This summer, I preached a session at Camp McCall. I was reminded how critical is the culture of ownership in Christian character and leadership that is facilitated and reproduced among generations of boys and men there, especially within our gender-confused cultural climate. The setting could not have been better. A congress of trees towered into the skies. Mountain stones walled the boundaries of gathering. Plush, emerald blades cushioned impromptu meetings. Birds woke the morning. Fish stirred the chilly waters. And the mosquitoes tried to kill us all.
About day three, I wondered why God allowed these diminutive, blood-sucking monsters into the otherwise perfect Blue Ridge ecosystem. The answer still escapes me, but in the moment, I was reminded of something much more significant: SCBaptists, and Southern Baptists at large, have inherited an entire ecosystem of Great Commission movement, and each organism is dependent upon the success of the others.
The Baptist ecosystem teems with life from many corners of our territory, materialized within a variety of interconnected autonomous entities. Healthy, missionally focused local churches constituted by healthy, missionally focused Baptists are the sine qua non of our biome.
For 400 years, local Baptist churches have voluntarily associated for relational encouragement, localized mission, and doctrinal accountability. For 200 years, they have convened regionally and nationally for increased denominational solidarity and for expansive missional opportunity. Each level of cooperation — church, association, convention — is vital to the overall success of our shared Great Commission objectives.
In the large and complex ecosystem of Southern Baptist life, state conventions play several critical roles. They provide space and opportunity for the convening of a state’s Baptist people for mutual encouragement and for doctrinal and missional solidarity. They manage the organizational administration of statewide ministry partnerships, including church representation in the governance of related organizations.n>
State conventions are the collection and dispersion agency of the churches’ financial resources given toward their shared mission. Elected leadership leverages influence on statewide and national scales to ensure the values and objectives of the state’s Baptist people are met with serious consideration. But perhaps above all else, state conventions effect an intergenerational statewide mission strategy on behalf of cooperating churches.
South Carolina is home to 5.4 million people — 80 percent of whom will not attend an evangelical church this Sunday — and our population grows by 90,000 each year. Our statewide strategy, put simply, is to reach them with the gospel, disciple them in the faith, mobilize them for the mission, and resource them to raise up another generation that will do the same.
Your state convention staff works tirelessly to facilitate cooperating congregations’ unified efforts to strengthen existing churches, share the hope of the gospel, send missionaries, serve communities, start new churches, and encourage and resource shepherds and church staff for effective ministry.
Often, cooperating local churches need help with revitalization, evangelism or discipleship strategies, leadership transition, etc. It is our joy to come alongside associations in assisting such churches — mission-critical as each church is — toward greater health and greater mission effectiveness. Other times, a healthy local church needs nothing directly from its state convention but continues to sacrificially cooperate through it so that the larger ecosystem of Baptist Great Commission impact might flourish and thrive in our generation and for generations to come.
I don’t know why God allows blood-sucking mini-monsters to bite at the heels of campers. But I do know that He has allowed a variety of symbiotic Baptist organizations to serve your church together in this season. Your state convention is essential in your church’s partnership with others to get the gospel to our neighbors and the nations.
The gravity of this responsibility is not lost on us. It is our honor and our joy to facilitate the Great Commission cooperation of Baptist churches like yours in the Palmetto State. And it will take the entirety of our diverse Baptist ecosystem working together to rise to the Great Commission opportunities before us.