GCR leaders and the 'Cooperative Program'

From a friend of a friend of a friend, one more thought about the "Great Commission Resurgence Task Force" committee:

The chairman of the committee, Ronnie Floyd (pastor of a megachurch in Springdale, Ark.), has already been rejected by Southern Baptists for his pitiful, disgraceful Cooperative Program giving. I use the strong word 'disgraceful' because he attempted to become our president while giving 1/3 of 1 percent to our cooperative work. Why do we keep putting these guys in such key leadership positions!?

The Cooperative Program is the unified approach Southern Baptist churches take to jointly fund large-scale projects (like missions and seminaries) that they could not accomplish separately. I seem to recall reading that megachurch pastors like Rev. Floyd and Rev. Johnny Hunt chafe at observations like the one above because their churches - virtual denominations unto themselves - invest large sums of money into direct missions while sending small percentages to the "CP." I seem to recall that some megachurch pastors, in fact, have complained that their missions spending "outside the structure" of the Cooperative Program is not given enough weight in evaluating their commitment to the Southern Baptist cause.

I can understand that concern. Any pastor who is leading a congregation to invest in missions activity what for them is a large sum of money ought to get credit for such visionary leadership.

My friends who are Southern Baptists, however, tell me that it was the creation of the Cooperative Program that freed individual congregations from a constant barrage of fund-raising requests brought by visiting representatives of missionary societies. The more persuasive fund-raisers raked in the dough for their causes; the less glamorous causes struggled. Small congregations were torn, unable to respond meaningfully to all the pleas for money. The decision to pool resources for missions causes - and ignore pleas from societies - set loose one of the greatest engines for Christian missions the non-Catholic world has ever seen. Most Southern Baptist churches measure their commitment to cooperative missions by the percentage of their budget they donate to the CP.

No doubt the proponents of the "Great Commission Resurgence Task Force" committee want to see renewed passion for the missions mandate among Southern Baptists. Any believer with a heartbeat wants to see that.

Given the track record of some of the GCR leaders, however, a person couldn't be blamed for wondering whether they aren't actually hostile to the Cooperative Program approach to doing missions.

And if you aren't a Cooperative Program Southern Baptist, what makes you a Southern Baptist at all - as opposed, say, to an Independent Fundamental Baptist? Could this committee be used to dismantle the Cooperative Program framework or at least do serious damage to it?

Just asking. What does an outsider like me know anyway?

Oh, good! A committee!

The boys in the new club - the Southern Baptist "Great Commission Resurgence" Club - are so excited that delegates (sorry. "messengers") to the annual meeting voted for their committee. Everyone knows that the best way to spark renewed passion for the Great Commission is to appoint a committee to study the situation and bring back recommendations.

What a bunch of Baptists.

If you want to see real change in Southern Baptist churches, you can start with about two-thirds of their members getting saved.

Then you need to talk to the backsliders about lordship.

Then you should to talk to the superficial Christians about discipleship.

Then you ought to get everybody on their knees at the altar, confessing their sins and righting wrong relationships. (The Calvinists should set the example for the "weaker brothers" and be the first to apologize - for being arrogant know-it-alls.)

Then you should get each member to pick five unsaved people with whom to develop Kingdom relationships and pick five new believers to disciple.

Then you should all get on the church van and head over across the tracks and see how things are going in the real world.

Then some of you get on a bus and head cross country to help start a new church. And some others get on a plane and fly overseas to sit with people dying of AIDS.

Then everyone meet back here one year from today and we'll talk about all the great things God did while the GCR Committee was spending buckets of money, deliberating how to keep God's Southern Baptist Kingdom out of the crapper. (Mark Driscoll told me it was "missional" to use that word in this context.)

These boys make all kinds of noise about passion for the Great Commission. Then they form a committee to talk about reorganizing the denomination.

Oh, yes, that ought to work. I mean, it worked for Jesus, right?

A few more GCRD questions

It appears to be a cause for celebration in some circles that the Great Commission Resurgence Declaration now has 3,374 signatories.

That is out of how many Southern Baptist church members?

And how many of those signatories are students at Southeastern Seminary or members of Woodstock Baptist Church?

And how many of those 3,374 will actually be delegates to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting? (I'm sorry. Messengers. I've been told there is a difference.)

Southern Baptists and their GCRD

It has been almost a year since I posted but there just hasn’t been anything that piqued my interest. Until now, anyway.

I have been reading about the Southern Baptists’ Great Commission Resurgence Declaration (GCRD) in Baptist Press and on the blogs. While I agree wholeheartedly about the need for Southern Baptists to rediscover a passion for Christ’s mission in the world, there were some things about the GCRD conversation that struck me as being a little off.

So some friends and I have been talking and we have come up with a few questions that we would like to have answers to, if we were going to be delegates to the upcoming Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) meeting in Louisville, Kentucky (which we are not).

The GCRD asserts the SBC has a problem with growing bureaucracy. Just saying so, however, does not make it so. What is the evidence for the assertion? Can anyone provide numbers that demonstrate inappropriate growth in Southern Baptist agency staffing?

And if it turns out there has been significant growth in staffing, how does a person tell the difference between bureaucratic enlargement and growth necessitated by ministry advancement? Is all growth in staffing by definition an enlargement of bureaucracy?

As long as we are at it, let’s also talk about church staffs. When would the growth of a church's staff count as bureaucratic enlargement? Are the issues of misplaced mission priorities illustrated at least as well by how churches spend money on themselves? What does a church that keeps 98% of its dollars at home have to say to a state denominational office that keeps 55%?

Which is the bigger problem for the enlargement of Christ’s Kingdom: the percentage of dollars kept by the local church and not sent on to mission causes, or the percentage kept by a state denominational office for state missions?

Among the leaders at the local church level who are calling for the denomination to make better use of the people's offerings, do we have examples of pastors with misplaced priorities? Are large building and salary budgets a good mission use of money given by the congregation?

GCRD leaders have complained that critics have zeroed in on their Point #9 (which criticizes the growth of denominational bureaucracy and calls for reorganization at all levels to “streamline”), but other than #9, which elements of the GCRD would anyone actually disagree with? Is it irrelevant that the GCRD's most practical call for specific change is focused on denominational structures, not the local church?

If the GCRD really is directed at the churches, not the denomination, what exactly is the challenge it poses to the churches? In what way do they need to change?

Is there any point in the GCRD that a church member would say does not already characterize their church?

If we believe these points already describe our church, how does affirming them ignite a “Great Commission Resurgence” (GCR)? Did the “Conservative Resurgence” happen because everyone in the SBC affirmed a high view of Scripture? Did the Protestant Reformation happen because Martin Luther posted 95 Points of Agreement on the church door?

When a church readily affirms the elements of the GCRD but does not live them out in practice, what do you do next to spark a GCR?

We also were put off by the original tone of the GCRD as put out first by Dr. Danny Akin and then by Rev. Johnny Hunt. The language was sharply critical of denominational agencies without offering any documentation for the assertion about bureaucracy. We have addressed that above.

We were even more concerned, however, by the tone Rev. Hunt struck in his subsequent media interviews. It seemed to us that it was arrogant for him to lecture denominational leaders about speaking down to pastors and churches. He declared that “the church is king” and said that when churches speak to the denomination, they speak as kings to princes. The point is that denominational leaders should listen and cooperate, not presume to give directions.

That is all well and good. In Southern Baptist polity, churches are indeed king. But someone may need to point out to Rev. Hunt that the SBC therefore has more than 40,000 kings, not one, two, or twenty. It also ought to be noted that it is therefore the churches that are king, not the pastors. A pastor may not appreciate a denominational leader speaking down to him, and that's understandable. But does the fact that the church is king justify a pastor speaking down to a denominational leader?

Some of the SBC’s leaders have asserted that if a GCR is going to happen, it will require the partnership of all people at all levels of the denomination. How can a spirit of partnership prevail if a pastor speaks to convention leaders the way a king would speak to princes?

We also are curious about another polity issue. Southern Baptists say they are not connectional. That means no level of denominational organization has authority over any church or over other levels of organization. The churches directly control each of the levels of organization with which they choose to relate.

That being said, on what basis would a national SBC task force presume even to discuss -- much less make recommendations about -- Southern Baptist reorganization at state and local levels? If the churches are king, would not they take up those discussions themselves in the appropriate venues? Is it not a little ironic that a local church leader who diminishes the role of national agencies would then call for a national task force to tell state and local leaders how to reorganize their affairs?

I doubt any of the big shots who run the big churches and big agencies of the Southern Baptist Convention have any interest in what nobodies have to say. But it seems to us nobodies that a group of people who claim they want to spark renewed passion for the Great Commission are going about it more like a bunch of religious bureaucrats than a band of passionate followers of Jesus Christ.