Fourteen years after adopting an aggressive plan to advance the Great Commission of Jesus, the Southern Baptist Convention largely has failed to follow its own plan, a blue-ribbon evaluation team reports.
“What will likely be the key takeaway from this report and a surprise for many is that only two of the seven Great Commission Resurgence recommendations which were passed in 2010 were ever fully implemented,” says the report from the group, named the Great Commission Resurgence Evaluation Task Force.
Among Southern Baptists, the Great Commission — Jesus’ final command to go into all the world and teach, baptize and make disciples — is an essential mandate. This directive from Matthew 28 has been the spark for the global Christian church’s evangelism efforts.
The name of the 2010 plan adopt by messengers to the SBC annual meeting carries additional meaning, however. By using the word “resurgence,” the evangelism plan was tied to the so-called “conservative resurgence” that pushed out moderates from the SBC and gave conservatives full control in the late 20th century.
One of the selling points for this movement was that only conservatives could cause the SBC to buck the trends of every other religious body in America and grow rather than decline. Conservatives seeking power charged that creeping liberalism was threatening evangelism and church growth.
The denomination’s own statistics now show, however, that the SBC has been in numerical decline for more than two decades.
When conservatives began their effort to capture control of the SBC in 1979, the denomination had just launched a massive evangelism effort called Bold Mission Thrust. Those evangelism and church planting goals were interrupted by two decades of political infighting.
Thus, the Great Commission Resurgence objectives were intended to restart the fires of evangelism, missions and church growth under conservative leadership.
“From the very outset, our hope was that this report would be a sort of healing ‘balm’ and not a hurtful ‘bomb’ to our cooperative work moving forward,” the evaluation team’s report says. “However, as we navigated this process, we did discover a few ‘live ordnances’ and we share them here in hopes of diffusion and resolution.
“Regarding the simple question of whether or not the implementation of the work of the GCR Task Force reversed the decline of baptisms in the SBC, the answer is a clear and decisive no.”
“We intended to function with integrity and to be dispassionate in our approach, while seeking factual, and as much as possible, objectively verifiable data for our analysis. We resolved to refrain from blaming, finger pointing or charging anyone, any church, any state convention, or any entity for the negative statistical data of which we have all been made aware.”
The report offers this stark assessment: “Regarding the simple question of whether or not the implementation of the work of the GCR Task Force reversed the decline of baptisms in the SBC, the answer is a clear and decisive no.”
The 50-page report offers only analysis and no prescriptive actions. The task force says it will offer some recommendations soon, at least one week prior to the June 10-11 annual meeting in Indianapolis.
Among the curious inactions documented is the failure to implement a new mission statement recommended and approved as part of the overall plan. That mission statement was to be, “As a convention of churches, our missional vision is to present the gospel of Jesus Christ to every person in the world and to make disciples of all the nations.”
Yet the review group found no instances of this new mission statement being adopted or publicized.
The new mission statement “appears to not have been implemented in any significant way,” the report says.
Likewise, a set of core values adopted as part of the plan also never were promoted, the group says.
“There is no discernable emphasis placed on publishing or branding any material enumerating these core values,” the report says. “Further, there is no objective evidence pointing toward a positive movement in this area as a whole.”
Other unrealized goals of the “resurgence” plan include:
- Not reversing downward trends in giving to the SBC’s Cooperative Program unified budget and the new designation of Great Commission Giving that allows churches to fund only the parts of the Cooperative Program they like. “Both the Cooperative Program and Great Commission Giving continue to experience decline,” the report says.
- Not implementing or supporting a plan for Cooperative Program promotion to move from the SBC Executive Committee to the state conventions.
- Increasing the percentage of Cooperative Program giving that makes it to the International Mission Board, which has happened but has not corresponded with an increase in international missionaries. The report notes the IMB receives more money and is supporting fewer missionaries than before.
One thing that has happened most fully is increased cooperation between the IMB and the North American Mission Board, the report says. And NAMB figures in another objective that could be considered a success but with a big caveat, it adds.
“Baptisms and church starts are down. There are still strained relationships and distrust of NAMB.”
The area of the report given the most space concerns empowering NAMB to redefine its relationships with state Baptist conventions and take a more direct role in church planting. That created animosity between state leaders and NAMB leaders, and the results have been mixed, the report says.
“NAMB has become the leading voice for church planters among Southern Baptists and has begun redeveloping relationships with all states through the Send Network,” the report says. “However, that is not to say that everything has been a success. Baptisms and church starts are down. There are still strained relationships and distrust of NAMB due to, in part, financial implications related to the dissolution of Cooperative Agreements. … The phasing out of the old model of Cooperative Agreements resulted in the elimination of many jobs across state conventions, further escalating tensions, but did free up money for church planting.”
In sum, the report says, “There was a problem at NAMB that needed solving and the GCR was the solution that the messengers approved. The dilemma of the GCR is that while it solved some of those problems, it also created new ones, including dismantling the evangelistic network between NAMB and state conventions that promoted and supported evangelism at the local church level. Many of the problems created were also relational in nature, though not all of them.”
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