The Courier’s recent piece on the graying of SBC leadership (April 30) articulates a question that has been simmering on the back burner of issues facing Southern Baptists. Thoughtful critics, however, have been discussing it for quite a while. It is the issue of developing churchmanship: growing disciples who are committed to their church’s mission. For Southern Baptists, that mission comprises the efforts of the local church in all its programs, the association in its regional efforts, and the state and Southern Baptist conventions in their various thrusts.
Robert SimmsIn the 20th century, we believed in this goal of growing churchmen so much, we dedicated an entire program to implementing it. When the repeatedly recast program was dying, it was not replaced with any sufficient substitute. Now we wonder why we aren’t seeing the rise of a generation of churchmen to lead us through this next century.
I have been having this conversation with whomever was willing since I first began preaching in 1971. At every church I served, I have pled with internal leaders not to scrap or emasculate church training programs, and not to adopt third-party materials that de-emphasize or ignore missions. Unfortunately, however, the training programs and events that increasingly made generations of Southern Baptists aware of, and committed to, their convention’s missions strategies were well on their way to being abandoned by the time I became a pastor.
I have watched the concept of church training, by whatever names its implementations were called, dwindle to a barely detectable presence across the SBC as a whole. Practically the only substitute in many churches for what Southern Baptists used to accomplish in “Training Union” or “Church Training” is a stack of tracts or bulletin inserts and the occasional mention of missions in a sermon.
To be blunt, Southern Baptists have neglected to train new generations in how we conceived, built, grew and maintained our unsurpassed mission strategies. We even abandoned direct training in the foundations and fundamentals of the local church. Bored by Sunday night training hours, we dropped them or substituted group gatherings with little to no missiological or ecclesiological content. Missions organizations became more generic and popular in nature.
To be even more blunt, envying the superficial success of independent churches, both Baptist and non-denominational, we imitated their approach to attracting masses, and we have gotten what they have: masses. Those masses, however, are woefully uneducated in the things that enabled Southern Baptists to have the significant impact we have had on evangelism and missions around the world. We have cut our own throats.
I was solidly a part of the conservative resurgence. But along with a return to the inspiration and integrity of the Bible, we church leaders as a whole packaged that resurgence with too much entertainment, which attracts casual followers, and too little training, which develops committed disciples. If church training needed a new injection of creativity, youthful interest, or revolutionary approaches, then we should have invested in those fixes. Instead, by and large, Southern Baptists seem to have assumed that knowledge of, and commitment to, Southern Baptist missions, and the associations and conventions that support them, would be transmitted by osmosis to a new generation. We are beginning to pay the price in spades for that shortsightedness.
Nor can we blame the Cooperative Program itself for being too large, too cumbersome, or too impersonal. Small, loose networks of missions work, characteristic of independent Baptists, are what kept them from building the kind of missions forces that Southern Baptists did, the kind that have had unparalleled effectiveness. The home-brew, one-church, one-missionary strategies of other churches that maximized the personal touch have minimized efficiency and put a lid on impact.
All during my pastoral career, I heard people announcing the death of the institutional church. However, people do still support institutions, when they believe in them. Herein lies our denominational failing. By moving away from educating and training our members in our denominational work, we have stopped perpetuating our belief in it. If our members give to outside causes instead, it is because we have not continued to make them aware of the urgent cause that drives the leaders, staff and missionaries involved in our great mission boards. We have stopped magnifying the grace of God that inspired the vision of the Cooperative Program, and that led us through generations of the implementation of that vision, which has involved the inter-working of churches, associations and conventions.
Perhaps my own generation, the generation of the resurgence, unconsciously blamed our leftward institutional drift on the institutions themselves instead of the left-leaning people who took them there. Interest in our convention may have declined for many contributing reasons, but I believe the greatest of them is that our churches have largely stopped training boys and girls, teens, and men and women, in churchmanship. Any new direction we take with the hope that we will recover loyalty and support of our denomination will have to reinstate such training in a substantial way. What incarnation that training takes is wide open, and our best minds need to be focused on it, right now.
Simms is an ordained Southern Baptist minister and former pastor who preaches and serves interims when the opportunity arises. He also is a Greenville County magistrate.