SBC president calls for ‘return to first love,’ Great Commission and ethnic diversity

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Southern Baptist Convention President Bryant Wright
challenged “Southern Baptist Christians and churches to return to their first
love of Jesus” and to “become much more passionate about the Great Commission.”

He also called for a historic Lottie Moon Christmas
Offering, more ethnic diversity among SBC leadership and a “radical
reprioritization of our denominational mission funds beginning with the
Cooperative Program.”

Wright?pastor of Johnson Ferry Baptist Church in Marietta,
Ga.?delivered his remarks after a dinner hosted for pastors and laymen at the
SBTC’s offices in Grapevine on Nov. 2.

Such challenges are needed, Wright said, because “culture
has influenced the church more than we have been a transforming agent for
culture.”

One such influence is materialism, which “is the number one
idol in the church,” Wright said. “The majority of our church members rob God
every single week. It’s a testimony that we love money more than we love
Jesus.”

“Hedonism, workaholism, technology obsession?all these kinds
of things can take the place of that relationship with Jesus. So wherever I go,
I want to challenge Southern Baptist Christians to return to their first love
of Jesus. Nothing is more important than that,” he said, adding that love for
Jesus engenders “a greater love for the lost.”

Regarding non-believers, Wright said they’re created in
God’s image and “have gone astray just like all of us have gone astray. But we
want to be in the business of pointing them to Jesus. If we have that spirit of
Jesus, we’re going to have a passionate desire to see lost people reached.”

“I hope Southern Baptists become much more passionate about
the Great Commission than we have ever been in all of our history,” he added.
“We are at our best when the Great Commission is front and center of what God
wants us to do.”

Saying the SBC has “gotten sidetracked” regarding the Great
Commission, Wright believes that part of getting back on track includes “a
radical reprioritization of our denominational mission funds beginning with the
Cooperative Program.”

Wright lauded the SBTC for sending more CP funds out of
state than are kept. The current CP split for the SBTC is 55 percent for
national and international SBC ministries and 45 percent for in-state ministry.

“That’s an incredible model. I’d love to see it happening in
every state,” Wright said.

Members at Johnson Ferry changed their CP giving plan,
Wright said, when they discovered that only 16 cents of every dollar the church
gave through its state convention CP plan made it to the international mission
field.

Wright said church members “wanted the majority of our
Southern Baptist mission dollars winding up on the international mission field.
That’s just a passion we have.”

The church gives 5 percent directly through the
International Mission Board’s Lottie Moon Christmas Offering and 5 percent
through the CP “because we still want to support state missions and the
seminaries and home missions. But we wanted most of our funds to go to
international missions.”

“We’d much rather give the full 10 percent through CP?much
rather. But there needs to be a radical change in priorities in how we do our
missions giving,” Wright said. “And [the SBTC] is certainly a great model in
that regard.”

Asking pastors to challenge their churches “to have the
largest Lottie Moon offering in the history of the church,” Wright implored his
listeners to “do something that is God-sized.”

Noting that members of Johnson Ferry have completed numerous
mission trips, Wright said, “It’s really on my heart that every church go on at
least one mission trip each year…. There’s no way I could overestimate the
spiritual impact mission trips have had on the life of Johnson Ferry.”

During a question-and-answer session, Wright responded to a
question regarding how to reprioritize CP giving, saying that many state
leaders have asked, “‘What do you want us to cut?’ And the answer to that is
very simple: ‘That is n

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