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?