EDITOR’S NOTE — The Baptist Paper staff members continue their review of the audio files from the 2009–2010 meetings of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force. (See the first four articles here.) Staff members are currently working through audio files from the remaining meetings and will release highlights from those meetings in the coming weeks.
The Great Commission Resurgence Task Force gathered Nov. 30–Dec. 1, 2009, in Atlanta for its fourth meeting, which began on a somber note as task force chair Ronnie Floyd asked the group to keep fellow task force member Frank Page, who did not attend the meeting, and his family in their prayers. Page’s 32-year-old oldest daughter, Melissa, had died tragically a few days before the meeting. Floyd noted Page had expressed his appreciation for task force members reaching out to him after the news broke. Current SBC president Johnny Hunt also was not at the meeting because of a prior commitment.
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As the business of the meeting got underway, Floyd noted the first order of business focused on the “status of the North American Mission Board.” Below are the highlights of the discussion:
• Ted Traylor, task force strategy team member and chair of the NAMB president search committee, shared how the search committee had “put the brakes on” its search until after the GCR Task Force finalized its work.
“Our search team is really backing up as I’ve led them to kind of put the brakes on and say ‘Let’s wait and see where GCR takes us, and then what the SBC assignment is to us,” Traylor said, noting the search team planned to talk again by phone the following week.
“I believe NAMB has one last chance — and if we don’t get this right, I don’t believe NAMB is going to survive.”
‘We need some help’
•On that note, Tim Patterson, chair of the NAMB trustee board who would eventually serve as executive director of the Baptist State Convention of Michigan before retiring in 2024, was a guest presenter for the task force at this meeting. He shared personal observations of serving NAMB. By his side were Tim Dowdy, vice chair of NAMB’s board, and NAMB’s interim president, Richard Harris, who had stepped in after former president Geoff Hammond’s departure.
Patterson, who noted his report was built on nearly a decade of serving on the trustee board, said the current spirit of the board was better “than it’s ever been.” He described trustees as “energized, excited and on task.”
He noted that while some may believe NAMB is ready for an “estate sale,” he contended it was time for a “good garage sale.”
“We just have too much junk in the garage,” Patterson said. “We need to clean it out. Not do away with it, not do away with the ministry of NAMB — but let’s bring it down to a size or a focus where we can truly, truly make a difference.”
At the time, NAMB had about nine ministry assignments. The entity could probably do about three or four of them “really well” so “we need some help,” he added.
Patterson listed evangelism, church planting and missions mobilization as some of the assignments he believed NAMB should keep.
Another area needing attention, he emphasized, was “cooperative agreements.”
“As you know, not every one of them are the same,” Patterson said. “They’re pretty much different. It’s whatever, whoever was the best negotiator, had the most leverage and could pull the most power on them. That’s what they got.”
He added, “I understand there is a basic structure … but I think you need to revisit those things.”
Overall, he noted a need for more accountability and a need for change in regard to NAMB funding “state programs,” where “95% of it comes from [NAMB].”
“There’s no growth, and the evangelism, church-planting, and the things that are really important … are not there.”
While there “are structures that worked very, very well in the past,” they’re now “stuck in our garage,” he said.
“I think we need to get rid of some of that and put in some new organization structure in how we do what we do out in the states. We need to refocus what we’re doing and go back to evangelism, church planting and missions.”
Focusing on ‘the main things’
•Harris described NAMB as a “coordinating, networking, facilitating and sending agency.” He shared a conversation he had with Bob Reccord, who left the president role under pressure in 2006 for his handling of the organization.
Harris said Reccord asked him what he could have done better. Harris said he responded, “Bob, you settled for doing a lot of good things to the neglect of doing a few great things.” Reccord agreed, according to Harris, stating, “I think you’re 110% right.”
Harris added, “I think that is the problem of the agency. It needs to focus on the main things.”
Among one of the highlights for Harris was one of NAMB’s current projects — an evangelism initiative called GPS (God’s Plan for Sharing).
“It’s probably one of the best evangelism initiatives I’ve seen come along in recent years, certainly the last 12 to 14 years,” Harris said. “It has unbelievable potential. It calls us back. Every person sharing. Every person hearing. It’s the heart of the Great Commission.”
The main problem with Southern Baptists, he noted, is a “spiritual problem,” and “aggressive leadership” was his suggestion to fix the issue.
“When you have churches not baptizing people — and that number just continues to go up — churches are forgetting why God put them in their location to fulfill the Great Commission.”
•Ed Stetzer, executive director of Lifeway Research at the time, also attended the meeting to present his “statistical analysis of church planting from a study of 11 different denominations that we did at the North American Mission Board” report.
Stetzer, who would be invited to sit in on the remainder of the meeting following his report, noted the study tracked the first three years of the 1980s. Southern Baptists, Nazarenes and Assemblies of God tracked similarly in number of church plants, he pointed out. “But … over the last 10 years, Southern Baptists have trended decidedly down, whereas other denominations have actually remained plateaued in the area of baptisms.”
He later added that Southern Baptist church planters need to be more realistic with their expectations. He said too many of them go to conferences where the speaker has planted a church that has grown to 4,000 in attendance, “and they think that’s normal.”
“That’s not normal,” Stetzer said.
Jumping through ‘hoops’
Stetzer contended that NAMB needs to become a more lean organization. “I’m not saying we need to lay off everybody, but I’m saying in my observation, that denominations that are doing it well have a lean church-planting structure.”
He added that part of the challenge with SBC church-planting efforts is the number of hoops and the amount of permission that is needed to plant a church.
“Even though we are not a hierarchical denomination, it feels like you have to get permission from typically five groups of people before you can actually plant a church,” he said. “You have to first get permission from a sponsoring church, secondarily an association — which in many states is much harder than any other of the hurdles — (and thirdly) you’ve got to get permission from the state convention. Fourthly, you’ve got to get permission from the North American Mission Board. Fifthly, you’ve got to get permission from your wife.” All of that, he said, is currently needed to plant a church.
Stetzer later noted, “When we get to a place when a system has existed for a long time, it gets rusty.” He agreed with the other NAMB leaders at the meeting — that the agency needed a narrow focus, and that they need to be experts on church planting.
NAMB is “remarkably complex,” he said.
When Floyd later asked the task force, “What do you want to do with NAMB?” the room fell silent.
After several moments of silence, Floyd said he had already met with the task force’s eight-member strategy team for “hours” on a conference call and communicated through emails to map out ideas. He noted he could go straight to that plan but wanted to give the group the opportunity to share ideas.
“I’ve got so much information that could flow out of me,” Floyd said. “I’m not trying to dominate. I’m not trying to direct you. I’m trying to facilitate you. … You want to talk about a global mission board? We can go down a lot of tracks.”
After more silence, Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (who served on the strategy team), chimed in, “I think the problem is … it’s like trying to grab a cumulus cloud. The three things that come to my mind: We definitely want a church-planting strategy. We want a people group strategy. And we want to break the pattern so that eventually money can flow to the less-reached regions of … North America, rather than the more highly-reached (areas).”
Regarding discussions of a global mission board, Floyd said the strategy team “walked away” from the idea because if the SBC went to one mammoth missions agency, it would put more than 70% of Cooperative Program dollars for SBC missions and ministry causes in the hands of one leader.
“That’s only as good as your leader,” Floyd said.
Avoiding ‘tripwires’
As discussion continued about next steps and possibly creating a new entity, Mohler added, “Ronnie, I think politically speaking, we want to thrill the SBC, we want to stretch the SBC, we want to surprise the SBC. But, we also want to get our report passed by the SBC. I think if we can avoid having anything that’s a tripwire to requiring two subsequent conventions that is to our advantage.”
During the meeting, the group seemed to settle on continuing with two missions boards but mentioned adjusting IMB’s ministry assignment to expand access to “unreached people groups” in the U.S., working in cooperation with NAMB, of course.
Mohler suggested leaving IMB’s ministry assignment the same but adding a line that frees them to go after “unreached people groups wherever they are found.”
Ken Whitten, then pastor of Tampa-area Idlewild Baptist Church in Lutz, Florida, (who also was a member of Floyd’s strategy team), suggested giving NAMB “the teeth” to say, “We’re going to strengthen churches. We’re going to train, we’re going to be the experts. We’re not going to let anybody go outside of us anymore and say we’re going to get our training somewhere else. We are going to be the best, and we’re gonna start planting churches. NAMB is going to be known as a church-planting center nationally.”
Taking on cooperative agreements
The conversation eventually shifts to “cooperative agreements.” Floyd noted the sensitivity of this particular topic.
“There is a lot of affection, a lot of emotion, and some money is tied up here in this. To the tune of $50.7 million dollars this year.”
He added, “Plus, an additional $10 million to pay the benefits of those personnel. Plus, an additional $5 million that somewhere along the line will be put back into those state conventions for various strategies.”
He proposed deciding a time when those types of agreements would be discontinued.
Jim Richards, task force member and then executive director of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, noted that discontinuing those agreements is “going to affect some of the old-line states a lot, in the sense of absorbing it in their budget. And then on the new-line states, the pioneer areas, they’re going to be impacted even more severely in the sense that many of their staff are NAMB employees. … Let’s take New Mexico for instance, I think everybody except the executive director gets their salary from the North American Mission Board or Lifeway.”
While Richards noted any change to cooperative agreements would “impact everybody,” he added, “I think it has to be done because I don’t think the system is working. We’re losing people. There are lost people going to hell because our system doesn’t work. We’re rewarding mediocrity at best and failure at worst by keeping the system we have. And that’s not to in any way denigrate fine, godly good people who give 100% effort in many of those states, but I just think that our system is wrong.”
Bob White, executive director of the Georgia Baptist Convention at the time, mentioned the fallout of “doing away with pioneer state conventions” would be “very bad.”
Floyd clarified, “I didn’t say do away with.”
Richards responded, “You don’t have to do away with. If you end the cooperative budgets with those states (the pioneer states), it will do away with those state organizations.”
Roger Spradlin, pastor at the time of Valley Baptist Church in Bakersfield, California, added, “If you do away with cooperative agreements … it collapses. Basically, everything but the mainline state conventions. The state that is the most affected is California because they get the most money. It would without a doubt collapse that convention. It would no longer exist.”
Floyd added, “You all know the train wrecks more than I know the train wrecks. All my thinking is if NAMB is going to be effective, it’s going to have to decentralize. They’re going to have to get closer to its field with leaders and strategists in those situations.”
He noted, “We certainly don’t need California to fold. … But some of the mentality in it is as long as we support it, it’s never going to be on its own.”
Floyd later asked, “Is our goal to build Baptist conventions or is it reach North America?”
Kathy Litton Ferguson, task force member, later added there is “no big emotional attachment (to the state convention structure) in most of those (pioneer) states. (A regional concept for NAMB) would be much more pragmatic … not the emotional connection to state conventions.”
‘They will vote for souls’
Richards said the key to “sell it” to SBC messengers is to focus on what it takes to reach North America. “That’s how we sell it. Messengers will vote for souls. I guarantee you they will vote for souls,” he noted.
Stetzer, who by invitation remained in the room after his report, added, “I think right now, you have a bully pulpit nationally, your task force and coming into the SBC. … I think part of your recommendation has to be an aggressive recommendation that states move to 50/50, and that cooperative agreements, if you’re going to do that, that those funds need to go into pioneer areas. And you’re just going to have to encourage them in that way … you can’t do it any other way.”
Who ‘holds the strings’?
The conversation then turned to how much authority NAMB has in negotiating the cooperative agreements. Floyd suggested NAMB go back to the states and “renegotiate” their cooperative agreements.
Danny Akin, task force member and president of Southeastern Seminary, asked, “What if NAMB said we’re cutting (the agreement) in half? What can they do?”
White responded, “Not much.”
Akin added, “NAMB holds the strings.”
Floyd said, “NAMB is the one who has to sign off and writes the check.”
Richards said, “You heard the two guys from NAMB today. Both of them were pleading with this group to help them. Because the trustee board, forgive me, Ted (Traylor), has lacked the courage to do what has to be done, and the leadership surely has. So that’s the reason why we’re in the mess we’re in. And nobody wants to take the heat, and they stood there, both of them, and begged us to help them do it because they won’t cover for it.”
‘Go for broke’
Akin then pulled out his phone and read to the group a text he received from “one of (the NAMB leaders) after they left (the meeting).” The message, according to Akin, said: “Whatever you heard us say, go further. Go for broke. Do it. Help us. If you think you’re going too far, go further than you think you’re going to go.”
Floyd then asks, “What if we made it really clear in our report. No longer do we want the North American Mission Board funding Baptist conventions. That is not our role. Our role is to accomplish the specific ministry assignments that we have now given them. Period. And those agreements are not to be agreed upon. The budgets are not to be funded unless they compliment the ministry assignments of the North American Mission Board. And that’s what it is.”
White quipped, “You’ll have a huge turnout in Orlando.”
The room responded with loud laughter.
J.D. Greear, task force member and lead pastor of The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina (and future SBC president), asks Akin what he thinks “go further” actually means.
Akin responded, “It means they believe that their entity is broken. It is dysfunctional. … Any of the good things they are doing are overshadowed dramatically by the failures. They are tired. They have been going through it now for three presidents, a decade in a half. They see this as a golden opportunity for us to come alongside of them and help them get out of this mess.”
Floyd noted, “Our mission is to present the gospel of Jesus Christ to every person in the world and to make disciples of all the nations. We can’t do that funding Baptist conventions and their ministries.
“We’ve got to fund church planting and evangelism and building leaders across America to make a difference.”
He later emphasized, “Do we really want to go down in trying to preserve future Baptist entities and the institutionalization of the SBC or do we want to go down … for the gospel?”
Discussion continued on how much time to give old-line states and pioneer states before discontinuing cooperative agreements.
All eyes on NAMB’s next leader
As that evening’s meeting began to wind down, the focus turned to leadership and the kind of leader NAMB would need.
Mohler said the task force is answering a question that has needed answering for a long time. “Is the NAMB problem a leadership issue or a structure issue. As much as I have waded neck deep in this stuff … I’m convinced it’s primarily a leadership issue. Because if we had a leader at NAMB who resonated with the very things we’re talking about — and had the leadership ability to pull it off — we would not be having this meeting.”
He cautioned, “The search process that is going on right now is far more important than anything we do. As we sit here, I’m thinking prayerfully we need to make it easy for the new president of NAMB to be a rip-roaring success in mobilizing Southern Baptists just to reach North America. We need to do nothing that’s going to make his life more difficult. And I do not mean to throw a wrench into this, but I’m listening to this thinking we could sink his ship before he even gets behind the wheel if we create animosity from the state conventions that is not tied to a direct benefit.”
Mohler later added, “At the end of the day, we’ve got to hand it over to whoever this new president is, and I just want to make sure we think through how we make his runway clear rather than putting obstacles in his way.”
EDITOR’S NOTE — This report was written and compiled by Shawn Hendricks, content editor for The Baptist Paper.
