(Courtesy)http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100616/so-baptists-adopt-major-changes-to-tackle-lostness/(Photo: SBC / Matt Miller)Posted 41m ago
By Bob Smietana The Nashville Tennessean
By Bob Smietana The Nashville Tennessean
ORLANDO, Fla. — A decade ago, Southern Baptists fought over the belief that Jesus is the only way to heaven and the inerrancy of the Bible.
Today, they're divided over budgets and baptisms.
As the older hard-line conservatives fade into the background, a new group of leaders is jostling over the priorities of the country's largest Protestant denomination. These new leaders are less concerned about conservative politics and more concerned about saving souls.
"Status quo is not the way to go," said the Rev. Matthew Surber, the new pastor of Two Rivers Baptist Church in Nashville. "To pretend like everything is fine and we just need to try harder is not going to work."
At a gathering of 11,000 Southern Baptists on Tuesday at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., Baptists overwhelmingly approved a plan that will channel funds away from established Baptist programs and use them to fund new churches and more missionaries. It's called the Great Commission Resurgence. The national meeting concludes today.
Baptists also underscored their desire for change by electing a new president, the Rev. Bryant Wright, pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta, Ga., who is somewhat controversial for promoting the idea of letting churches give money directly to the Baptist International Mission Board. That worries some Baptists who say churches should give money to a longstanding Baptist fund called the Cooperative Program, which then divides the funds among shared Baptist causes.
Wright said his church changed its method of giving after many church members traveled overseas on mission trips and developed friendships with missionaries. They returned to the United States questioning where the church was sending its money.
"We really believe that a majority of those funds should end up on the mission field," Wright said.
Rev. Frank Page, a former convention president, said it is possible to save souls and Baptist programs as well.
Page, newly elected president of the Southern Baptists' Nashville-based executive committee, is concerned that the Cooperative Program, and by extension certain Baptist interests, will suffer if churches start giving directly to missions. He said the convention needs the Cooperative Program to survive.
"We need to use time-honored methods to advance the Great Commission," said Page, who was also a member of the task force that drafted the Great Commission Resurgence plan. The plan is named after Jesus' command in Matthew 28 to go into the world and make new disciples.
Each year, the Cooperative Program collects about $600 million for Southern Baptist causes. State conventions keep about two thirds of the money. About $200 million is then divided among Baptists entities — with about 50 percent going to international missions and 25 percent going to evangelism in the United States through the North American Mission Board. Some of that money in the U.S. then gets recycled back to the states.
That has caused some Baptists to reduce their giving to the Cooperative Program. This past year, Long Hollow Baptist Church in Hendersonville gave money directly to the mission board, rather than to the Tennessee Baptist Convention.
Many of the church members didn't grow up Baptist, and so they don't feel obligated to support the state convention, said the Rev. David Landrith, pastor of Long Hollow.
"For a lot of our lay people it was an issue of stewardship," said Landrith. "Is it the best idea to keep the majority of money in Tennessee when there are so many places that don't have an evangelical witness."
Ed Stetzer, president of Nashville-based LifeWay Research, said to keep Southern Baptists working together, three things have to happen: States have to send half of the money collected to the national denomination, churches have to give more to the Cooperative Program, and the denomination has to work more efficiently.
Says Stetzer, "Increasingly pastors see denominations as a tool rather than a goal. If the goal is the evangelization of the world, the denomination is a tool to achieve that."
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