The future of the Southern Baptist Convention

I ran across a very interesting article recommended by Tom Ascol, written by Danny Akin and Bruce Ashford at Between the Times. The topic was the future of the Southern Baptist Convention and there are a lot of important questions asked, sacred cows tipped, oxen gored and conversations started!

Here are a couple of choice quotes:

The SBC was formed as a network of local churches who partnered together for the sake of mission. In the last 50 years, however, she has become more and more of a denominational bureaucracy. We must help our denomination return to her roots. The SBC of the twenty-first century must be a missional network, just as the churches of Acts were a missional network. Our focus must be the gospel, and our means of cooperation must be primarily “churches partnering for the sake of mission.” Thom Rainer has urged our churches to simplify and streamline so as to maximize their effectiveness, and we think that this applies to our convention as well. The roadmap for revisioning the SBC, as well as any institution or entity within the SBC, will always involve two ideas: local church and missional cooperation.

Man, I love talk like that! I especially love it if people listen and take action. What a novel concept, seeking to see the SBC look like the church in Acts! I came to Christ in a Southern Baptist church and while I see the strengths of the SBC, I also see the weaknesses. One of the biggest weaknesses is that in a lot of the SBC, Baptists are enamored with being Southern Baptists and the size and strength of the SBC has made it ripe for bureaucracy and layers of hierarchy that inevitably lead to wasted resources and territorialism. Far too much of the giving in the SBC goes to supporting the bureaucracy, as if the churches exist to support the SBC instead of the SBC supporting the local church.

This is going to cause people to get riled up!:

One issue that we might examine is our name. We are the Southern Baptist Convention, but “Southern” neither describes who we are or who we want to be. Perhaps we should modify our nomenclature to better describe our nature as a transregional network of churches.

This issue has been whispered as long as we have been Christians and I am wholeheartedly in favor of revisiting the name. “Southern” may describe the historical nature of the SBC, but if the SBC wants to be a worldwide network of cooperating churches it may be worthwhile to consider nixing the American regionalism of the name. Right or wrong, “Southern Baptist” carries a lot of baggage (much of it self-inflicted) and I think that more than a unifier among SBC churches, it serves as a divider. Conversely, I also am not so naïve as to think that a new name is going to fix everything but it might be a step in the right direction and an admission that things need to change. Being a “Southern Baptist” convention is hard to do when you are in all fifty states and around the world.

What are some challenges ahead for the seminaries? One challenge the seminaries face is how to locate as much of our education as possible in the local church. Is there a reason not to return certain courses of study, such as pastoral ministries, to their native environment in the local church? Another challenge we might face is how to provide the most affordable seminary education. Are there ways we can streamline our institutions? A third challenge is for the seminaries to reject the temptation to be divisively competitive and instead commit to being a network of truly cooperative campuses. Such a network could, for example, provide a combination of on-campus and distance education to international missionaries in a way more beneficial that what is offered presently. A final challenge is for the seminaries to remain vigilant to ensure that our professors are doing theology primarily for the church and secondarily for the academy.

Oh my, that is outstanding! Right now, Southern Baptist seminaries are, IMHO, overly academic, incredibly expensive, divorced from the local church and insulated from the world. I have often complained that the process of sending young men away from the local gathering of the church to get an expensive seminary degree that “qualifies” them to do ministry and then having them move somewhere else to be in “ministry” is incredibly counter-intuitive and Biblically irrational. If the role of the seminary is to serve the local church, stop taking young men out of the local church and start doing more to disciple them right where they are, so that they can minister and serve locally until God moves them.

I spend a lot of time railing about the institutional church but the most important thing should be the most important thing and that is always the Gospel of Jesus Christ. These are questions and conversations that need to happen in the church. Every time someone has a knee-jerk visceral reaction to “the way things are done”, it hampers the Gospel ministry and serves the institution and not the church. If the SBC can get beyond institutional inertia, tribalism and barrier erecting, it can be a great force for spreading the Gospel. The SBC came back from the brink of heresy in the “Conservative Resurgence” but there is a long way to go. Conversations like this one are only a first step on a long road but any journey worth taking always starts with a first step.