Jim Austin, executive director-treasurer of the South Carolina Baptist Convention, said it remains to be seen how Southern Baptists will embrace the recommendations outlined in the report of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force and adopted overwhelmingly June 15 by messengers at the SBC annual meeting in Orlando.
“It’s probably too early to tell how it’s all going to shake out,” Austin said. “We don’t know all the implications right now. It depends on how the churches themselves respond to it.
“Time will tell, from our perspective, how it’s embraced by Southern Baptists, how it’s embraced by each individual [state] convention, even association.
Jim Austin“Only time will tell if what occurred here was a pop gun or a cannon shot. It’s being celebrated as a cannon shot, but we won’t know that for some time.”
Austin said the SCBC will be “proactive as a board and a staff to try to get on the front end of all this in a fresh way and validate people’s perspective on the legitimacy of the convention and convention work, and the importance of it.
“And that’s okay,” he said. “It’s healthy to have to earn your right to be heard and show your relevance, and it’s healthy to ask hard questions. You shouldn’t be afraid to ask them, and that’s what we’re doing. It’s what this process is probably going to initiate.”
Among the seven recommendations approved by SBC messengers is one that calls for a phasing out of cooperative financial agreements between the North American Mission Board and state conventions. For South Carolina, that could mean the eventual loss of more than $800,000 annually in NAMB funds used primarily to employ church planters. The funding withdrawal, if adopted by NAMB trustees, would probably take effect beginning in 2012 and would be implemented over a seven-year period, Austin said.
Austin said he doesn’t expect much to change in the short term. “Over the next 18 months, we’ll probably have several meetings to prepare for the implications, and then we’ll have a better read on how each [SBC] entity’s board responds to actions taken [at the SBC annual meeting],” he said.
“We’re going to do our best to provide servant leadership to our churches and ministry partners,” he added. “That’s not going to change. We’ll make whatever adaptations we need to make to help us all, in a team effort, fulfill the Great Commission.”