I had originally planned to put this online in a series of posts, but I already have a notion of how many people will read through this monster, so I might as well put it all up at once. It can also be downloaded as a PDF:

GCR-Comments.pdf

The Great Commission Resurgence Task Force was organized to examine denominational entities and make recommendations on how we as a denomination can be more effective in missionary work. Formation of the task force was approved during the 2009 Southern Baptist Convention meeting in Louisville, Kentucky and the task force will present its final proposal at the 2010 SBC meeting in Orlando, Florida.

The final proposal was released to the public on May 3rd and is available at http://www.pray4gcr.com/. The document is 27 pages long and consists of four sections:

• Introduction
• Proposal, presented in seven components
• Summary of the recommendation to the SBC
• Concluding challenges to individuals, churches, and entities of the SBC

In my comments on the GCR proposal I’m going to try hard not to nitpick. There were a number of statements that jumped out as really good, and a number of statements that jumped out as really bad. Many of the bad statements point to deeper problems within the SBC. I discuss one of those bad statements in a previous blog post. But for the purpose of this post, I want to remain focused on what the GCR proposal is intended to bring about, what specific recommendations are being proposed, and whether or not I think the recommendations are good.

Several months ago, the GCR Task Force released a rough draft of their proposal. At that time the document had little more than the opening introduction/sermon and the proposal itself. Now, however, the final report includes a section of challenges to Southern Baptists. I think the challenges are the best part of the document and am thrilled to see them in the final report. Read the rest of this entry »

I am working on a fairly extensive series of posts digging through the Great Commission Task Force recommendations. In the meantime, head over to Baptist 21 and submit questions for a panel discussion to be hosted at Southeastern Seminary. Here are the questions I sent in:

Recognizing that the IMB serves a broader range of cultures than NAMB, why does NAMB need to be decentralized into regional offices when IMB does not?

On the creation of a leadership training center through NAMB, don’t seminaries serve that function?

On the ending of cooperative agreements, has any thought been given to designating certain states as pioneer or frontier states and allowing NAMB to have cooperative agreements with pioneer states?

Are all of the proposed changes ultimately designed to turn NAMB into a church planting network in order to retain and facilitate the work of young church planters, moving the old NAMB ministries into the hands of state conventions?

From the introduction to two sermons in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, Volume 2. The attribution is given to T. Prince and W. Cooper, written in 1731.

…it is the very soul of piety, to apprehend and own that all our springs are in him; the springs of our present grace and comfort, and of our future glory and blessedness; and that they all entirely flow through Christ, by the efficacious influence of the Holy Spirit. By these things saints live, and in all these things is the life of our spirits.

Such doctrines as these, which, by humbling the minds of men, prepare them for the exaltations of God, he has signally owned and prospered in the reformed world, and in our land especially, in the days of our forefathers; and we hope they will never grow unfashionable among us: for, we are well assured, if those which we call the doctrines of grace ever come to be contemned or disrelished, vital piety will proportionably languish and wear away; as these doctrines always sink in the esteem of men upon the decay of serious religion.

I believe they are right.

From White Horse Inn:

Powerful. From Churches Helping Churches.

After reading about biblical illiteracy it occurs to me that the theological diversity within the SBC is both a blessing and a curse. It is a blessing as it encourages our people to unify around the essentials without dividing over non-essentials. There do remain some matters not essential to salvation that nonetheless divide us from other denominations: ecclesiology, baptism, the ordination of women, etc. But there is also remarkable diversity allowed within SBC life. Calvinists work alongside non-Calvinists. Dispensationalists and amillennialists go to church together (okay, not often). The Baptist Faith and Message establishes what is considered the minimum level of acceptable belief. It presents the least common denominator of Baptist faith. And as it stands the BF&M is a good document. Everything it affirms is right and true. But many topics are left unaddressed, providing freedom for individual Baptists to follow diverse convictions on these issues.

The curse of our diversity is that we also try to over establish uniformity. From a least-common-denominator confession of faith we also have a least-common-denominator body of teaching material through Lifeway, once known as the Baptist Sunday School Board. Lifeway’s approach follows that of the Baptist Faith and Message: teach things held in common by all Southern Baptists without crossing into areas of disagreement. This is not an altogether bad approach. As a Calvinist, I would not be happy knowing my money to Lifeway helped pay for material specifically opposing Calvinism. I imagine my non-Calvinist brothers and sisters would be equally appalled if Lifeway started promoting Calvinism.

The problem is with the end result. We wind up with a denomination full of people who have never been trained to go beyond the basics, never trained to dive into Scripture and emerge with rich jewels of truth.

The Lifeway material is fine for what it does, but what it does is not sufficient for the week-in-week-out growth and edification of the people of God. Our people need to be led deeper and further into biblical truth, not dancing around issues where Southern Baptists disagree but confronting those issues head on and emerging with strong convictions about what the Bible says on every subject that it addresses. For Lifeway, the solution might be to offer a variety of material coming from different theological persuasions. Not really a good solution, but I’m not sure what else they could do. In the meantime, individual churches using Lifeway material will need to go places the material will not go, augmenting the weekly lesson with more time spent in the Bible and less time spent in the Sunday school book. In the end this is the best approach anyway, no matter what material is used.

Picked this up from David Wayne at Evangel. The following quote comes from Ann Douglas’ book The Feminization of American Culture.

For some time, roughly between 1740 and 1820 the rigor exhibited by the Edwardsean ministers seemed representative of the wider culture or at least welcomed by it. Edwardsean theology, however, outlived its popular support. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as in the twentieth, the vast majority of American Christians identified themselves as members of one of the various Protestant groups. Yet, the differences between the Protestants of, say, 1800 and their descendants of 1875 and after are greater than the similarities. The everyday Protestant of 1800 subscribed to a rather complicated and rigidly defined body of dogma; attendance at a certain church had a markedly theological function. By 1875 American Protestants were much more likely to define their faith in terms of family morals, civic responsibility, and above all, in terms of the social function of churchgoing. Their actual creed was usually a liberal, even a sentimental one for which Edwards and his contemporaries would have felt scorn and horror. In an analogous way, Protestant churches over the same period shifted their emphasis from a primary concern with the doctrinal beliefs of their members to a preoccupation with numbers. In ecclesiastical and religious circles, attendance came to count for more than genuine adherence. Nothing could show better the nineteenth-century Protestant Church’s altered identity as an eager participant in the emerging consumer society than its obsession with popularity and its increasing disregard of intellectual issues.

This was written in the 1970′s. It’s far more true today.

At any given time I am usually working through three or four books. Among them I always have going at least one book that gives help for pastoral or church ministry. At the moment that book is Light and Heat: The Puritan View of the Pulpit by R. Bruce Bickel.

The Puritans saw the pulpit as the central part of corporate worship. The preaching of God’s Word is the principle work of a minister and the central, most important part of a church service. Because of the great gap between the Creator and the creature and our great need for divine truth, it is more important that the assembled believers hear what God has to say than that they speak to God. Prayer and singing certainly have an essential place in church but it is through the expounding of God’s Word that the people hear from God.

Bickel says the Puritans “note clearly the progression that begins with God giving the ministry of preaching to His Son, the Son giving the ministry to His apostles, and thence to all ministers of the gospel.” He then quotes the Puritan Paul Bayne who points out Ephesians 2:17 which mentions Christ preaching to the Ephesians. Jesus was never in Ephesus so the preaching must have been through Christ’s messengers, those appointed as ministers of the Word. When those men speak it is as though Christ speaks, as Jesus said in Luke 10:16: “The one who hears you hears me…”

The Puritan sermon was divided into three parts: Doctrine, Reason, and Use; or Declaration, Explanation, and Application. The sermon always followed a text of Scripture. The first part of the sermon would lay out the doctrinal teaching from the text. The second part would present the argument and respond to objections. The third part would give specific application of the text on the Christian life. Bickel includes a quote from Richard Baxter about the development of a sermon and appeal to the hearer:

The preacher’s aim should be first to convince the understanding and then to engage the heart. Light first, then heat. Begin with a careful opening of the text, then proceed to the clearance of possible difficulties or objections; next, to a statement of uses; and lastly to a fervent appeal for acceptance by conscience and heart.

I’m only part of the way through the book so there is much more to see and learn, but already my preaching has been challenged. To what degree do we look for light and heat in the pulpit? Are we as preachers really trying to speak in a way that Jesus speaks through us? Are we watering down his message with the world? Are the hearers looking for solid, biblical preaching that unfolds Scripture before them? How much will today’s congregations tolerate poor preaching?

Brothers, hold me accountable, and preach the Word. Person in the pew, hold your preachers accountable.

One thing that will quickly turn me off to a preacher is if I hear him using facts or information in an imprecise or incorrect manner. I knew one such preacher a few years ago. Just about every sermon contained questionable factual data. In one instance he was talking about a new Muslim place of worship in the city, explaining how it was paid for by oil money from tycoons in the Middle East. Evidently some of the people had had enough. Someone called out that it was a Shriner’s club, not a Muslim mosque. He had a hard time regaining his balance after that correction.

If you are going to claim something in a sermon, be sure it is true.

Dan, one of the Pyro guys, has written about the use of Greek and Hebrew in a sermon. His post applies to any facts used while preaching. He says well why we should not say what we do not know:

Suppose I choose to draw an illustration from the field of biology, or anatomy, or a physical science, or an historical event. Suppose, further, someone in my audience happens to be well-studied in that field. And suppose he instantly recognizes that I’m full of beans, that I pulled out some old chestnut that every well-studied ____ist/ian/ologist immediately knows to be an urban myth, or a common but long-since-exploded misconception.

What will he think of my faithfulness? of the seriousness of my intent? of the thoroughness with which I research what I am about to hold out for people’s trust and acceptance?

He’ll instantly know I’m willing to say things of which I haven’t taken the time to make sure.

And he’ll wonder — he’ll have good reason to wonder — how thoroughly I have researched and thought through the other claims I’m making. He’ll have good reason to think, “Okay, I know anatomy, and I know that what he just said is simply beans. But I don’t know Greek, or theology, or much about the Bible. How do I know whether he knows what he’s talking about on those subjects, or whether he’s just as sloppy about them as he was about this?”

A few weeks ago SBC president Johnny Hunt released the document The Great Commission Resurgence. Since its release it has received over 3500 signatures and has generated quite a bit of discussion.

On the whole it is a good document. As others have stated, almost any pastor can agree with 98% of it. Most of the controversy has focused on section IX which deals with the need for structural changes in the convention.

Regarding section 9, I tend to think Hunt is right – there do need to be some changes in convention funding, structure, and support. My feeling is we have more bureaucracy than we need. We’ve become the Oscar Wilde quote – “Bureaucracy expands to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.” .

I like some of the things in the document. Hunt recognizes the need to adapt to a changing culture, moving beyond programs that worked yesterday and looking for what is effective today. From section 8: “In the past, Southern Baptists were characterized by a remarkable uniformity in both style and substance, but those days have long passed.” Then in section 9: “...the denomination has too often failed to adapt its structure and programs to the changing culture. We are frequently aiming at a culture that went out of existence years ago, failing to understand how mid-20th century methods and strategies are not working in the 21st century.”

Children and families are also affirmed: “Too often we believe that children are a burden rather than a blessing and smaller families are more ‘responsible’ than large families. Too many believe that motherhood is not valuable as a woman’s unique and primary calling and is not as ‘fulfilling’ as other occupations. Too many believe that husbands and fathers are not uniquely called and gifted for leadership in the home and that biblical gender roles destroy authentic equality.” We have three children and someone once commented that we have a large family. That astonished me. Society’s view of children and family has certainly changed, and not for the better.

I have a few little concerns with the document. I wish section 1 focused more on obedience to Jesus and section 2 said more about the Bible as a whole. Section 4 should say more about sufficiency and the need to strive to understand all of Scripture. Section 5 could use a little more clarifying. Section 6, I wish the phrase “Baptist identity” had been left out, though I think I know what Hunt means in the sentence and if so I’m fully in agreement. Section 7 should say a little more about pastoral ministry, and the last sentence of the section is a little quirky. Section 9 is nonspecific enough to cause a desire for clarification.

My main concern is with the overwhelming focus of the document being to seek a resurgence of great commission fulfillment. We need to be carrying out the great commission. We need to be bolder, more faithful in evangelism. But that is not the only, or primary, purpose of the church. The church is given to carry out Ephesians 2:7, to be a sort of trophy room for God, displaying his glory. Evangelism aids in this, so does discipleship. Historically, Southern Baptists have emphasized (though perhaps not carried out) evangelism fairly well but in the past several decades we have been very weak on discipleship. The whole push is to go and tell with little energy left for come and learn and grow. Even those things done as discipleship are often structured to be lures to get the lost into church rather than helping believers grow in the faith.

I appreciate Hunt’s work on this document and his desire to see Christians become more faithful in carrying out the great commission, but I wish the document also called believers to greater faithfulness in studying and knowing and applying God’s Word. I wish that it called churches to increase their discipling work. Many Baptists have declared the Bible inerrant while simultaneously forgetting what it says. I hope we see this change.