by Bret Capranica | Jun 23, 2009 | Featured Articles, Southern Baptist Issues
Here’s more on the current trends and debates in the SBC in advance of this week’s annual meeting. Perhaps this is a generationally driven debate. Younger generations (I still wistfully place myself on the senior end of this group) are questioning the viability, reasonability, and rationale of being a part of a denomination that appears more and more irrelevant to the daily life of the local church. I don’t think what I have said is an overstatement. You need only listen to this generation speak of their experiences with denominational life. Other groups are rising up who are more streamlined and focused on what matters biblically and how they can assist churches to accomplish it. The Great Commission Resurgence group is rightly focusing on the downward trend of the next generation’s involvement and commitment to an old and waning way of cooperation among churches. Personally, I believe there are good reasons to remain committed to the Southern Baptist Convention. I believe our cooperative way of funding missions allows us to do much more than we could any other way. Yet, herein lies some of the problem. Doing more tends to bring about more bureaucracy that lessons more action. I think we need to define “missions” biblically and root it fundamentally in the local churches. Yet, if focused and streamlined, I believe our missions agencies could be increasingly on mission and less self-focused and self-promotional. If local churches were headquarters for the mission organization and seen, not merely as a pool from which to draw people and money for their own program, but rather seen as the center for missions,...
by Bret Capranica | Jun 22, 2009 | Featured Articles, Pastoral Ministry
This week, the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention will convene (June 23-24, in Louisville, KY – click HERE for live streaming of the sessions). During this meeting, the normal will be obvious (and I suppose necessary). Messengers will vote for officers, affirm a budget, hear reports from agencies, debate various motions and resolutions, hear a few sermons, and listen to a few mega church choirs sing. LifeWay will have a bookstore almost as large as the convention itself, and I will probably buy very little from it (I don’t have enough money for their prices or desire much of what they offer – perhaps this year I will be surprised). Southern Seminary will be celebrating its 150th anniversary, which should be fun to be a part of. A host of breakfast, lunch and dinner meetings will be held where fruitful conversation over denominational and theological life will be had. However, there is one issue that is beginning to dominate the landscape of this year’s convention. Over the past few years, a group of denominational leaders have been trying to refocus the convention on what they call The Great Commission Resurgence. Many of them make up the first generation of leaders beyond the generation of leaders that fought for and won the Conservative Resurgence, beginning in 1979. With theological liberalism behind the Convention’s institutions, cooperation among Conservatives is now the debate. We will always have such discussions and debates. New (recognizing there is really nothing new) ministry forms and strategies will always create new discussion and debate. The Emergent church, the “missional” mindset, a renewed commitment to social...
