Ron Lynch, pastor of Siloam Baptist Church in Powdersville, was elected president of the South Carolina Baptist Pastor’s Conference Nov. 10 at Trinity Baptist Church, Cayce. With the theme “Follow the Old Paths!” drawn from Jeremiah 6:16, this year’s conference featured messages by an Indiana seminary president, a North Carolina pastor, a Tennessee evangelist and an international prayer leader from Georgia.
2008 South Carolina Baptist Pastor’s Conference officers, from left: Brad Whitt, vice president; Bryant Sims, vice president; Mack Tester, treasurer; and Ron Lynch, president.Also elected were co-vice presidents Brad Whitt, pastor of Temple Baptist Church, Simpsonville, and Bryant Sims III, pastor of First Mt. Moriah Baptist Church in Greenwood. Mack Tester, pastor of Pope Drive Baptist Church in Anderson, was elected treasurer.
Proclaiming Jesus as “the door,” Harold Hunter, president of Trinity Theological Seminary in Indiana, observed, “No title in the entire Bible better describes Jesus.”
Hunter noted that a door is a movable structure that allows access into or keeps one from entering, underscoring that “Jesus is the structure by which you enter or which you do not enter heaven.
“If you want to get to heaven, we all must go through the same door,” Hunter said, correcting a popular notion in a pluralistic society. “Jesus didn’t say he was a way, or that he was the best way. He said, ‘I am the way.'”
“Evangelism is the first order of the church. But it doesn’t stop there. That’s only the beginning,” declared Mike Whitson, pastor of Indian Trail (N.C.) Baptist Church.
Whitson highlighted several non-negotiable principles based on the discipleship program of Jesus: self-denial, cross-bearing, willing submission, and unashamedness.
“In biblical days, when one took up the cross, they knew it was a one-way ticket. They knew they were going to die,” Whitson said. “You have to voluntarily decide, ‘Lord Jesus, I’m going to live my life for you.’?”
Reacting to the continuous stream of leadership seminars, Whitson quipped, “What ever happened to ‘followership’??”
“Follow me” was Jesus’ call, he reminded the pastors. “You have to decide at that moment, and every day after, you will follow Jesus.”
Harrogate, Tenn. evangelist Ronnie Owens highlighted Jesus’ self-description as the Bread of Life.
“Bread can only be offered for a limited time,” Owens explained. “Bread has to be taken while it’s fresh, hot, and coming through,” he said, emphasizing the urgency of accepting salvation offered by Jesus.
Pastors attending the South Carolina Baptist Pastor’s Conference collected a love offering for retired pastors and widows. Bryant Sims, right, outgoing Pastor’s Conference secretary-treasurer, presents a check for $2,100 to representatives from South Carolina Baptist Ministries for the Aging.“Bread is universally acclaimed. Every nation has bread,” Owens observed. “Bread is for everybody,” he added, explaining that the gospel is for “every person in the world.”
Bread not only sustains strength and health and promotes growth, it is “so good you just can’t get enough of it,” Owens noted. “How many of you go to a certain restaurant because they have good bread? You keep going back and going back.”
Proclaiming Jesus as the Bread of Heaven, Owens said, “When you get him, you will never be hungry again.”
Glenn Sheppard of the International Prayer Ministry in Conyers, Ga., reminded pastors, “When revival comes to the church, suddenly awakening comes to the land.”
Bemoaning churches that are “nothing more than religious country clubs” and huge sanctuaries that so often are “mortuaries full of dead religious bones,” Sheppard pointed to 2 Chronicles 7, urging the church to humble itself and return to God. “People will flood our churches not because we entertain them, but because we heal them,” he asserted.
“If we are to have revival, we must admit our failure (at humility),” Sheppard urged. “When you humble yourself, the Bible says you begin to be lifted up,” he noted, calling on Christians to “open our hearts for the glory of God to flow through us.”
“God’s up to something. But he’s going to get it on our knees,” Sheppard asserted.
Richard McLawhorn, former president of the South Carolina Baptist Ministries for the Aging, shared a burden that he has for elderly pastors and their widows who are in need of financial assistance to afford health care provided at Bethea and Martha Franks retirement centers.
“Our reputation comes from whether we love one another. Do you think we will be remembered by future generations as people who practiced what we preach?” he challenged the pastors.
Quoting from Galatians 6:10, McLawhorn urged them, “Let us do good to all people, and especially those who are of the household of faith.”
More than $2,100 was collected in a special offering and presented to SCBMA representatives.
Two other South Carolinians were among those to deliver addresses – Eddie Burris, pastor of Westside Baptist Church, Spartanburg, and Scott Eadie, an evangelist from Ridgeville.
“If you are discouraged, pastor, my God is able,” Burris declared. “My God has enabled me to make it, to stand when I didn’t feel like I could stand.
“I’m here to say my God is bigger than your problem,” Burris asserted. “My God will sustain you. He will enable you,” he encouraged the pastors. “Just remain under the Holy Spirit’s control and power.”
“God has a purpose for you. He didn’t make a mistake,” Burris said. “It’s not how big you are – but how faithful you were,” he added, reminding them that they had been “selected by God.”
While recent research by George Barna found that only 32 percent of adults view hell as an actual place of torment where people’s souls go after death, Eadie asserted, “The same Bible that tells us there is a heaven also tells us there is a hell.”
The scripture testifies that hell is a place of fiery torment, eternal thirst, no mercy, regret and no escape, Eadie emphasized. “My friends, we better stand up in our pulpits and we’d better tell people that there is not only a heaven to gain, but a hell to flee,” he urged.
Eadie asked the crowd, “If the rich man (in Luke 16) could come back and stand before the South Carolina 2008 Pastor’s Conference today and give a five-minute testimony today after being in hell for over 2,000 years, what would he say?”