We are only a few days away from our B21 Panel at the Southern Baptist Convention in Louisville. The buzz around the recent Great Commission Resurgence Declaration released by Dr. Danny Akin and Dr. Johnny Hunt is sure to be a hot topic at this year’s convention.
The event Baptist21 and Sojourn Community Church will be hosting is on Tuesday, June 23rd from 11:45 – 1:45. There will be a panel consisting of Dr. Danny Akin (SEBTS President), Dr. Ed Stetzer (President, Lifeway Research), Dr. Albert Mohler (SBTS President), Daniel Montgomery (Pastor, Sojourn Community Church), Dr. Mark Dever (Pastor, Capital Hill Baptist Church), and Dr. David Platt (Pastor, The Church at Brook Hills).
At this event, each panelist will be given a topic to speak on for a period of time regarding the SBC. Following this time there will be a Question and Answer time consisting of YOUR questions. We want you to submit the questions that you would like to have answered from one of our panelists. For the next few days we will be taking questions and compiling them. We will then narrow down the best five to seven questions asked and we will proceed with those questions at the B21 Panel. Here are two ways to submit your question:
- You can submit your question via text message. Create a new text message with 41411 as the recipient. Before you type anything else, type “baptist21”. Then proceed with typing your name, email, church, and then your question. This is an easy way to send us a question if you are on the go and you think of something you would like to ask the panelists about the SBC.
- The second way you ask a question is by simply filling out the online form you see below. Please fill out each field accurately.
All questions will be compiled and the B21 guys will precede with choosing the best questions for the panel. Thanks again for your continued involvement in the SBC and we look forward to reading your questions.
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Many of our churches are having difficulty presenting the Gospel to our culture; something seems “off.” Is it more that the content of our Gospel message off? Or is it more that our methods of delivering the Gospel off?
Guys, I’m new to the scene here in the SBC, having apostatized at an early age and wandered in darkness most of my adolescence and young adulthood. My story is long and not the topic of this comment, however. When I look at the Southern Baptist churches I’ve interacted with throughout those years and even now, the three biggest problems I see are right here at home:
Education of Believers – Put simply, we are not doing a good enough job of teaching the word of God, at every level from new believers young and old to seasoned lay members. It is a tragically rare and beautiful thing to find a pastor courageous enough to teach deeper concepts in Theology and Christology, stepping outside the comfort zones of the oft-repeated cliches that comprise the vast majority of Baptist Sunday school literature. This lack has the effect of neutering our witness and ministry in our own, everyday lives. If we don’t teach our people the deeper character and nature of Christ’s mission and ministry, how can we expect them to reflect that nature outside the church? If they don’t reflect the love of Christ, how can we expect the outside world to recognize Him when they see Him? This is a huge issue, and one that deserves some discussion not just within our denomination but nationwide.
Political Involvement – Fellow Christians, we are in the midst of the biggest battle for the moral and ethical soul of our nation since the sixties. We have capitulated and allowed our voices to be silenced for too long, and now the forces of the Enemy have the upper hand in America. The Church, and here I am talking of the people that comprise the body of Christ, must stand up and make our voices heard. If we don’t stand up for what is right, we will be complicit in the horrors to follow: rampant murder of unborn children, the viral spread of sexual immorality throughout our culture, moral relativism destroying even the definitions of good and evil, and there’s still more out there. What can we do about it, though? Certainly nothing until the vote comes back around, right? Wrong. Write your senators. Speak out on television and on the radio (as a caller or even as a guest). Write your representatives in local and state government. Arrange and participate in demonstrations like the tea party movement did and is doing again on Independence Day. While we must obey earthly authority so far as doing so is not a sin, we are not called to be completely absent in its direction. Get off your derrieres and get your fists in the air, your voices raised, because if we don’t, the consequences will be on our hands as much as any of theirs in D.C.
Both of these points have to do with integrity. We have strong convictions about our beliefs because those beliefs are external to us, objective, in the person of God. If we live according to those objective moral standards, we can become again that shining light on a hill instead of just another voice among the many as we are in grave danger of becoming. Gentlemen, there can be no compromise on our moral standards. They’re not ours to compromise.
Home Missions – By gaining back our integrity and showing that we live what we believe, we strengthen the witness that allows us to cut through the morass of escapist propaganda in our culture and reach the truly lost and needy of our own country. We have a very real challenge before us in reaching these lost, because a vast number of them already call themselves, “Christians,” by which they mean they attend church regularly, tithe and participate in Sunday school gossip, all because Mommy and Daddy did or because it’s the “in” thing for their particular circle of friends. And reaching these is small-potatoes next to the young, college-educated, self-avowed atheist, armed with all the propaganda that is available to such an educated, indoctrinated mind. Reaching these people, our countrymen who thrash about blindly destroying our nation in the process, is the only mission that I simply don’t see happening. We, as Baptists and as Christians, have lost the credibility to perform it.
My mission, my calling, is to correct these problems as best I can. I am called to minister, yes, but not overseas where the work of missions is glorious and often times far more fruitful. I am called to minister here, where the minds and hearts are hardened against Christ, and our integrity is weakened by so many who are willing to compromise what is not ours. I hope I will find a home in the SBC, but if not, don’t look for my voice to fade.
In light of current disagreements on the subject, what do you see as the future of Calvinists in the SBC and SBC cooperation with Calvinist-leaning groups such as Acts 29 for church planting or Desiring God and Sovereign Grace for ministry events?
Is there a plan in the leadership of the SBC to reach the most libral areas of our country, like the Northeast as well as the big cities outside the South that need to be evangelized. Will there be a call and cooperation between local congregations to plant outside the bible belt?
Ed Stetzer: You stated in your sermon at the Southern Baptist Convention that “the decline of the SBC is not a matter of debate, but is a matter of math.” It seems, however, that there are those who would debate with you and who would argue that your use of stastics is taken out of context in order to promote and support a point of view which you arrived at before you received the numbers. My question has two parts: First, is it helpful to use rhetoric that automically exludes those who disagree with you? Second Frank Page has asserted that one of the reasons that we are failing at the church level is by using 1950’s methodologies to reach the 21st Centry. Would you agree with this statment and if so how would you respond to Will Hall who attributes the change in membership numbers to “demographic changes in our country,” rather than “outdated methodologies,” or ” a generation gap in the leadership of our churches and institutions,” aruging that “data shows that membership and baptism figures are in large part a product of a declining birth rate among whites as well as the suburbanization of America?”
CORRECTION OF ABOVE: I apologize for the typos in the post above. I was at the Pastor’s Conference all day yesterday and had no access to internet, so I read off my questions to a friend who could not read this tiny print and thus missed the typing errors. Here is the corrected document, along with another adjustment. Again, I apologize and would have spend more time on formatting the question, but I did not think I had enough time to do so before the time for submission ended. Thank you for your patience. Here is the corrected material:
Ed Stetzer: You stated in your sermon at the Southern Baptist Convention that “the decline of the SBC is not a matter of debate, but is a matter of math.” It seems, however, that there are those who would debate with you and who would argue that your use of statistics is taken out of context in order to promote and support a point of view which you arrived at before you received the numbers. My question has two parts: First, is it helpful to use rhetoric that automatically excludes those who disagree with you? Second, how would you respond to the articles written by Will Hall for the Baptist Press which was distributed at the Pastor’s Conference and puts your analysis of the statistical data into question?
All Members of the Panel: Frank Page has asserted that one of the reasons that we are failing at the church level is by using 1950’s methodologies to reach the 21st Century. Would you agree with this statement and if so how would you respond to Will Hall who attributes the change in membership numbers to “demographic changes in our country,” rather than “outdated methodologies,” or ” a generation gap in the leadership of our churches and institutions,” arguing that “data shows that membership and baptism figures are in large part a product of a declining birth rate among whites as well as the suburbanization of America?”
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