Fresh from a two-day meeting with 26 fellow state Baptist executives and North American Mission Board staff members, South Carolina Baptist Convention executive director-treasurer Jim Austin offered optimistic but tempered comments about two Southern Baptist initiatives.
Jim AustinAustin and other state executives met at NAMB’s Alpharetta, Ga., headquarters Sept. 17-18 to discuss strategy for NAMB’s “God’s Plan for Sharing” (GPS), a 10-year evangelistic initiative poised to launch next year.
NAMB’s acting interim president, Richard Harris, told state leaders at the meeting “our goal is to be a good partner” as he pledged cooperation with the states’ evangelistic efforts.
Austin said South Carolina is “strongly embracing” GPS, even “adding to” some GPS initiatives. Austin said directors of missions across the state are enthusiastic about the state convention’s plan to launch GPS by utilizing “intentional prayerwalking” in communities in order to lay the groundwork for building relationships with lost people and equipping Christians to share their faith. Austin said South Carolina’s GPS plan will include target dates such as Palm Sunday for emphasizing professions of faith and Easter for holding baptisms.
Harris told state executives that NAMB has “hit some bumps in the road,” an apparent reference to recent resignations by former NAMB president Geoff Hammond and top members of his management team. “But we are moving forward with the mission we’ve been given to help you and our churches reach North America for Christ,” Harris said.
Austin said the mission board staff, while “staying focused on doing the Lord’s work,” nevertheless has “a lot of ambiguity about what the future holds,” not only because of the recent resignations, but also because of uncertainty about the future of denominational structure and “recommendations that will emanate” from the SBC’s Great Commission Resurgence (GCR) task force.
Messengers at the annual meeting of the SBC last June in Louisville, Ky., approved the creation of the task force. SBC president Johnny Hunt appointed 23 members to the panel with a broad mandate to study how Southern Baptists can work “more faithfully and effectively together in serving Christ through the Great Commission.”
Austin told The Baptist Courier he is “a little concerned” about the overrepresentation of large churches on the task force. “Hopefully those that are in megachurches doing great work won’t be projecting that, just because they do ministry in a certain way, a church in Columbia or Santee or Florence can do church the same way. We just don’t have the same demographics or resources or cultural perspectives. It’s different.”
“There’s a lot of unknown,” Austin said. “A concern is that if the GCR task force comes up with a proposal where Cooperative Program contributions can bypass state conventions or national agencies or institutions, and you can steer [contributions] to a preferred ministry and it still be counted as CP dollars, that could have a devastating impact on everybody’s work, including ours.”
“I don’t think they’ll do that, but there is concern it may be a consideration of some [task force members],” he said. Austin said restructuring the Cooperative Program to accommodate designated giving could lead to competition for funding among SBC ministries, a “detrimental” scenario reflective of an era of competing appeals for special offerings that helped give birth to the Cooperative Program in 1925.
Austin called the Cooperative Program an “ingenious” method for funding ministry, but said it may need “tweaking.”
“For every generation you’ve got to make it relevant, but I don’t think we need to do a wholesale overhaul,” he said. “There’s a danger of us getting back into societal ministry, and everybody’s on their own as far as fundraising. I think that would be very counterproductive and very damaging to cooperative work.
“Everybody’s concerned about what the ultimate proposal [from the Great Commission Resurgence task force] is going to be. Sometimes you won’t know the result of what sounds good until a few years later, but then you get unintended consequences.”
Austin said he doesn’t “have a clue” what the GCR task force will recommend to Southern Baptist messengers next June in Orlando, but added that he is praying for the members.
Austin and other Baptist state executives will meet with the task force Oct. 27 in Dallas. “We want to emphasize the value of our state conventions and our ministry partners within the state convention,” he said. “I think there’s a lot of question about our relevance. I think we’re very relevant.”