SBC: The Year Ahead?

Many Southern Baptists are quite optimistic about the future of the denomination following this year’s annual meeting.  Messengers to the yearly convention overwhelmingly approved authorization for SBC president Johnny Hunt to appoint a Great Commission Resurgence Task Force to determine how “Southern Baptists can work more faithfully and effectively together in serving Christ through the Great Commission.”  The task force will present its findings and recommendation next year at the convention in Orlando.  The GCR approval has produced a great deal of optimism.

Alan Cross, who has been cynical towards and frustrated with the SBC in recent years, believes “something significant has happened.”  He believes the significance is that the future belongs to the Great Commission Resurgence camp, led by the likes of Al Mohler, Danny Akin, Ed Stetzer, and Johnny Hunt, and that the “days of culture war” and “days of denial over our current situation” are finished.

Michael Spencer (iMonk) is also percolating with optimism, stating, “The younger leaders of the SBC are taking on power in a denomination that has been, for the most part, attempting to lock the doors and hope they would go away. Well, they didn’t. They came to the convention and voted in a mechanism to take an urgent look at what we are doing for the one thing that holds us together: a commitment to carry out the Great Commission. What you saw today was a serious changing of the power grid in the SBC. The vast numbers of obedient old-guard messengers are never again going to show up and make the SBC into a wholly owned subsidiary of the culture war or the Jerry Vines version of the SBC. This is now a denomination that has given itself clear and simple instructions: Get to the task of world missions, not the task of building a denominational culture.”

Others aren’t looking at the approval to appoint the GCR task force in the same light.  For example, Peter Lumpkins, who voted for the committee formation, rebuked the iMonk’s assessment of the situation.  Lumpkins stated the SBC merely “voted to ‘study’ ourselves” and then took the opportunity in his post to provide another of his scathing assessments of the Calvinists associated with Founders Ministries (along with criticism of Ed Stetzer).

While I’m somewhat hopeful for the direction of the SBC at this point, I’m not overly optimistic.  Next year’s meeting will be, I believe, much more indicative of the state of the denomination than this year’s convention.  I expect executive directors from the majority of the state conventions to buck against the Great Commission Resurgence as an attempt by agency directors to gain direct CP gifts for their institutions (and thereby cutting funding to the states).  I also believe many within the Baptist Identity camp will speak glowingly of the Great Commission Resurgence, yet labor frenetically to ensure greater doctrinal conformity within the SBC.  This doctrinal conformity will include an assault against Calvinism and Calvinists.  Jerry Nash, a pastor from Florida, was a messenger to the convention this past week.  Speaking of the motion to appoint a GCR task force, Nash called it “a waste of time, funding and other resources.”  He argued Southern Baptists are no longer agreed on the “heart of the gospel,” pointing out that thirty percent of SBC seminary graduates are Calvinists and that “Calvinists and Calvinist sympathizers are in positions of leadership throughout our Convention.”  He argued that “Calvinist theology” is incompatible with “Traditional Baptist theology,” and that “Calvinists will kill or split the Southern Baptist Convention.”  He maintained “Traditional Baptists” are unable to cooperate with “Calvinists” because the two “cannot agree that God loves everyone and that Jesus died that everyone.”  He asked, “If we cannot agree on God’s plan of salvation how can we cooperate?”  I fully expect leaders such as Morris Chapman, Paige Patterson, Malcolm Yarnell, Steve Lemke, Jerry Vines, and others to become more vocal in their opposition to Calvinism within the convention in the upcoming months.  I believe this issue will dominate denominational discussion in the days ahead and there will be a drive to expel “Calvinists and Calvinist sympathizers” from the SBC.  I hope I’m wrong, and that all within the SBC who love the Lord Jesus will be able to go forward for the cause of Christ.  Whatever the future holds for the Southern Baptist Convention, boredom will not be part of the equation.