If you didn’t realize the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting was being held last week in Phoenix, you were not alone. For the first time since 1944, fewer than 5,000 messengers registered for the two-day conference. Only 4,780 had registered when it came time to elect the convention president, and only 2,384 actually voted in the contest between incumbent Bryant Wright and Wiley Drake who had nominated himself. All but 102 voted for Wright.
Perhaps for the first time, the president (formerly executive secretary-treasurer) of the SBC Executive Committee (Frank Page), the president of the International Mission Board (Tom Elliff) and the president of the North American Mission Board (Kevin Ezell) all were elected to their positions in the same year. With this influx of fresh leadership will we see any real changes?
Jim White
|
So far, the evidence is that we will. This may not always be a good thing. Southern Baptists are mixed in their reactions to blurring the distinctions between the mission board assignments, for example, and the ultimate shape of NAMB still remains to be seen.
Still, some of the changes promise to be refreshing, healthy and needed.
To illustrate, I cite Ezell’s statistical citations. For years, former NAMB presidents provided figures that anyone possessing elementary evaluative skills knew could not be right. Nevertheless, they continued to be used. Ezell, however, surprised journalists when he admitted that figures used in times past were bloated. He then provided a more realistic view of the mission board’s work.
In a statement, Ezell promised “accuracy, transparency, effectiveness and efficiency — not smoke and mirrors.” He then took issue with some oft-quoted NAMB statistics. In 2010, Southern Baptists planted 769 new churches, not the 1,400 to 1,500 a year usually reported in the past.
“It’s been said that NAMB has more than 5,100 missionaries serving in North America,” Ezell said. He then began to clarify. He said 3,480 of NAMB’s missionaries are jointly funded with the states; 1,839 are spouses, some with ministry assignments and some not; 1,616 are Mission Service Corps missionaries who receive no funding from NAMB; and 38 are national missionaries, who are paid 100 percent by NAMB. In addition, NAMB has 3,400 chaplains — 1,350 of them military chaplains — and 955 summer student missionaries on its rolls.
Let’s be honest. We all want to be seen in the best possible light. NAMB is no exception. Its leaders wanted Southern Baptists to be impressed. They also wanted those offering dollars to keep flowing their way. Pastors are so noted for estimating crowd size and finances on the high side that the term “ministerially speaking” is synonymous with inflated totals.
At the Religious Herald, we would like to inflate our circulation figures. But there is a simple reason we do not. Integrity. It is a question of honesty. We believe lying is contrary to the teaching of scripture. It violates our principles.
With the numbers of church starts, however, it wasn’t merely an attempt to impress that led to the inflated figures. Part of the problem, he emphasized, is there has been no commonly agreed-upon definition of what a church plant is. “When the old NAMB counted church plants, they didn’t ask for church names or addresses or planter names. The new NAMB is asking and only counting churches for which those details can be obtained,” Ezell said. “The old NAMB had no system for consistently tracking new church plants across the 42 state conventions. We are working with the states on such a system.
“Also, the old NAMB had no definition of a church plant agreed upon by all of our state convention partners,” Ezell added. “The new NAMB is working on that with state partners, to write a definition we all can adhere to.”
To the “old NAMB” he delivered a fitting coup de grâce: “If Walmart can track how much toilet paper it sells every hour, we should be able to track how many churches are planted each year.”
One would think so. It seems, however, that counting new church starts is not as easy as it might at first appear. State conventions have struggled to delineate the differences between churches and worshipping communities. When do missions of sponsoring churches cease to be counted statistically as part of the mother church and merit independence? Are the different locations of multi-site churches counted as individual churches or as one church?
But such accounting peculiarities cannot possibly explain why the figure NAMB has been using has been inflated by double the actual number; nor why Southern Baptists were led to believe that they had 5,100 home missionaries when the actual number of full-time missionaries supported entirely by NAMB is 38. Ezell’s term was “smoke and mirrors.”
Returning to my hope that we are seeing a new day in the SBC, such honesty and accountability as Ezell has demonstrated thus far is to be commended. Many questions remain to be answered, of course, about how NAMB will relate to state conventions and general associations. But such openness is a positive sign.
It is also a needed sign. The lack of trust within the SBC has become a serious concern to its leadership. Page has addressed this issue from time to time, calling for members of the SBC to learn to trust each other and their agencies again. Nothing promotes trust like honesty and integrity, the short supply of which led to a lack of trust in the first place.
But SBC leaders are also concerned that membership figures and baptism totals continue to drop. They believe an appeal to ethnic diversity is right for its own sake; but the potential to reverse downward trends is certainly not lost on them. Numeric growth, however, will never be sustained without a commensurate growth in trust. Only a return to integrity will prevent a long, slow slide into irrelevancy. This is the kind of growth that should most concern convention leadership.