This is us T

he 2023 Southern Baptist Convention was a feast for the senses. Just peruse the Facebook photos of messengers and you’ll understand.

Beignets for days. Etouffee. I overheard someone say that the Wednesday night reception at New Orleans Seminary (NOBTS) served 1,250 dozen chargrilled oysters. That’s 15,000 for the math-challenged. I ate my dozen.

And that was just the food. Streetcars rolled up and down Canal and St. Charles. Palm trees and live oaks draped in Spanish moss lined boulevards with their unique Creole architecture.

One of the beautiful things about the annual summer gathering of Southern Baptists is that it travels. Every year, we get to walk in someone else’s church context. It’s an annual reminder that the brothers and sisters in my family, my tribe, all labor in these unique places that are different than my daily experience.

Hitting the streets of the host city and talking to messengers from around the country leaves no doubt that my personal perspective is not the epicenter of what it means to be a Southern Baptist. This applies to you, too.

This was my first time in New Orleans, and some formerly local friends gave me a whirlwind tour of the city beyond my Magazine Street hotel.

They were at NOBTS through Hurricane Katrina and came back to help rebuild their adopted city. We worshiped at First Baptist New Orleans together, drove through City Park, stopped in to talk with people serving at Global Maritime Ministries, and decided the line was too long to wait for a sno-ball at Hansen’s Sno-Bliz.

Our wanderings took us through the still recovering Lower Ninth Ward. We talked about how high the water rose, the devastation suffered, and saw numerous blocks of houses that Southern Baptists helped clean up or build.

Like all cities, New Orleans is many things at the same time. Both beautiful and gritty, it’s a mix of cultures and ideas and fallen natures and redemption. Lots of Baptists call it home. And for a few days I got to see their city through their eyes. As I stood in conversations with passionate and resilient locals, their love for their city and their churches and the hope of the gospel was evident.

These same loves represented by the 47,000 or so SBC churches are what bring all of us together. We love the places where we live, serve, and gather in community and worship. We see those same places through our experiences and the lens of the gospel. We want to see the love of Jesus flourish in the places we call home and spread to every tribe, nation, and tongue around the country and the world.

In our beautiful complexity, we sometimes frustrate one another, but for the vast majority of us, our core identity is the same. It’s Christ in us, the hope of glory. It’s the bride of Christ, the local church. This makes us a bit complicated. We’re many things at the same time, on display at the annual June meeting: part celebration, part business meeting, all reunion, because, despite our diversities, we are family.

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