I guess since today is my birthday, I officially need to change the title to, “Thoughts of a 26 year old Southern Baptist.” Now that we’ve got that taken care of, I’d like to continue my thoughts on the GCR from my perspective as a young pastor with a dad who has been intricately involved in the details of the Great Commission Resurgence. As I stated in my previous post, I have been coordinating the GCR blogs from the Task Force members. We relieved them of any blogging responsibilities for the Christmas holidays and I took this opportunity to give my thoughts on the GCR from my position as someone who is not on the GCR Task Force. My thoughts from last week were: (1) This task is complicated (2) This task is worthy (3) This task force is a group of Godly men and women you can trust. Here are my thoughts for today:
(4) This goes much deeper than structure
While the majority of Southern Baptists are wondering what, if any structural recommendations will be made at the convention, the issue of the GCR goes much deeper. Something I have heard my dad say in this process is, “The SBC needs a new culture. We often act much more like 1 Corinthians 3 than we do 1 Corinthians 13.” As a young SBC pastor, I could not agree more. The majority of my generation longs for a day when we come to a convention and deal with mission rather than fighting. That is not to say we are not willing to stand and fight when needed. The young SBC pastors that I know that are involved in the convention are those who are in full support of the Conservative Resurgence and everything it stood for. We are conservative, Bible-believing, mission-minded, called ministers of God who want to see people come to Christ. A line my dad uses at our prospective members dinner is, “We don’t fight here.” Right from the beginning, people know that we are a church set on reaching Northwest Arkansas, America, and the world…and we don’t want to fight. What if five years from now we were able to say that about the SBC? That instead of running to a computer to blast a fellow Southern Baptist in the blogosphere, we either confronted them personally or left judgment to God? That sounds like an SBC I want to be a part of. We don’t fight, unless there’s Biblical/theological/missional ideals that need to be fought for. Beyond that, we join together on mission.
(5) We can and should all go together
What distinguishes the Great Commission Resurgence from the Conservative Resurgence is that we can all come out of this on the other side together. The same could not be said decades ago. Some needed to take their liberal theology and get out of our seminaries and churches. This is different. There are no heretics here. We can, and should, all go together. In fact, this is something the convention charged the GCR Task Force to do. The motion asked them, “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.” So from the eldest suit-wearing pastor of the SBC to the youngest, jean-wearing pastor, from the seminary presidents all the way to the people who clean the bathrooms at Lifeway or the ERLC, from the Executive State Directors of the state conventions to the leaders of our local associations, we can and should all go together. The task of the Great Commission is worthy of our unity.
(6) The time is now
We all need to realize that this could be one of our last chances to put our petty differences aside and unite around the cause of the gospel. There are unreached peoples in distant lands who have never heard the name of Jesus. Let it not be on our watch that we chose to remain comfortable rather than change, hold on to rather than sacrifice, sit back instead of press forward. I want to be a part of a movement rather than a convention. I want to be a part of a movement of Southern Baptists who have been willing to do whatever it takes to get the gospel to our own nation and the nations of the world. I want to be a part of a movement that sends out church planters all over the world to build evangelistic churches that reach their communities. I want to be a part of a movement that comes together under the theological conviction that the Bible is perfect and in it are the very words of God. I want to be a part of a movement that changes the world. In other words, I want to be a part of a Great Commission Resurgence. Do you?
