In 2009, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary President Danny Akin worked with Johnny Hunt, the SBC president at the time, to flesh out the idea of a Great Commission Resurgence. Akin said he and Hunt had discussed the idea at the previous year’s annual meeting in 2008, and Akin contacted Hunt in March 2009 about a sermon idea to tackle “reversing the stagnation within the SBC,” said Akin.
From there the momentum gathered, and Hunt’s “Declaration of Great Commission Resurgence” was released online in late April 2009, dominating conversations the month leading up to that year’s annual meeting.
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Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler made the motion at the 2009 SBC Annual Meeting in Louisville, Kentucky, to create the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force, which messengers overwhelmingly approved. Hunt announced the 18-member GCR Task Force the following morning.
For the next year, the task force conducted its work and created a seven-recommendation report focused on “penetrating the lostness of the world.” Messengers to the 2010 annual meeting in Orlando approved the task force report by a majority — despite significant opposition by the Executive Committee’s then-president, Morris Chapman.
The audio files from the GCR Task Force’s 10 months of work in 2009 and 2010 were sealed for 15 years, the agreed-upon time by the group. The collection is housed in the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives and consists of 57 compact discs and very few paper documents.
Read The Baptist Paper’s reports on the GCR records, which were unsealed in 2025:
