intactness/tightness in SBC identity. Any use of resources “outside the program” (using different curriculum, attending a non-SBC conference center) were immediately suspect. There was enormous spiritual security in all this. There was a tribal, cultural identity. An enormous brand loyalty. But now the world has changed on us, and the world that produced that identity is long gone.

The SBC today – Two Analogies

• The SBC as General Motors – William Durant developed GM as a cradle-to-grave employer. Everyone became ‘inside.’ You never have to leave the corporation. Small distinctions, but many similarities. Centralized headquarters with centralized “offerings.” Dealders were distributed throughout the country. GM overtook Ford because of its aggressiveness, and led in auto sales for 77 years. Managerial dynamic, the envy of every other company. But now, has transformed into a new corporation owned by US taxpayers and pension stock. Lost market share and is the second largest bankruptcy in human history. It fit the 50s and 60s really well, but doesn’t fit any more. Are we trapped in the same organizational logic?
• The SBC as Shopping Mall – this was made possible by the automobile. First built in 1950. A complete reversal of downtown logic, with pedestrians walking down the street, entering storefronts. Significant advantage: enclosed space, protected from the elements. Anchor tenants attract shoppers. The logic is that you’re “going to the mall.” The action and identity is inside. By 2008, 1175 enclosed mall in the US. Displaced almost all other retail context, rivaled only by “big box stores.” #1 item sold is women’s clothing. But not one enclosed mall has opened in America since 2006. Retail logic has collapsed – lifestyle centers. Retailers now want their name out front. The identity is now primarily the “store” rather than the shopping “center.” The SBC is a huge “mall.” Two anchor stores: IMB and NAMB. Inside the mall are many other things going on. The loyalty is to this huge “thing” that is only explicable from the inside.

There were certain gains from these models, resulting in many people getting to the mission field, but the question we need to ask is, “What is changed, and why have we not?” and “Has the logic of this particular organizational pattern been eclipsed by something else?” Does it seem like an age gone by?

The SBC now faces several questions.
We must choose one direction or another.

• Are we going to be missiological or bureaucratic? Only missiological fits the Lord Jesus Christ. Otherwise, we will find ourselves out of touch with churches and the world we’re trying to reach. The logic of bureaucracy will never take us where we need to go.
• Is our identity tribal or theological? We’ve had many shared theological convictions. SBC tribal identity is no longer the norm. A theological identity will lead to missiological.
• Is the basis of our cooperation convictional or confused? We must “grow up” theologically. Must distinguish first order issues. A clash of worlviews now occurs very early in life.
• Is our logic going to be more secular or more sectarian? Will we stand out from the culture around us? The SBC did not once need to be sectarian in the South, but that has changed, and we need to reach areas outside the Sun Belt. The church of the Lord Jesus is in a sense always sectarian, comprised of reside aliens never fully at home in the culture.
• Are we going to become younger or dead? We’re losing at least 2/3 of our young people between adolescence and adulthood. This is a generation that has reduced religion to “moralistic therepeutic deism.” We need a level of evangelism and discipleship beyond what the SBC has traditionally seen. The SBC birth rate has shrunk.
• Are we going to be more diverse or diminished? Becoming more diverse will require a lot of strategy and uncomfortability. This means we won’t be singing out of the same hymnbook. By the year 2050, 25% of all Americans will have a Hispanic grandparent.
• Will we become missional or missiological? We can no longer be merely methodological. The church is found faithful when found missional.
• Will we be more strategic or anemic? Local churches must be a missiological think tank for our community. More intentioned.
• Will we be more bold or more boring? This generation will not be satisfied with boring (same thing, same way, no surprises). The NT Gospel is bold. We’re going to have to take risk, which is uncomfortable, especially for a denomination already struggling. Need bold leadership. The comfort zone will lead only to death.
• Are we going to be happy or bitter? The SBC has a reputation for denominational crankiness, even in our annual meetings. Don’t be cranky for the wrong things. We’re going to have to say hard things that appear unloving, intolerant. We cannot afford to waste the opportunity to reach our neighbors by being cranky over extraneous things. There needs to be a love and commonality. There should be evident joy among God’s people.

Two problems with the Cooperative Program.
The SBC has both perception problems and reality problems. Only a small portion of CP giving actually makes it to missions.

• Our greatest goal is not merely to cooperate. Any entity can do this. The whole purpose is reaching the nations. Are we going to be relevant in the modern world.
• We cannot simply tell churches in a new age what they must do and how they must live. We must earn their trust. We are partners of the churches. They must be liberated to give as they will, or they will not give at all.

Concluding thoughts

• We are still too North American centric.
• We need to return to the primacy of the early church. Where are churches urgently, passionately understanding the mission of God. Our identity is not in the “giving.” The giving must be at the end, not the beginning.
• We first need a theological rationale. Corporate logic comes at the very end. The SBC is at one of those very interesting moments – primarily made up of “PC guys.” The “Apple guy”. They don’t use the same logic. We cannot be seen as backward and cranky, committed to the wrong cultural identity. We need to be missional. Our mission must be to gather to work with other Christians to spread the gospel of Jesus Christ. We cannot gauge church health by raw numbers on a profile. The question is “does this church have what the NT church has”?

The SBC is at a great crossroads. Discussion of structure cannot come first. Our ethos/mission comes first. Structures must remain open and flexible for the rest of our lives.

Let’s not be caught in the dark, realizing we missed a great opportunity while it was still day.

Update: here is the audio from the forum:

Related posts:

• New GCR website has launched
• A strategy for the SBC
• A year of mixed success for Southern Baptists

Why are there 16 million registered members in the SBC, yet only 6 million can found in our churches on Sunday? I believe many of these members responded to an “easy believism” gospel invitation, but sadly, they never truly counted the cost of becoming a disciple of Christ.

Jesus warns, “Whoever does not carry his own cross and come after Me cannot be My disciple. “For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it?” (Lk. 14:27-28).

Over 100 years ago, J. C. Ryle described this tragic phenomenon:

For want of counting the cost, the hearers of powerful evangelical preachers often come to miserable ends. They are stirred and excited into professing what they have not really experienced. They receive the Word with a “joy” so extravagant that it almost startles old Christians. They run for a time with such zeal and fervor that they seem likely to outstrip all others. They talk and work for spiritual objects with such enthusiasm that they make older believers feel ashamed. But when the novelty and freshness of their feelings is gone, a change comes over them. They prove to have been nothing more than stony–ground hearers. The description the great Master gives in the parable of the sower is exactly exemplified: “Temptation or persecution arises because of the Word, and they are offended” (Matt. 13:21). Little by little their zeal melts away and their love becomes cold. By and by their seats are empty in the assembly of God’s people, and they are heard of no more among Christians. And why? They had never counted the cost.

For want of counting the cost, hundreds of professed converts, under religious revivals, go back to the world after a time and bring disgrace on religion. They begin with a sadly mistaken notion of what is true Christianity. They fancy it consists in nothing more than a so–called “coming to Christ” and having strong inward feelings of joy and peace. And so when they find, after a time, that there is a cross to be carried, that our hearts are deceitful, and that there is a busy devil always near us, they cool down in disgust and return to their old sins. And why? Because they had really never known what Bible Christianity is. They had never learned that we must count the cost. (Ryle, Holiness, chapter 5).

It was for this very reason the SBC passed a resolution on Regenerate Church Membership last year at the 2008 convention. O that God would awaken hearts before it is too late.

The Great Commission Resurgence Task Force recently launched a new website, prayforgcr.com. I encourage you to pray regularly for this team and for the Holy Spirit’s awakening in each of our churches. No amount of meetings can bring success if we do not humbly seek the Lord’s face and find His blessing.

On the site, the task force explains why a “Great Commission Resurgence” is needed for such a time as this:

• The churches of the Southern Baptist Convention are yearning for a new day of Great Commission awakening and commitment. They sense both a need and a rare opportunity to come together to reclaim the missional vision that brought us together from the first.
• A new generation of Southern Baptists is ready for deployment in the service of the Great Commission – and waiting to see if Southern Baptists are ready to send, support, and propel this generation out to the nations. Will we do what it takes to send those God is calling?
• Many of our churches –- perhaps 70% — are plateaued or declining. They need a Great Commission Resurgence starting right where they are. A Great Commission Resurgence has to start right at home.
• Southern Baptists have much work to do reaching America in a multicultural, multiethnic, multilingual era. We need a Great Commission Resurgence that will make us do whatever it takes to reach America with the Gospel.
• Southern Baptists need a Great Commission Resurgence that will reorder our priorities, refocus our vision, reclaim our mission, and set our hearts on seeing the nations exult in the name of Jesus.

This movement is bigger than any one denomination. The GCR may be a Southern Baptist initiative, but it’s something many other churches and denominations are watching expectantly to see what the Lord will do.

Will you commit to pray today?

Related posts:

• 10 highlights from the SBC convention
• Pastors: the key to a great commission resurgence

I enjoyed reading this article by Tom Ascol and believe it captures some of the bright moments of this year’s SBC annual meeting:

Dr. Al Mohler’s motion to commission a task force passed tonight at the Southern Baptist Convention. Specifically, the motion requests that

the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting June 23-24, 2009 in Louisville, Kentucky, authorize the President of the Southern Baptist Convention to appoint a Great Commission Task Force charged to bring a report and any recommendations to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in Orlando, Florida June 15-16, 2010, concerning how Southern Baptists can work more faithfully and effectively together in serving Christ through the Great Commission.

There was brief public opposition during the time for debate. The most rancorous opposition came from a pastor who is convinced that the problem with the SBC is the rise of Calvinism in our ranks. He likened it to the Primitive Baptist movement and blamed all the ills the convention on the revival of the doctrines of grace in the convention. His comments were inflammatory and unfounded. They did not carry the day.

A substitute motion was put forward but was fortunately voted down, allowing for an overwhelming affirmation of Dr. Mohler’s original motion. The Parliamentarian, Dr. Barry McCarty, later said that the vote was at least 95%-5% in favor.

This was a good move that bodes well for the future of the SBC. Of course, it is just the beginning. Johnny Hunt must now appoint a committee that will take up the responsibility of this assignment. Pray for him and for those whom he appoints. The last thing that the SBC can afford at this point is a study and report that fall short of serious analysis and recommendations. While these recommendations will not be binding on any entity in the SBC just because a task force recommends them, they can become rallying points for the way ahead in marshalling our cooperative efforts more energetically and efficiently in the work of the great commission.

Though in the big scheme of things this vote is not all that important, I believe that it is a harbinger of better days on the horizon. In fact, today is the best day that I have ever spent at a Southern Baptist Convention. In no particular order, following are some of the reasons that I say that.

1. Danny Akin. Dr. Akin spoke at the Founders Breakfast at 6:30AM, the Baptist21 luncheon at noon, at the SBC giving a theme interpretation at 3:30PM and at the 9Marks after-meeting at 10:00PM. No doubt he is tired! But his weariness is reason for Southern Baptists’ encouragement. In each assignment, he knocked it out of the park, communicating great insight in a personable, humble and courageous manner. He is the kind of leader that Southern Baptists desperately need right now, and the demands on his time indicate that he is willing to answer the call.

2. Johnny Hunt. He has proven to be a remarkable leader for Southern Baptists this last year. Dr. Hunt makes it very hard not to love him. He is gracious, humble, transparent and enthusiastic in his leadership. He has demonstrated a willingness to work with all Southern Baptists who are willing to unite around the gospel and press forward in the great commission. He has been very gracious and kind to those with whom he disagrees at certain points, setting a tone of genuine love and respect in the SBC that we have needed for a long time. Some have been less than thrilled with his leadership but, from my vantage point, their antipathy has more to do with his unwillingness to tow anyone’s party line than with him personally. His love for Christ, pastors and for the conversion of unbelievers is contagious and I, for one, want to catch what he’s got! I look forward to his next year of leadership and will continue to pray for him privately, in my home and in our church.

3. Though I have not heard all of the sermons from the pastors’ conference or that were preached today at the convention, what I have heard has left me more encouraged about the state of preaching in the SBC than in a long time. There have been wonderful messages preached. Sell your blood if y0u must, but be sure to purchase the CD of David Platt’s sermon from last night at the pastors’ conference. It was incredible.

4. The IMB. Everyone has heard of the financial shortfall that will result in the decrease in our missionary force by the end of the year. Of the $16 billion that Southern Baptist churches collected last year, less than 2.6% went to the IMB. But that message seems to be rallying Southern Baptists to renew our commitment to getting the gospel to the unreached peoples of the world. I was deeply moved by the IMB report tonight of what God is doing and what the needs yet are. Jim Richards of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention presented Jerry Rankin with a $100,000 check to help start making up for the shortfall. The pastors’ conference took up a special offering to assist with it as well. I believe that Southern Baptists will rally and that this financial crisis will provoke the kind of self-examination that we need at this time in order for us to re-order our priorities.

5. The growing humility within the SBC. I heard agency heads, featured preachers and seasoned pastors saying publicly what has needed to be said for a long time. God doesn’t need the SBC. The SBC can fail and be thrown onto the ash heap of ecclesiastical history and the kingdom of God will march on victoriously. It is that kind of awareness and humility that breeds the kind of perspective on the SBC that may well lead us to see our brightest days in the future. Until we get over the SBC we will not be in a position to utilize it for kingdom purposes as we ought.

So, I am hopeful. It seems to me that a fresh wind is blowing. If it is the wind of God’s Spirit then may we recognize His work and redouble our efforts to be faithful in following wherever He leads.