Month: April 2010

View church ministry through ‘family lens,’ conference speakers urge

Drawing on an agricultural picture from his West Texas background, Richard Ross described the landscape of church life as a cluster of silos?one for preschoolers, one for school-age children, one for students, one for adult ministries, and so on.

“What we don’t need is one more silo that is the “family-ministry silo,” he said in sharing his vision for family-focused church ministry.

Speaking to hundreds of ministers and future church leaders at a conference co-hosted by the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Ross emphasized that ministry to families is not another program or age-group “silo” to manage. Rather, it is a way to view existing ministries while always keeping in mind the Deuteronomy 6:4-9 mandate for parents to be the primary spiritual instructors of their children.

“Figure out laterally how to put a family focus on it. Use a ‘home lens’ for everything versus creating a new silo,” he said.

Further explaining the problem, Ross said, “Our primary model has been ‘church-centered and family-supported.’ We have created programs at church and we have tried to motivate families to support those programs.” Ross contends that for the last 50 years churches have inadvertently taught parents their whole duty in training their children spiritually is to drop them off at church for the professionals to instruct them.

The biblical model is very different: “And you tell in the hearing of your son and your son’s son, the mighty things I have done ? that you may know that I Am the Lord,” Ross said, quoting Exodus 10:2. “That’s how this thing was supposed to work.”

Off track and under attack

Southwestern Seminary President Paige Patterson delivered the opening address in the two-day gathering called “Connected: Families and Churches, Partners in Ministry,” reminding participants how far from a biblical foundation the family and church have strayed.

“What is the hallowed position that is under attack? God in his infinite wisdom and benevolence has prescribed the family as the basic unit of social order providing a rather specific and functional and relational model which, if embraced, pays significant dividends not only for the individual and the family, but also for all other aspects of the social order,” he asserted.

Other key directives of Scripture for family that Patterson believes are devalued or omitted because they are not popular include the mandates that a husband and wife be devoted to each other for life, that children honor and obey their parents, that the man is the head of the wife as Christ is head of the church, and that God’s created order is perfect and absolute.

Patterson’s solution is to return to our commitment to the whole counsel of God from our pulpits. “‘The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul’?turning the soul back to God,” he said referencing Psalm 19:7. “If this is the Word of God, you have to do it his way. That is where we find happiness, fulfillment, joy and meaningfulness for life.”

Ross noted another ministry dynamic that he believes has served to remove the primary role of spiritual instruction from parents. To better serve congregations, churches have, over recent decades, hired more and more specialized age-group ministers.

“In a sincere desire to earn their keep, many [age-group ministers] have created new programs designed to spiritually transform children and youth. And in a sincere desire to see those programs prosper, they have intentionally or unintentionally communicated to parents that those programs offer the best hope for spiritually strong children.”

Ross does not advocate eliminating staff positions as a solution. Instead, he believes a change in their roles is warranted. “An age-group minister who sets himself or herself up as an alternative to the parents, or implies consciously or unconsciously, ‘I’m doing most of this, and parents, you help me out’?that person needs a change of heart.”

“But I do think those who are ready to come alongside parents and champion families have a valuable place in the church to come,” Ross added.

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GCR Task Force: Move CP promotion from Nashville to the state conventions

NASHVILLE?There’s no denying that Southern Baptists individually, corporately and as a denomination are lagging in their stewardship of God’s resources. While the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force recommends shifting primary responsibility for Cooperative Program and stewardship promotion to state conventions, task force chairman Ronnie Floyd is counting on local pastors to teach their members to honor God through tithing.

“Remember, the only people who ever get offended with the declaration of biblical stewardship are the ones who give little to nothing at all to your church,” Floyd said in the news conference that followed the release of the task force interim report.

“Christians need to repent of the sin of not honoring God with at least the first-tenth of their income,” Floyd reminded. “Can you imagine the spiritual revival that would consume our churches if God’s people would obey God in giving? Can you imagine the opportunities of advancing the gospel regionally, nationally, and globally if God’s people would obey God in giving?”

Seeking to discover “how Southern Baptists can work more faithfully and effectively together in serving Christ through the Great Commission,” the task force analyzed the means of funding that effort and reaffirmed the Cooperative Program as the preferred means of giving.

Early proponents of a Great Commission Resurgence called on Southern Baptists to cut a larger piece of the Cooperative Program pie for the International Mission Board in order to see more dollars sent overseas and appealed to state conventions to keep fewer dollars for in-state use. While recommending the IMB’s share increase by 1 percent, a move Floyd called “symbolic,” the task force chose to trust state conventions with more responsibility for stewardship and CP promotion.

Component 4 of the task force progress report states:

“We believe in order for us to work together more faithfully and effectively towards the fulfillment of the Great Commission, we will ask Southern Baptists to move the ministry assignments of Cooperative Program promotion and stewardship education from the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention and return them to being the work of each state convention since they are located closer to our churches. Our call is for the state conventions to reassume their primary role in the promotion of the Cooperative Program and stewardship education, while asking the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to support these efforts with enthusiasm and a convention-wide perspective.”

The SBC’s Executive Committee did not welcome the recommendation. In a March 11 historical review of CP promotion, stewardship education and the SBC, EC Convention Relations Vice President Roger S. Oldham offered a 10-page rebuttal of verbiage he called “potentially misleading.” (Visit baptist2baptist.net/issues/gcr/rso-03-19-10.asp for the complete text of the white paper.)

Concerned that Southern Baptists could infer from the words “return” and “reassume” that CP promotion and stewardship education “were once ministry assignments entrusted to the states,” Oldham said CP promotion has been a joint venture of the SBC and state conventions since its inception in 1925 “with the responsibility for strategy development uniformly assigned to the SBC, and the ‘field’ responsibilities consistently shared with our state convention ministry partners.”

Based on his defense of the SBC’s “right and responsibility” to promote CP and engage in stewardship education (including the decade when LifeWay Christian Resources had the stewardship assignment), Oldham argued the adoption of Component 4 would be the first time in SBC history “that the Convention will have assigned away its rights, role, and responsibility to promote funding and support for its ministries of international missions, North American missions, theological education, and moral advocacy, each of which is rightly under its purview.”

In making the case for giving state conventions primary responsibility for both assignments, Floyd said in his Feb. 22 presentation, “History shows that we have struggled with where to place both of these assignments in order to serve our churches more effectively.” He expressed appreciation for the work of the Executive Committee, calling state conventions “Great Commission partners” of the SBC that could participate in a consortium involving the EC president.

“Together they can plan and execute an annual strategy that will promote the Cooperative Program to our churches as well as challenge our churches in biblical stewardship,” Floyd said. Calling it a return to the strategy offered in 1929 that gave state conventions responsibility for promoting CP “in the field and gathering funds from the churches,” Floyd said historic precedence permits such a move.

The EC’s Old

IMB unlikely to appoint missionaries in North America, Rankin says

NASHVILLE ? The proposal of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force to remove geographical barriers preventing the International Mission Board from working with unreached people groups “on American soil” will not likely result in missionaries being assigned stateside, nor will it result in churches planted by IMB personnel, said IMB President Jerry Rankin.

For the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, the proposal is nothing new. The Texas Missions Initiative (TxMI) launched by the SBTC last year includes the priority of reaching the rising number of unreached people groups (UPGs) and immigrant groups to the state by assigning people group missionaries to work with specific ethno-linguistic people groups.

In an interview with the Florida Baptist Witness, Rankin said he supports Component 3 of the GCRTF progress report made to the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee, Feb. 22, which asks “Southern Baptists to entrust to the International Mission Board the ministry to reach the unreached and under-served people groups without regard to any geographic limitations.”

Rankin said, however, there should not be an expectation that the IMB will place missionaries throughout the United States because “it’s a matter of proportion” and indigenous strategies. Instead, the soon-to-be-retiring president said he envisions the IMB’s primary role will be to mobilize, train, equip and mentor local churches, associations, state conventions and the North American Mission Board.

“It will be a partnership,” Rankin said. “It’s not an exclusive role that the IMB is going to do for Southern Baptists in this assignment. Our role is to facilitate, enable all Southern Baptists to fulfill the Great Commission, and so that’s how I would anticipate our approaching this aspect of the Great Commission task in America.”

Although the progress report indicates the GCRTF is “unleashing the International Mission Board upon American soil,” Rankin said NAMB and others have already encouraged IMB to help them reach ethnic and other peoples in the states.

“I don’t see this really as very radical. I don’t see it as conflicting and overlapping of turf with North American Mission Board, a potential conflict as some had conjectured,” Rankin said. He noted IMB and NAMB administrators and boards already meet twice a year to collaborate on some efforts.

UNENGAGED AND UNREACHED PEOPLE GROUPS

Rankin said the top priority for the IMB is the Unengaged Unreached People Groups (UUPG), of which there are 41 with a population of more than a million and 469 with a population of more than 100,000. These groups have no access to churches, other Christians, Scripture or Christian resources in their heart language ? and no mission agency.

The GCRTF believes a new synergy can be created in international missions as the SBC makes use of IMB expertise. “Most of the 586 people groups that do not speak English in the United States have strategy coordinators working overseas with the same groups,” stated GCRTF chairman Ronnie Floyd in making his report.

Among UPGs, Rankin said, less than 2 percent of the population is born again, and there is no active church planting movement or gospel witness for the remaining 98 percent. Of 11,000 people groups throughout the world, over 4,000 are considered unreached.

Considering the hundreds of UUPGs around the world who have no access to the gospel, and over 4,000 UPGs who have limited exposure to the gospel, Rankin said he is positive about the proposed new strategy.

Citing prolific work among immigrant groups in the U.S., such as Vietnamese, Hispanics, Slavs and Haitians, Rankin said the state conventions “don’t have the capacity, the focus” to reach other people groups that are less populous. “They really don’t have the training or the expertise in those cultural worldviews that we would have,” he said.

As an example of the type of training the IMB could provide for North American missions, Rankin noted the “Great Commission