In 2000, an Empowering Kingdom Growth futuring group was appointed by Carlisle Driggers, executive director of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, to prepare the convention for the second chapter of the EKG emphasis. The group was composed of pastors, associational directors of missions and lay leaders. The group presented its report at the annual meeting of the convention in 2001.
Reggie McNeal, director of leadership development and special assistant to the executive director of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, served as facilitator of the futuring group of the South Carolina Baptist Convention for EKG 2002-2007. The following is an interview reflecting on the development of EKG.
Courier: What did the EKG futuring group accurately anticipate?
McNeal:
We correctly anticipated the single biggest realignment in Christianity since the Protestant Reformation-the rise of the missional church. This movement started overseas and is coming to America. Two major shifts characterize this movement: the church is becoming more externally focused rather than internally focused, and there is a shift from an emphasis on program-driven to people development.
The external focus is pushing worldwide the marriage of missions and evangelism (which we reflected immediately in our staffing structure after EKG was adopted). Christians are showing a new concern for community engagement, getting the gospel into the streets in ministry, which EKG anticipated with the call for more missions volunteers. In countries where the Christian movement is spreading exponentially there is a church multiplication factor that is astonishing (for instance, there will be 25,000 new house churches started in India in the next twelve months). So our EKG challenge to start churches in a way we’ve never done before hit the mark. We also affirmed that a spiritual awakening in South Carolina would result in a huge number of new converts. This awakening is a reality around the globe now. Most North American Christians are unaware that Christianity is now the number one growing religion in the world, with 175,000 new believers every single day.
EKG also called for every church to have an intentional process for spiritual growth, a phrase that meant we had to pay more attention to individual people’s growth. In our Hearthopes Sessions we conducted as part of our futuring group work we consistently ran into the cry among church members that they wanted to grow more spiritually. It was no surprise to us that Rick Warren’s Purpose-Driven Life took off. In our convention staff discussions we are increasingly aware that many people in our churches are involved in everything the church offers yet feel like they are not growing. The kind of growth they are hungry for is not going to be met with some new program, but with new attention to life-on-life application of people development.
Courier: How are we doing?
McNeal:
I wish we were as good at execution as we were in anticipating the new challenges. We are starting churches but not nearly fast enough. We are still baptizing people, but our numbers are actually down. Most congregations are still charting their scorecard through participation (how many show up, money collected, etc.) and are assuming that people are growing. Praying for spiritual awakening has been slow to catch on, perhaps because we are too absorbed with business as usual. The one real area of great growth has been the explosion of missions volunteers. This has even accelerated with tsunami relief and now hurricane relief efforts.
Courier: What are other hopeful signs?
McNeal:
In some cases the conversations are shifting. We are talking more about church planting. We weren’t talking much about this before. We aren’t historically a “new work” state. To change the culture we have to influence the conversation in the churches. EKG has helped to do that.
Another hopeful sign is the emergence of more variety in evangelism that has more relational components to it. While all methods are still being employed there is greater awareness that we are going to have to be much more culturally informed in order to connect with the unchurched and lost populations of our state. The development of new worship venues (some offsite from the church), as well as ministries specifically targeting NASCAR fans to senior adults to college students are all encouraging developments.
The single biggest encouragement is in the arena of the church’s involvement in the community, something that churches of all sizes are doing. Many of our small churches have decided to have a big impact in their town. We are seeing churches adopting public schools, reaching out to the hospitality industry, getting more involved in hunger relief locally, beginning small groups for healthcare people in hospitals, the list goes on and on. Small groups are springing up in restaurants and coffee shops. Church services are being held in public parks. House churches are emerging. The churches engaging in these efforts have figured out that being salt and light means actively getting “out there,” not just inviting people to “come and get it.”
What are the disappointments?
McNeal:
I’ve already mentioned we should be starting more congregations. We simply have to have more imagination and will in this area. We need congregations planted in apartment complexes, in trailer parks, in gated communities, in homes in the suburbs as well as in coffee shops uptown. We also should be seeing more baptisms. We should stop to ask ourselves why we are down in baptisms when we are in the largest English-speaking mission field in the world. What is it about what we are doing that blinds us to the harvest? My own opinion is that we are too busy doing church to “be” church. That would require that we release people from church obligations in order for them to have the time and energy to invest in relationships with people outside the church culture. Second, we are expecting people to become like us (dress like us, vote like us, have Sundays off, like our music) in order to them to get the gospel. We must no longer insist that people become church people to get Jesus. We must broaden the bandwidth of our engagement with the unchurched. More church activity obviously is not the answer.
The single biggest disappointment, though, is a focus on the numbers we published along with EKG 2002-2007 (600 new congregations, etc.). I certainly underestimated the goal-oriented culture of Southern Baptists. Those numbers were designed to be indicators of what would happen in a spiritual awakening. I was shocked at the people who thought the numbers were too ambitious. That was a goal-oriented reaction by Baptists conditioned to planning on doing what we’ve done before, only better. In parts of the world where Pentecost is happening, exponential growth is normal. We anticipated that people would focus more on the spiritual awakening need-prayer, helping people grow, for instance. The idea was that if we would recalibrate our efforts for spiritual awakening we would see actual kingdom growth (always explosive) in our communities. But that will come only with different behavior, not arguing about whether we got the numbers right. Let’s just say that we slipped up and planted only 400 congregations in the next few years. Would that be a failure? Hardly! The point is that the numbers were there to show the new experience we would all be having if we quit expecting only incremental growth.
Courier: What are the challenges, then, to move forward?
McNeal:
They are simple, but profound. We’ve got to make several critical shifts in how we think and act. The world is a whole lot closer to A.D. 30 than to 1980 in terms of the spiritual challenges and opportunities. We are going to have to get out of the church business and get in the people business. If we are honest, we have to admit these are not always or automatically the same. We are going to have to change the scorecard to begin acting like missionaries in our own home towns. We would never support a missionary who only wanted to reach people like us or who retreated behind church buildings and issued invitations to church services. We expect missionaries to start with community needs and build relationships with people who aren’t church people. A kingdom perspective looks to join God in his redemptive mission in the world. This was Israel’s commission in the Old Testament, passed along to the followers of Jesus in the New Testament. We’ve got to recover the dynamics of the early Christian movement, sharing the truth in love with people who need to experience the abundant life God has for them. The early Christians won a hearing for gospel by serving people with radical sacrifice (adopting babies who had been abandoned, taking in sick people, loving people who weren’t like them). We must do no less if we want to see Pentecost come to South Carolina.
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