Former BP editor undertakes special report on GCR
A six-member task force and a former seminary president are focal points of an evaluation of Southern Baptist missions in North America.
The Great Commission Resurgence Evaluation Task Force appointed by SBC President Bart Barber will relay its evaluation at the 2024 annual meeting in Indianapolis.
The seminary president, Chuck Kelley, who led New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary for 23 years, already has delivered his assessment in a 2023 book, The Best Intentions: How a Plan to Revitalize the SBC Accelerated Its Decline.
At issue is a 2010 revamping of the convention’s North American Mission Board set forth by a 23-member Great Commission Task Force (also called the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force) and adopted at that year’s annual meeting in Orlando, Fla.
A former editor of Baptist Press, Art Toalston, who served from 1992-2015, has undertaken a special report about the Great Commission Resurgence Evaluation Task Force and Kelley’s book, along with numerous other elements regarding the future of home missions, including the longstanding Cooperative Program channel by which Southern Baptist churches support missions and ministry internationally, nationally and in their states.
The GCR task force’s seven recommendations, or components, included a call for NAMB to be “unleashed” for church planting as its primary emphasis, with the mission board subsequently reallocating an estimated $50 million yearly to help fund the initiative. That shift meant the cessation of “Cooperative Agreements” between NAMB and state conventions that had linked their evangelism, church planting and other ministries for 50-plus years.
Especially for smaller state conventions with limited budgets in the Northeast, Midwest, Great Plains and the West, the Cooperative Agreements were the lifeblood of funding for their evangelism and church planting efforts, including various staff members and directors of missions for Baptist associations across their states.
Still, the North American Mission Board’s implementation of the Great Commission Task Force recommendations has yielded 10,000 church plants, 10 percent of all baptisms across the SBC, and 23 percent of baptisms in state conventions outside the South.
Toalston’s special report, spanning more than 9,000 words, includes comments, opinions and information from a broad range of SBC leaders, including Kelley, Kevin Ezell, Bart Barber, Danny Akin, R. Albert Mohler Jr., J.D. Greear, Ronnie Floyd, Scott McConnell, Morris Chapman, David Hankins, Johnny Hunt, Geoff Hammond, David Dockery, Amy Whitfield, Trevin Wax, Jeff Iorg, Jerry Rankin and Jim Elliff. τ
Editor’s Note: This article is a portion of an executive summary of the Special Report by Art Toalston (see condensed version of his report at BaptistCourier.com).