Focus on sharing the gospel, not institutions, speakers urge pastors

Platt

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LOUISVILLE, Ky.—Southern Baptists need to focus less on themselves and their institutions if they hope to make an impact on a world “racing toward hell,” speakers said at the final session of the Southern Baptist Convention Pastors Conference June 22.

SBC President Johnny Hunt was joined by seminary professor Alvin Reid and Alabama pastor David Platt in appeals to redirect Southern Baptist energies and resources toward sharing the gospel around the world and less on their own building programs and institutions—a theme that echoes Hunt’s call this spring for a Great Commission Resurgence.

“The SBC is far too comfortable in a world that is racing toward hell,” said Reid, professor of evangelism at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C.

Reached a tipping point 

Platt

David Platt, pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Ala., speaks June 22 during the closing session of the two-day Southern Baptist Convention Pastors’ Conference at the Kentucky Exposition Center in Louisville, Ky.

Southern Baptists have reached a “tipping point” in their attitudes toward traditional ways of carrying out evangelism and missions, said Reid, and “whether we like it or not … we cannot go back, for the sake of the gospel.”

“We have tipped in our [funding] relationships,” said Reid, referring to recent calls to reassess the Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists’ 84-year-old centralized method of collecting and distributing mission funds.

Reid called himself a “debtor” who has benefited from the unified plan’s funding of his education at Baptist schools as well, as his teaching post at one of the SBC’s seminaries. But Southern Baptist leaders must present a more compelling reason to contribute to the CP, he argued. “There has to be more motivation for cooperation than ‘You’re supposed to.’ That’s great for a three-year-old.”

Reid warned, “We have become so institutionalized that we are more focused on maintaining our institutions than on a movement of God.” If financial appeals were more focused on the gospel, “people would give like never before.”


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Southern Baptists also have reached a tipping point in:

  • How they think about the gospel. “Today we want to do more than just talk about the gospel. We want to be about doing the gospel. … We’re better at making church attenders than Christ followers.”
  • How they see the future. There are more teenagers in the American population than at any time in the nation’s history, Reid maintained, and they are sometimes hungrier than their parents for a deeper understanding of the gospel. “People ask me if I have to dumb down the message when I speak to teens. No. I have to dumb it down when I speak (in churches) on Sunday morning.”
  •  How they relate to the rest of society. “We’ve got to engage the culture better than we do,” he said.
  •  How they define success. “A lot of our younger pastors could be preaching in big churches, but instead they’re raising money to live in (urban centers like) Manhattan and reaching a few people—but people who will make a difference.”

In an impassioned address frequently interrupted by applause, Platt said Hebrews 13 should remind Southern Baptists that they face a choice: “Are we going to die in our religion or are we going to die in our devotion?”

The writer of Hebrews addressed “Jewish Christians when it wasn’t easy to be a Jewish Christian,” said Platt, pastor of The Church at Brook Hills, a Baptist congregation in Birmingham, Ala. “Apparently, many in his audience were tempted to shrink back from their faith and to fall away from their mission. … Somehow along the way, how they worshipped had become more important than who they worshipped—style without substance,” he said.

Paralyzed by fear

They also were “paralyzed by fear.” “Many were trying to figure out how to stay in the camp of Judaism and still follow Christ, and the author of Hebrews said it can’t be done. … He said, you have two options: You can retreat from the mission you have been given or you can risk everything for the mission.”

The writer of Hebrews reminded his readers that after the Jews fled Egypt, they failed to trust God and Moses prayed that God would forgive them. “God said he had forgiven them,” said Platt. “But he also said, nevertheless … no one who treated me with contempt will see the land I promised to their forefathers. Your people will suffer in this desert for 40 years.”

Platt said Southern Baptists, in the face of massive physical and spiritual needs around the world, have “retreated into our nice buildings, sitting in our comfortable chairs insulated from the inner city and the spiritual lostness of the world, while we design programs for ourselves.”

“If we retreat from the mission, God will forgive us; our salvation is not at stake here,” Platt said. “But, brothers and sisters, he may just leave us to wander in the wilderness until we die. He has done it with thousands of churches in the United States, and we are fools to think he could not do it with any one of us.”

A tendency to craft Jesus in our own image

“The danger,” he said, “is that we have a tendency to craft Jesus in our own image—a nice middle-class American Jesus. And if we do this, then we need to realize that when we gather to worship, we are no longer worshipping Jesus—we are worshipping ourselves.”

Hunt said he is saddened by the decline in baptisms among Southern Baptists, but added: “If church members don’t have a passion for winning souls, it’s because their pastor doesn’t have a passion for it. And if our denomination doesn’t have a passion for it, it’s because our pastors don’t have a passion for it. Whatever is important to the leaders is important to the people. We (pastors) become a voice to the people.”

Hunt said Christians often say that tragic events—like the 9/11 terrorist attacks or the economic depression—are attempts by God to attract America’s attention. 

“But I’ve turned a little,” he said. “I realized God isn’t trying to get America’s attention. He’s trying to get our attention, the church’s attention. … When we begin to conduct ourselves in such a way that we do everything with tenderness and holiness and compassion and full of the love of God, then God will get the nation’s attention. But he’s going to get our attention first.”

“I’m not a prophet or a prophet’s son,” said Hunt. “But I may have to do until a prophet comes. And here what I want to say to the Southern Baptist Convention: There is a dire need for overwhelming repentance.”


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