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Table of Contents

901 Commerce Street Nashville, Tennessee 37203 615-244-2355 E-mail: sbclife@SBC.net

7 A Letter from Ronnie W. Floyd

Ronnie W. Floyd President & CEO

F E AT U R E D A R T I C L E S

10 The Shuttered Church

34 The Winds of Providence

How the 1918 Spanish Flu tested Southern Baptist Churches and left pastors and government officials with an impossible choice

How Southern Baptist Churches witnessed—and took part in—the grace of God in one of the worst natural disasters in recent history

22 The Weight of War

46 The Next Normal

Even as World War II soldiers struggled to process their experience, churches saw unprecedented opportunity.

How COVID-19 has Southern Baptist Churches rethinking their methodology, embracing new mission opportunities, and even innovating future ministry

58 Townes Announces Retirement from SBC Executive Committee

74 The Charge Every Senior Pastor and Student Pastor Needs to Hear

61 Charles Grant Named Executive Director of African American Relations and Mobilization

80 In Historic Election, SBC Executive Committee Elects First African American Chair

67 SBC Executive Committee Launches New Branding, Websites 70 Racial Reconciliation Not a ‘Finished Project’ 25 years After Historic Resolution

Jonathan Howe and Amy Whitfield Executive Editors Andy Beachum Creative Director Rebecca Manry Communications Specialist SBC Life is published three times per year: Fall, Spring, and Summer. It is distributed to pastors, ministers of education, ministers of music, full-time denominational workers, chaplains, missionaries, and vocational evangelists. Workers retiring from any of these groups may continue to receive the magazine upon request. Subscriptions are free of charge. Bulk subscriptions are available at reduced prices. For SBC Life subscriptions, call 866-722-5433 (toll-free).

S B C U P D AT E S

64 We Must Not Be Silent on Racism

SBC Life is published by the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee.

Any article without attribution is by SBC Life staff. Cover and Featured Articles Intro Image Courtesy of Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine SBC Life (ISSN 1081-8189) Volume 29, Number 1

83 Early Adopters Pave the Way for GO2 Initiative 86 Addison Named SBC Executive Committee Executive Vice President 88 Cooperative Program Giving Tops $16 Million for Two Consecutive Months Amid Pandemic

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Advancing the V I S I O N A Letter from Ronnie W. Floyd

hen COVID-19 began to spread across the globe, just as in challenging times before, our work did not stop. Missionaries are still on the field, both overseas and in North America. Seminary students are still being trained for ministry and missions. Our work together in each of our respective regions, states, nation, and world is still alive and active. Disaster Relief ministry is still operating through state conventions, along with our Send Relief ministry. Our chaplains are still ministering. In unprecedented times, all of these ministries are present and making a difference for Jesus Christ. Things have changed around the world. Amid uncertainty, our churches, associations, state conventions, and national entities evaluate everything and adjust. But it is imperative to be clear: We will not retreat in this hour of uncertainty. We will not throw in the towel or raise the white flag of surrender because of this looming threat. We have been through past crises including economic recessions and depressions, wars, natural disasters, and even another pandemic. None of these have destroyed our work together. We have an overseas mission force that is growing. The Lord has blessed us with 3,700 fulltime, fully-funded missionaries and their 2,880 children who are focused on their work around the world. The International Mission Board has 1,001 candidates in the pipeline, nearly half of whom are preparing for long-term, career service. This represents more than 400 percent growth in the number of candidates in the past two years.

We have more than 47,500 local churches that are points of light across the United States. We have 1,100 associations of churches, 41 state conventions, and 12 national entities. Each is a point of light across the nation and the entire world. Additionally, we are blessed with 5,017 missionaries in North America as well as 3,500 fully endorsed chaplains. All of them are bright, shining lights. And all of this is possible because of continuing support from the people in the pewsâ€”many of whom are the brightest lights in their arenas of influence, from business to entertainment to law to education to politics to medicine to our homes and beyond. This is who we are. This is what we do together. I understand that our churches face uncertain times. For the sake of keeping these Gospel lights shining brightly across our entire nation and world, thank you for providing generous financial support through the Cooperative Program. This support places your church on the front lines of reaching the world for Christ. Your continued support makes a difference. As the people of God, we are under a divine call and mandate: Reaching every person for Jesus Christ in every town, every city, every state, and every nation. We have Good News for the whole world. Until this is accomplished or Jesus returns, we go forward together for the Great Commission.

RONNIE W. FLOYD is president and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee.

F E AT U R E D A R T I C L E S

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10 The Shuttered Church 22 The Weight of War 34 The Winds of Providence 46 The Next Normal

F E AT U R E D A R T I C L E

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The Shuttered Church HOW THE 1918 SPANISH FLU TESTED SOUTHERN BAPTIST CHURCHES AND LEFT PASTORS AND GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS WITH AN IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE

Image Courtesy of Otis Historical Archives, National Museum of Health and Medicine

ven as World War I raged on, Southern Baptist churches were focused on spreading the Gospel. The SBC was in the early stages of preparing for the 75 Million Campaign, a pledge campaign that would coincide with the Conventionâ€™s seventy-fifth anniversary in 1920. The goal was for the churches to collectively raise $75 million for the missions and ministries of the SBC. However, those plans would soon be interrupted. An unseen enemy lurked amidst the ranks of the military that would spread its tentacles across the earth, eventually infecting a third of the worldâ€™s population and killing approximately 675,000 people in the United States alone. First identified in the United States in the spring of 1918, the Spanish Influenza spread unevenly across America and Europe over the next six months. However, a second and deadlier wave of the virus hit the country hard in the fall as American soldiers began to return to the United States toward the end of the war.

“It was never the main story . . .” We asked several theologians and historians to weigh in on what it would have been like living during a particularly tumultuous moment of Southern Baptist life. GREGORY A. WILLS, PhD, is research professor of church history and Baptist heritage, as well as director of the B. H. Carroll for Baptist Heritage and Mission, at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. CALEB MORELL is a pastoral assistant at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, and a recent Master of Divinity graduate from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. LLOYD HARSCH, PhD, is professor of church history and Baptist studies at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. He is chair of the Division of Theological and Historical Studies and is occupying the Cooperative Program Chair of SBC Studies. KEITH HARPER, PhD, is senior professor of Baptist studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. ADAM G. WINTERS, PhD, is the archivist at the James P. Boyce Centennial Library of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

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Greg Wills: In all the newspapers, they just did not talk much about the flu, with a couple of small exceptions like Chattanooga, Tennessee. I happened across a paper from 1918 while the epidemic was there, and I was surprised just how much coverage there was and you could feel a little bit of the local sense of panic. One of the headlines was “Shortage of medical masks. Two thousand masks needed immediately for the nurses and doctors.” Caleb Morell: Most of the time you’d have to go back to page two, page six, page seven, to find even a reference to the flu. Even if it made front page news, it was never the main story because at this point in 1918, the end of World War I was always the cover story. Lloyd Harsch: Mobility wasn’t as widespread back then as it is today. It was because of the soldiers coming back to so many different places that it spread so quickly; it wasn’t just a regional thing that expanded out. It hit everybody kind of at the same time. It was short. It was devastating, but shortlived. People would be sick for three days and they’d recover [or they would die]. Keith Harper: Apart from the newspaper or radio, I don’t know that there was a great awareness of exactly how bad influenza could be, how contagious it was, or how easily it spread. People saw that just by being exposed to it. But to link your story with somebody else’s in the adjoining county or state—I don’t think that they had access to communication, and that shaped the way that they looked at it.

Image by Edward A. “Doc” Rogers, 1873-1960

Greg Wills: It’s surprising to me how little of the story made it into the official [SBC] publications. You can look at the 1918/1919 minutes of the Southern Baptist Convention, and you won’t see much there referring to it. Similarly, with the [Texas] state convention annuals that I’ve looked at, there’s very little mention of it. Lloyd Harsch: Here in New Orleans, the association met in the beginning of September [1918]. There is not one mention of the flu then or when they met a year later. By then, the flu was old news as they were pushing forward towards the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention.

“The Christian church is not a luxury . . .” Despite not being the biggest news of the day, many Southern Baptist churches were hit hard, not only by illness and death, but by closures ordered by government health officials. Caleb Morell: [Washington] DC didn’t see its first cases until [the latter half] of 1918, so it was relatively late. And they didn’t begin tracking cases actively until October 1, I believe. Adam Winters: The month of October 1918 is when it hit hard in Kentucky. The order was put out by the Kentucky State Board of Health prohibiting large gatherings across the state, which obviously included most churches. Keith Harper: Some churches were closed for a couple of weeks, others for a couple of months. And in their report to the Convention, various entities handled it differently. There wasn’t a unified approach to it, and that’s why some closed down and some didn’t.

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Caleb Morell: The headline of the DC-based The Evening Star read, “Churches Closed While Influenza Threatens in DC.” DC churches responded by calling an emergency meeting of the Protestant ministers and voted unanimously to accede to the request that churches be closed in the city. Although responses to this order were mixed, churches demonstrated a unified response by complying with the directives of the DC government. Greg Wills: In Texas, many churches did not meet for somewhere between four and eight weeks because the epidemic was raging. You don’t need a prohibition on meeting and traveling in an economy if there’s an epidemic raging in the population. People stay home anyway. Lloyd Harsch: One of the accounts out of South Carolina says that they were asked not to meet for the next two Sundays. And they didn’t. But there was a report that W. W. Hamilton was doing a revival at a church in South Carolina in October. After one week, they closed down the services due to the Spanish Flu. Caleb Morell: [The Baptist churches in DC] were all affected by it. Every church lost members, some fifteen and some twenty members. Our church, Capitol Hill Baptist Church, lost a handful of members, including two sisters who were members of the choir. Calvary Baptist Church lost one of their members, Mary Winifred Glasscock, who was the superintendent of the George Washington University hospital. She was serving at the hospital and died from influenza. Caleb Morell: Initially, when the order came out forbidding churches to gather for worship services, a number of churches announced they would be hosting outdoor services. The first Sunday, many gathered just outside the front door of their church and just kind of stood there and prayed. Others obtained licenses to gather in blocks and other outdoor spaces. But then the

DC Health Commission banned outdoor services as well. Lloyd Harsch: My suspicion is that while churches closed, pastors didn’t stop meeting, going to individual homes, or meeting with people on a one-to-one basis. At New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, the faculty immediately converted classes into individual meetings and correspondence courses and found a way to continue to meet. Caleb Morell: Many in the churches were really concerned about the seeming godlessness of the city officials, at least in Washington, DC. They were really concerned about the rise of materialism and atheism and distrust in the supernatural and the fact that the government was treating churches as if spiritual things didn’t matter, as if prayer didn’t matter. The conditions that they were in, both with the flu and the war, raised more spiritual questions. I think that’s where churches were concerned that out of all places, the church should be open. I think it’s significant that at least two times when the [Washington, DC] city officials were considering closing churches, they met with representatives of the churches to talk with them about it. That shows an openness and a recognition of religion and of churches; that the city health officials would not just gather with the business community, but would gather with the church leaders, to deliberate with them, to talk with them, to share their plans and to hear their concerns. Adam Winters: One of the criticisms was that while the churches were being told to close, you had public transportation systems still operating. You had some saloons that were still operating. There were a number of Baptists who took offense at that. Caleb Morell: One Baptist minister, J. Milton Waldron, published an editorial on October 29,

writing on behalf of “the eleven hundred members of Shiloh Baptist Church.” In the article, Pastor Waldron expressed concern that the city officials were carelessly “interfering with the freedom of religious worship.” In particular, his people felt that “the authorities are woefully lacking in reverence to God and wanting in a correct knowledge of the character and mission of the church when they place it in the same class with pool-rooms, dance halls, moving picture places, and theaters.” As Waldron put it, “The Christian church is not a luxury, but a necessity to the life and perpetuity of any nation.” Adam Winters: H. Boyce Taylor, longtime pastor of First Baptist Church in Murray, Kentucky, was very critical of the state health board telling the churches to shut down even though other things were operational, especially on Sundays. He was very upset when he would see advertisements for double pay for Sunday work. He thought there was some hypocriticalness to it. He also thought, as a lot of other Baptists believed, the state government didn’t have the prerogative to do that. Taylor viewed the Spanish Flu as God’s way of humbling people and also, he would often quote 2 Chronicles 7:14: if my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land (NIV). Taylor wasn’t importing a specific sin that he thought God was judging the people for, but he did think that it was an opportunity for people to pray, to fast, to repent, and to gather together in the churches. He thought it was the only means of ending the plague: people turning to God in large numbers. Taylor decided to hold a service on January 26. Even though the state ban on large gatherings had been lifted, there was still a local order in effect. The police chief showed up and read the ordinance against the assemblies, but Taylor continued the service. He preached about scenes of persecution or endurance, things like that, and by

the time the Sunday night service came around, the sheriff—who may have been a member of his church—came and arrested Taylor. In the days that followed, he was given a $100 fine. The church had their prayer meeting [the next week] and of course, Taylor wanted to go ahead with it and he was given another fine. I think everyone knew it would be something of a test against the elective officials. Taylor was given initially ten days to pay his fines, so by this point he had accumulated $200 [in fines]. On February 1, the ban was lifted for Murray, Kentucky, but that had no effect on the situation with Taylor or some of his other church members who had broken the law willingly. The deadline was extended to April the 10th. When he hadn’t paid the fine by then, he took himself to the jail and turned himself in and he was placed in a cell. I think the Murray Police Department recognized they had a real public spectacle potentially on their hands. So, reports are they treated Taylor very well; they gave him the most prominent cell. They even let him bring some of his furniture from home. He pretty much just spent his time there reading and writing and after two weeks, he was set free.

“There’s a cascading effect.” It wasn’t just churches who felt the impact of the Spanish Flu. Baptist seminaries, schools, and missionaries were impacted as well. Keith Harper: The influenza impact hit churches abroad as well because of the American money that missionaries invested into the places where they were. So in Mexico, China, South America; places like that, you might have to close your school because all of a sudden, your support is affected by the flu. If the influenza effects come Image by Harris & Ewing photographers

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in the form of a disease, you might lose half or all of your students. So there’s a cascading effect. It’s not just what it does at home, it’s what it does as a global pandemic. It’s not just a matter of one aspect of your work: everything the Southern Baptists did was affected by the influenza.

Greg Wills: It appears that Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary continued classes, but two of our students did die of influenza in 1918. Mary Hardin, or Baylor as it’s now called, appears to only have canceled classes while the epidemic was raging through its student body, and that lasted two or three weeks.

Lloyd Harsch: In the May 1919 annual reports from the foreign mission board, the different missions in Argentina and China and Nigeria all mentioned the flu going through their areas and they were shut down from two to four weeks, depending on their location. And sometimes they talked about deaths within congregations.

“They pressed forward.”

Adam Winters: The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary opened its annual session on Wednesday, October 2 with chapel services, meals, and the like. They were going to have an eight-month term at that point, but they had to close the next week when the ban came down. They remained closed for about five weeks, finally restoring classes on November 11. A big inconvenience for the students was that they weren’t able to go into their churches, or supply churches on Sundays, because most of the churches around the area were shut down. Near the end of October, they started doing a Sunday service on campus for the students. As far as infections among the students, most people weren’t sick or had pretty light cases. A couple of the heaviest incidences required hospitalization. A number of students had sick family members in other states and people lost family members to the flu. One student named Bay, who was hospitalized with the flu, lost his wife as well. Lloyd Harsch: The New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary was created in May of 1917, and it took a year to get a place to meet and a faculty and a president. We launched classes in the fall of 1918 and the very first classes began October 1. But on October 9, the city closed schools, businesses, and all those things due to the Spanish Flu. We were open for eight days [before we shut down].

Despite the obstacles that members of the SBC faced with the Spanish Flu, there was a deep determination to continue pushing forward with missions and discipleship efforts. Keith Harper: During that time, there was a push to build schools up in the mountains of Appalachia and the Ozarks. E. E. Brown, the man who was [responsible for] mountain education, told the Convention that some of these schools were just thrown together because they couldn’t get adequate workmen when they were built. Now they had a real problem because on top of those buildings being dilapidated and falling down, the schools were being impacted by the influenza. He was determined not to let these schools die because of the flu outbreak. Adam Winters: Classes didn’t meet at [the Southern Baptist Theological] seminary, but the students were still doing their work. They continued to study; they actually continued to live in the dormitories. They would have the dining; they would even entertain guests who would come in and dine with them; speak to them. Greg Wills: Most churches had members who got the flu, and probably most churches had members or family members of church members who passed away of the flu. A number of prominent pastors in Texas died of the flu. [If they lost their pastor,] they couldn’t do

And so, in the midst of their grief, they did the things that churches always do.

anything immediately because they couldn’t meet as a church. There were probably some private meetings of whoever the spiritual leaders were in the church. I’m sure they talked among themselves because there was business the church still had to attend to. They had to manage trying to keep the church open with no offerings coming in because the church wasn’t meeting and they still had bills to pay. There were things that had to be done. But of course, when you lose your pastor, you’ve got to start making plans for securing preaching and securing a new pastor. And so, in the midst of their grief, they did the things that churches always do. They began the process of searching for a new pastor and let the leaders of the denomination in that part of the state know what was going on. Other pastors, associational missionaries, associational leaders, and state convention leaders provided help. Lloyd Harsch: The Woman’s Missionary Union had their annual conferences. A number of state conventions were postponed or canceled, but others went forward depending on the severity of the outbreaks in the various areas. [At New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary,] the war department came in and they said

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they wanted to have a place for convalescing sailors and soldiers. So we were going to end up having to meet someplace else. They were to start taking possession November 10, but they didn’t because on November 11, the Armistice came through. Then on November 19, the quarantine was lifted in the city and we resumed classes back as we normally would have. So that’s the beginning of the seminary. It was having to adapt to unexpected challenges and doing so creatively and effectively. Adam Winters: In Louisville, Kentucky, you have Camp Zachary Taylor. There was a very serious outbreak of the flu among the soldiers at Camp Taylor, up to eleven thousand soldiers suffering at some point. So at the seminary, even as they were shut down for classes, students were recruited to go down to Camp Taylor and minister to the soldiers there—physical, spiritual needs, things like that. You also had the Woman’s Missionary Union Training School, which was using the seminary campus even though those ladies’ students would have been in different dorms. They continued to do very similar things, trying to minister to people when they had opportunities. Keith Harper: Depending on where you were at that time, you might have a recurrence of the flu just because of population density and human dynamics. But if you zoom out to the thirty-thousand-foot view, you’re going to get the sense of “well, the worst of this is behind us, and we have money to raise and churches to plant, people to educate and mission work to be done,” and they pressed forward. So does it go away? No, not totally. But with a broader perspective, it’s like, “okay, that’s over, let’s move forward.” Lloyd Harsch: By that point [September 1919], it was old news as they were pushing forward towards the 75 Million Campaign. You know, the attitude was, “The war has been won. The flu is gone. Let’s win the world for Jesus.”

“This is the reminder that we need . . .” Rather than being defeated financially by the Spanish Flu, the determination of Southern Baptists to push forward with even greater evangelical goals was reflected in church giving, both individually and collectively. Greg Wills: Most churches undoubtedly saw a decline in revenues when they were not meeting. However, the churches and the denominational organizations all knew that there was a great danger that their offerings would decline in that year because of the epidemic. And so they all urged Baptists to be mindful of this and to give at least as much as they would have given without the epidemic. As a result, when the revenues for the year were completed, there was no decline in revenues. In fact, there is an impressive increase in giving in 1918 and in 1919 at the local level. In terms of gifts given to churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, there is somewhere between a five- and ten-percent increase in giving to local churches in both 1918 and 1919. As far as denominational giving, giving to missions and education increased at an extraordinary rate. There was a 38 percent increase in giving to all Baptist mission causes in 1919. Caleb Morell: At the DC convention, a number of the churches reported both gains in membership and gains in their budget despite the war, the Spanish Flu, and other challenges that year. Far from churches reporting that their budgets had suffered, they actually reported with thanksgiving that their budgets were doing quite well. Fifth Baptist Church reported that 1918 was “one of the best we have ever had, both from a spiritual and financial standpoint.” And this is not withstanding the fact that the church was necessarily closed for many weeks due to food shortages and

the epidemic. Same thing for Hyattsville Baptist Church—they reported their financial situation as the “best in the history of the church.” Greg Wills: I think there were a number of factors that certainly contributed to this and the sense of the awareness that God’s judgment was upon the earth in the sword and pestilence. I think it did bring significant humility, a sense of dependence upon God’s mercy because we are sinners. One of the results of that is the recognition that this world is not our home; that we look forward to the new creation when all things are made new and we are sojourners, pilgrims here. So it helped to bring home the truth that our treasure is in heaven, where Christ is, and so let us live now in a way that’s consistent with that. Holding on to our material hope and security in this world with open hands and increased giving to the kingdom causes us to sustain evangelization, church planting, and the discipleship of Christians. Lloyd Harsch: The focus of the churches was that this is the reminder that we need to be ready for Eternity. And so let’s get this message out to as many people as possible, as fast as possible. They used the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Southern Baptist Convention as [a focal point] around which they were going to build the fundraising effort so they could achieve that goal. And they weren’t interested in trying to lay a good groundwork. They just wanted to get in the trenches and get it done. The flu was just another reminder of the brevity of life and why we needed to be about the Great Commission as the primary focus of what we were doing.

LINDA PERKINS is a freelance writer and journalist striving to live out Jesus’s commandment to love God and love people. She is also an aspiring artist and outdoor enthusiast. She lives in Houston with her husband and daughter, and is an active volunteer with several non-profits.

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The Weight of War EVEN AS WORLD WAR II SOLDIERS STRUGGLED TO PROCESS THEIR EXPERIENCE, CHURCHES SAW UNPREC EDENTED OPPORTUNITY.

Image by iStock.com/davelogan

fter World War I, the Great Depression ravaged the entire US, but especially the South, where the vast majority of Southern Baptist churches were located at the time. Agrarian communities were devastated by economic collapse, and the SBC was struggling financially in the years leading up to World War II. But signs of growth and potential lay just behind the scenes as the SBC prepared to step into one of the most propulsive seasons of growth in its history.

We asked several theologians and historians to weigh in on what it would have been like living during a particularly tumultuous moment of Southern Baptist life, and what the ramifications are for SBC life today. GREGORY A. WILLS, PhD, is research professor of church history and Baptist heritage, as well as director of the B. H. Carroll for Baptist Heritage and Mission, at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. ROBERT NAYLOR, who as president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1958–78 turned it into one of the largest seminaries in the world, passed away in 1999, leaving behind a journal of every SBC national convention he attended, starting in 1933. NATHAN A. FINN, PhD, serves as provost and dean of the university faculty at North Greenville University. He served previously as dean of the School of Theology and Missions at Union University and associate professor of historical theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. KEITH HARPER, PhD, is senior professor of Baptist studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

All of Robert Naylor’s quotes are from his book: Naylor, Robert. A Messenger’s Memoirs: 61 Southern Baptist Convention Meetings. Providence House Publishers, 1995.

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“The cloud of debt was simply paralyzing.” Nathan Finn: It was a transformational time for Southern Baptists. We were going through the Great Depression . . . which actually began in the South several years before the stock market crash because farm prices dropped. Greg Wills: A lot of small churches struggled [pre-WWII]. A lot of them must have folded, because the total number of churches in the Southern Baptist Convention basically didn’t move from about 1914 till about 1940. RN Robert Naylor (1933): The country was in a ter-

rible financial depression. Every bank in the country had been closed in March. As the pastor of the First Baptist Church in a county seat town, Nashville, Arkansas, there was not really much salary. Greg Wills: You’ve got twenty-four to twenty-five thousand churches throughout that entire period . . . but church membership doubled in that time. And that reflects what’s going on in the country as more and more Americans are moving into cities. That accelerated because of the great challenges of farming during the Great Depression, and farming becomes a losing enterprise for so many Americans who have borrowed money to buy equipment or to buy the land. And the money they borrowed becomes more valuable than the money that they have. Nathan Finn: Cotton got up to twenty to twenty-four cents a pound [during WWI] which was really something. But it dropped back down to twelve to fourteen cents a pound after the war was over, and so the South, come 1920, 1921, heads into a deep economic recession. Southern Baptists were negatively impacted because we had had this massive fundraising campaign called the 75 Million Campaign.

From 1919 to 1924, Southern Baptists participated in an unprecedented giving campaign that became the foundation for today’s ongoing Cooperative Program. SBC President J. B. Gambrell challenged Southern Baptists at the 1919 Convention “to adopt a program of work commensurate with reasonable demands upon us” (SBC Annual, 1919). The 4,200 messengers voted, without dissent, for the undertaking of the Baptist 75 Million Campaign, where members in every church were asked to sign pledge cards and give over a five-year period. Keith Harper: They pledged all $75 million, but the receipts only came in at $58 million and change, and [the Southern Baptist Convention] had already spent all $75 million. Greg Wills: In my view, the 75 Million Campaign was an amazing success. Not a failure. Some interpreters or historians called it a failure because it didn’t raise the $92 million that was pledged. Keith Harper: It’s like, oops. Yeah. Mistakes were made and lessons were learned. Greg Wills: When the Depression hit in 1929, there was an inability to pay back all the loans that the entities engaged in to expand and maintain their programs. So our entities, most of them stayed in debt until the early 1940s. That’s one of the reasons the SBC is very conservative in its budgeting for its entities, basing next year’s budgets on returns from two years ago. You’ve got the very conservative budgeting and a great reluctance to carry debt. So if you’re an entity, you’ve got to get approval from the executive committee to go into any significant debt. RN Robert Naylor (1933): [1933] was to be the

Debt Convention. The cloud of debt was simply paralyzing. Even in that first year of [my] ministry, there had been three debt-raising special offerings to which our church had responded. Nathan Finn: So Southern Baptists enter that

period very much in a bad shape financially. But if we’re talking about expansion, it is kind of the heyday. Greg Wills: Southern Baptists, by the time we get to the early 1940s, are in most of the states. They’re well into the forties in terms of the number of states where there are Southern Baptist churches. [State conventions] are forming outside of the traditional South and Southwest homeland, Southern Baptists are becoming what we are now, a national denomination with a regional identity. So Southern Baptists would have been a regional denomination with a regional identity for the first couple of generations of its existence, up until about the 1920s. And by the 1920s we were kind of off to the races in terms of expansion.

“We needed no convincing as a nation.” On December 7, 1941, a nation still recovering from the Great Depression was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor. America went to war, and much of the SBC’s activity slowed on a national level. RN Robert Naylor (1942): The place of the war

had to be primary in all of the [1942 Convention] sessions. There was a recognition in which forty chaplains marched into the auditorium and onto the platform. You can imagine the emotional response that was ours. There was a report from a special committee called “Call to Prayer for Just and Righteous Peace.” There was a listing of conscientious objectors by number; in fact, there were 147. I think it is to our credit that when the report of the Social Service Commission was given, there was a sentence removed from the report that read, “All our religious, educational,

commercial, and political gatherings should have now but one program and that program should be, ‘Win the War and establish peace.’”

In 1943, for the first time since the Civil War, the Southern Baptist Convention was canceled. RN Robert Naylor (1944): [The national Conven-

tion] was to have met in Memphis. Months before, the city had determined that it could not entertain the Convention or make good on its commitment. In addition, there had come a request from our government, not a command, that all meetings of Conventions be postponed and that the whole focus of our country be upon our war effort. Certainly we needed no convincing as a nation.

“It’s not something you talk about. It’s not something you dwell on.” Greg Wills: So all of these experiences, they gather together all the severe suffering of the Depression and then the war. It seems to me, it creates a seriousness among many Southern Baptists. I’m sure there were casualties on the other side. I’m sure there were some who renounced their faith; some who stopped going to church and who found more satisfaction and consolation going to the bar than reading the Bible and going to church. I’m sure there were those. But certainly in terms of those who were in the church, there seems to be a widespread seriousness.

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Greg Wills: When the war hits, most churches have either members or children of members who are in the armed forces. Certainly most churches of any size have members who lose family members. Wives, husbands, parents of the children.

RN Robert Naylor: The tide had begun to turn in

the long, bloody, costly way back from Pearl Harbor. Never had a nation seen such a mighty industrial effort, such total commitment of national personnel that now possessed us. Even now, the shadows of the war in that year linger. The death messages were multiplying. Our national transportation system was bogged down with the moving of military men and supplies. Greg Wills: Virtually every church had a placard up in the sanctuary somewhere with the silver stars of all the members or family members who were in the services. And then, of course, those who die in service are gold stars. This is where the gold star family language came from, from those service rosters. It doesn’t take much awareness, much reading, or much imagination or much sympathy to recognize that there is tremendous pain for what every gold star represents. But it’s not something you write about. It’s not something you talk about. It’s not something you dwell on. But everybody in that congregation, most people in the congregation, experience that and their sympathy for those who have lost family members. They’re aware of it. Keith Harper: You know, I wish that we had, as a denomination, the foresight to go back and talk to what Tom Brokaw calls our greatest generation. I wish somebody had talked to them about what that was like [returning from the war]. Greg Wills: Many service members are coming home with a huge set of griefs and sorrows and experiences. And they’re very difficult to process, of course. This has been studied and talked about a fair bit. But even if they don’t cause psychological trauma of one sort or another, it’s still an experience that can only be shared with those who were in your unit. It’s an experience that you can’t really share and you can’t really talk about it. And so it feels like kind of a cliché, the men who served in WWII don’t talk about it until

they’re in their seventies or eighties and then they don’t tell you everything. But I just think it’s true far more often than not. How can you even talk about it in a way that’s meaningful? So you got all of these men coming back.

“When this is over, I’m going to go back.” Baptist missionaries in war-torn areas faced increased danger as the war stretched on. Many were sent home to wait out the fighting. But there was also a surge of new missionaries being appointed. As the US became a global superpower and the atheistic Soviet Union became a rising threat, Southern Baptist churches felt an increased burden of responsibility to save the world, even if their Gospel efforts were indistinguishable to some due to American expansion. Domestically, the SBC was entering an era of unprecedented ambition. Keith Harper: All of a sudden after World War II, [Southern Baptists] are asking, what does that mean about the work we are doing at home? What does that mean about work abroad? And those are very big issues because the Soviet Union is atheistic. By their own admission, they’d go, “We don’t believe in God, and we believe your God is bogus.” Well, number one, that’s not going to sit very well with Southern Baptist, Christian veterans, and so politics, religion, economics, and international foreign policy welded together. That is an amazingly powerful force abroad. Greg Wills: There’s this seriousness of purpose [in the returning soldiers], of “Let’s go about our God given duties.” There’s a greater awareness of the fact that this world is not our home and we’re to be about the business of the Redeemer, to seek

and to save the lost and to build up His church, holding forth until He returns. And so there is this gravity, this seriousness, this soberness with which a generation of young pastors go about their work. Nathan Finn: There’s an American exceptionalism at work here. There’s a whole generation of missions built on the back of American lowercase “c” colonialism. I mean, we didn’t have capital “C” colonies . . . but American Southern Baptists were asking: Where does America have economic influence? Where do we have cultural influence? Where are we establishing military bases? Where are we establishing foreign business interests? Keith Harper: A number of men who went to the mission field after World War II had really felt burdened for the people they went to minister to because they had fought there in the war. Same was true in Korea. Same was true in Vietnam as well. It’s like, “when this is over, I’m going to go back.” I’m going to plant churches in Vietnam, Korea, Laos, Cambodia. Anywhere else I can go. So there’s something about the military and the missionary aspect that go together. Nathan Finn: By and large, the places where it was easiest to get, we were going. And it’s not until the emphasis is on people groups that you realize it’s not about reaching Indonesia. It’s about all the different groups of people that have to be reached in Indonesia. So if we’re serious about the Great Commission, then we’re going to have to go there even though it’s a closed country so that we can reach all those different groups. Keith Harper: And so [returning Baptist soldiers] think, okay, why did we fight? Well, we fought for a lot of reasons. But if we didn’t fight for at least the opportunity to tell people about Christ, then we shouldn’t even have gone to the field. And I think there’s a sentiment within a number of our veterans from World War II who felt

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exactly that way. We’re not going to let communists tell people who’ve never heard about Christ that Jesus is bogus before we’ve even had the opportunity to get our foot in the door. Nathan Finn: In Africa and Asia, there was a perception that these guys are bringing American culture as much as they’re bringing the Gospel. And Southern Baptists would have been offended by that, but it doesn’t change the fact that that’s what people on the ground thought. They begin to say things like, “We’re so glad you want to reach us. And we thank you for that, but you don’t let people who look like us worship in your churches [in America]. You refuse to denounce Jim Crow as a denomination, or you refuse to support the civil rights movement as a denomination. We’re going to make all of you leave.” Or, “We’re going to stop working with you as partners until you address this back home. And if you don’t address this, then you are at least as American and even Southern as you are Baptist.”

“A Million More in ‘54” For the SBC, an unprecedented time of growth and expansion mirrored the country’s economic opportunities. While those who left the South chasing better work opportunities started their own Baptist churches, business principles became integrated with church leadership. Nathan Finn: Because we’re a tradition that values local church, autonomous churches have always been able to do whatever they want to do for the most part without significant repercussions. But for a tradition that values local church autonomy, it is breathtaking how much uniformity there was from the 1930s through the 1970s. You could have gone on consecutive Sundays to a Southern Baptist church in Florida and then South Carolina, and then Tennessee, and then

Texas, and then Arizona and California. And you would have felt at home. Wherever they would have been, they would have been wearing Sunday best, whatever that meant in their context. You would have heard a textual evangelistic sermon. Greg Wills: One of the things that became popular for a while was to do a simultaneous revival where all the churches [in a community] planned together . . . to hold revivals . . . The pastor might be sharing the pulpit with several others or you may be able to get someone in who is a more effective evangelist to preach in your church. But all the churches are doing this at the same time. Keith Harper: There was a slogan for Southern Baptists because they wanted to increase the denomination size by a million in 1954. A million more in ‘54, that was their goal. RN

Robert Naylor [1954]: [Sunday School Board President] Dr. James L. Sullivan concluded his session [at the Convention] with an address on the subject, “A Million More in ‘54.” In the years since, I have heard people make snide remarks about Southern Baptist slogans. They particularly love to cast some kind of aspersion on “A Million More in ‘54.” I took it seriously, and so did a multitude of other Southern Baptists. It was one of the greatest years in winning people to Christ in the history of the Convention.

But if we didn’t fight for at least the opportunity to tell people about Christ, then we shouldn’t even have gone to the field.

Greg Wills: And God bless them, of course, because there was a revival. It’s not on a First or Second Great Awakening level, and it doesn’t appear to be ‘58 Awakening level. But there is an awakening that occurs in this land in the 1940s, maybe even into the early 1950s. Keith Harper: [The campaign] went fairly well, but there’s a famous evangelist out of North Carolina named Vance Havner who said, “If we get a million more like we did in ‘54, we’re sunk.” He was talking about easy membership in churches and things like that.

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Greg Wills: There is a growing emphasis upon a utilitarian or pragmatic means of evaluating what we do and how we do it. The SBC is facing all kinds of questions. What’s a proper basis for baptizing a candidate? How do we evaluate whether we should baptize someone? What does it mean to practice Christianity in our churches?

World War II who wanted to go into vocational ministry, either as pastors or missionaries, and the Southern Baptists after World War II created not one, not two, but three brand new seminaries. Three. And to this day, I don’t think anybody educates as many people for vocational ministry as Southern Baptists do. We have six seminaries.

Keith Harper: In 1948 just after the war, [a pastor during the national Convention] declared Baptists were God’s last and only hope in this world. And that’s pretty presumptuous. It’s arrogance, you know, the idea that God needs us. God’s got all kinds of ways to get His job done. It’s a privilege, you know, to have what we have in this nation. And I’m so thankful for it. But yeah, to stand up and say that we’re the last hope of the world. That almost sounds like you’re daring God to show you that you’re not. I don’t want to be in that place.

Keith Harper: Your rural churches are becoming smaller and many of them are closing down. Ministering in larger and larger churches, of course, becomes more and more difficult. A church of four hundred members is more challenging than a church of eighty-five members, right? And you need help. And one of the things that begins to occur at the time of WWII and accelerates after that is the addition of staff members. Pastoral staff members, an associate pastor. An education minister, a music minister.

Greg Wills: God raises up Billy Graham and a host of fellow evangelists. Billy Graham’s first Youth for Christ meeting was in 1944 in Soldier Field in Chicago. And God blesses that. And a large number of young people become converted and out of those converted God calls a large number into the ministry.

Nathan Finn: It’s really around World War II that all of the Southern Baptist entities are becoming more sophisticated. They’re being driven more by business growth principles than they were earlier. That’s going to go into the 1950s. We’re starting to add new commissions, some of which aren’t around anymore, but we’re adding new denominational agencies. We’re expanding the six seminaries. Because of the GI Bill, you have a generation of pastors and other church leaders who might not have ever gone to college, let alone seminary a generation earlier, but now Uncle Sam is paying for that. And so all of a sudden Baptist colleges and Baptist seminaries are booming and that’s a part of a wider trend that’s happening at state universities as well. And now you’ve got temporary housing going up, and you’ve got folks who are older than traditional students would have been. They’re racing to get faculties to be able to teach all the students who are there, and they’re building new buildings. In some ways, it’s the beginning of modern theological education, or even Christian liberal arts education.

“All of a sudden, Baptist colleges and Baptist seminaries are booming.” Keith Harper: Going into World War II, there were two Southern Baptist seminaries, Southern and Southwestern. And you have the Bible Baptist Institute in New Orleans. Well, when the war was over the Baptist Bible Institute was turned into New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. There were so many people who came home from

Well, God has blessed you, but do you think that’s all it’s about? To whom much is given, much is required.

Nathan Finn: It took Southern Baptists a generation to get out of debt. In the same way that America kind of comes out of the Great Depression because of the wartime economy, Southern Baptists come out of debt because of the economic recovery that happens during the war era. Keith Harper: I’m not sure there would have been a Cooperative Program if the 75 Million Campaign had not, you know, blown up on them. You have enterprises that transcend the state— international mission work, home mission work, the seminaries, the library and archives, for example. Those are things that transcend a singular state. So how do you fund that and what you do at the state level? And that’s where the Cooperative Program came from. You could begin to think about umbrella budgeting. You can’t count on an exact monetary amount coming in, but based on the past, you’re going to have a pretty good idea of what’s coming in, and you can look at your economy differently that way. Nathan Finn: What I used to say whenever I would teach Baptist history classes to seminary students is: We need to remember that the goal is not to replicate past decisions because our people made those past decisions. Even if they were

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good decisions. Our goal is to come up with creative answers to problems that arise in our day that are suitable to our day. Keith Harper: If you’re a person of faith, it is so easy to equate material prosperity with spiritual well-being. And that, as a believer, causes me more concern than just about anything else. You know, you can’t think that just because you’re the biggest, the baddest, the richest, that now God has blessed you. Well, God has blessed you, but do you think that’s all it’s about? To whom much is given, much is required.

JOSH PEASE is a journalist and pastor living south of Denver, Colorado, with his wife and two kids. You can find him on Twitter @joshuadpease.

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The Winds of Providence HOW SOUTHERN BAPTIST CHURCHES WITNESSED—AND TOOK PART IN—THE GR ACE OF GOD IN ONE OF THE WORST NATUR AL DISASTERS IN RECENT HISTORY

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torms were common along the Gulf Coast. Pastors and denominational leaders were accustomed to tracking the latest hurricane, but this storm was different. Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent floods throughout the region would change the landscape of New Orleans forever. Katrina’s impact is hard to calculate. The storm was the largest to hit the US and the third strongest with winds up to 175 miles per hour and a storm surge exceeding twenty feet. The levee system throughout New Orleans was outmatched by the ferocity of the storm and their failure resulted in flooding that left entire neighborhoods stranded for weeks. The final death toll from the storm is listed at 1,836 though some are still reported missing to this day. Over fifteen million people were forced from their homes—many to never return. The implications of the storm were not only physical as the economic impact on the region exceeded 150 billion dollars. Baptist work in New Orleans was significant before, during, and after the storm. God providentially prepared and positioned leaders to love and serve those impacted by Katrina in Christ’s name.

We asked a few pastors and denominational leaders to reflect on the storm, the various efforts to provide disaster relief, and most importantly, the ways God showed Himself faithful in the face of this one-of-a-kind storm. ROB WILTON is lead pastor of Vintage Church and the SEND City missionary in Pittsburgh. He also serves as chaplain for the New Orleans Saints. KEN TAYLOR is pastor of Gentilly Baptist Church and professor of urban missions at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. JAY ADKINS is senior pastor of First Baptist Church Westwego in Greater New Orleans. JOE MCKEEVER is retired director of missions for the New Orleans Baptist Association.

Rob Wilton: The summer before Hurricane Katrina, David Platt, myself, and Robby Gallaty, we got twenty-one guys together to pray and we were all scattered throughout the country—preaching in camps and preaching in churches—and we got pastors and student leaders together to pray. And this was our prayer: “Lord, ignite our affections to obey Your Holy Spirit and to surrender to Your worldwide mission.” We came back to the fall semester at seminary and God was all over that campus. We had a Tuesday morning prayer time the week that Hurricane Katrina ended up coming in, and we had hundreds of students at the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary chapel on their knees before God . . . and at about 11:00 pm, all of our phones start to blow up [with notifications] that there’s this storm in the Gulf and this is no joke. Ken Taylor: I moved to New Orleans in 1983. The city was rocking along. Everything was pretty smooth. We hadn’t had a major hurricane since 1965 when Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans. The seminary was doing well, and the church was doing well, so things were good. Jay Adkins: I was here pastoring while at the seminary, living in a parsonage over here on this side of the river. We are part of Jefferson Parish, in a total of five parishes down in what we call the metro area. The hurricane hit on Monday. On Sunday morning it had just turned into a category five, and so my wife called me and said you promised you’d come up here if it was a five. We packed up and got into terrible traffic to try to head north.

“There was nothing.” Ken Taylor: I went to the church and saw that and drove around the neighborhood and there was nothing. No one—I saw only one dog. And

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there was nothing there. I was able to go back a couple of weeks later; this time I still hadn’t heard from many people—they didn’t know where I was, I didn’t know where they were. I got one-gallon ziplock bags and put letters in them with my contact information, asking them to call me and let me know where they were, to contact me. I went around to church members’ houses and put up those ziplock bags with the letters inside them. And gradually, after a few days and weeks, the calls started from Houston and Atlanta and other places. Joe McKeever: You could say virtually anything about New Orleans in the days following the storm and they would be true. There were parts that were normal, there were parts that were destroyed forever, and there were parts that were affected temporarily, and people would be returning. Many of the pastors’ stuff was gone forever. I was just in tears as I drove around and saw things. [I was] just so brokenhearted seeing the city destroyed like this. And ever since then, man, I have not been able to watch any videos or anything about Katrina, because I sit there and weep. At that point, God in heaven spoke to my heart and said, “This is not about you. It’s about Me.” I cannot tell you how relaxing and liberating that was to know from the Lord. Ken Taylor: No one died. Everybody in our church lost their home, had to rebuild it. It was a long, long process of trying to physically be present and getting phone calls and finally some text messages and with new phone numbers, you know, we gradually made contact with everybody. We had our first church service in January, four months after the storm, and we had twenty-four people, and I think that was everybody that was back. So by January we probably had, I don’t know, 20 percent of the folks back by that time, or maybe 15 percent? After a year, by that time we probably had 50 percent back. A lot of folks didn’t come back. We still have church members that are in other places. We actually had church members move back in October [of 2019].

Image by Keith Manuel

There was no complexity to it, it was very clear what the assignment was. There were people in need . . .

Ken Taylor: It was almost impossible to contact anybody right away. We finally sent a few text messages. I don’t know if I had texted before that. The grandmother and her two grandchildren [staying] with us—she had another four children, I believe, and another eight or nine or ten grandchildren. She didn’t know where any of them were, so she kept watching things from New Orleans, wondering if she would see a few of her family members. I got a call from a pastor in Mississippi. He said, “You happen to know a Deborah Johnson?” I said, “She’s in my mother’s living room now!” He said, “Well, we have some of her grandchildren.” That was the first she’d heard of any of her family members that were safe. They just happened to be in Mississippi.

“Nobody has any statistics except God and heaven.” Joe McKeever: I had been a pastor in the New Orleans area for fourteen years, from 1990 until 2004. In April of 2004, I became director of missions for New Orleans for the Southern Baptist churches there. This is a five-parish area, so it’s a huge area from the ends of the Mississippi river up through New Orleans. We had 130 churches and a mission. A mission could be anything. We had all kinds of arrangements. Some of them were church starts, some had been missions forever, and some of them were old churches that had gone on life support, and reverted to mission status. We had strong churches and weak churches but about 130. And when I got back from evacuation, after Katrina, we started counting the churches that were still in operation and thirty-two churches were still in operation.

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Rob Wilton: There was no complexity to it, it was very clear what the assignment was. There were people in need, there were homes that needed gutting, there were opportunities to be the hands and feet of Jesus, for the church to rise up. But those times after Hurricane Katrina were super special because of the lives that were changed, because of the unity of the church, and because of the opportunities that we had to truly be in the city and for the city. Everything that you pray for in terms of unity and opportunity for ministry, none of us who lived out Katrina would want that to happen, but man, God used it, God used it. And I truly believe that New Orleans is where it’s at today—a place where there’s so much opportunity for the Gospel message—because of the faithfulness of the true church that rose up and truly served the city.

Jay Adkins: When we got here on Thursday, I went over and made a connection with the National Guard that was stationed just physically a few hundred yards from our church at what’s called the Alario Center. I pulled up there and told the man, “If you gave us a place to set up, we could probably get some kitchens in and start feeding people.” And they gave me permission. I came back to the church and made a phone call to Alpharetta, Georgia, with the only phone that I knew of, the only phone in the area that worked. I was able to contact the North American Mission Board after being on the line for a long time getting bounced from here to there. And when they answered, I said “Please don’t hang up, I’m a pastor in New Orleans, and we could feed a whole lot of people if you can get a kitchen here.” Within a day or two the Georgia Disaster Relief kitchen started rolling in here. Joe McKeever: Baptists were coming in and sending in the eighteen-wheelers and parking in our church parking lot. First thing they did is they set chainsaw groups. A group from Texas arrived. Southern Baptists were the champions. Prior to Katrina in New Orleans, Southern Baptists were looked upon as sort of a cult, but after Katrina, man. Our people came from everywhere, loving on those New Orleans people and ministering to them and blessing them and not charging them a dime for what they were doing. Rob Wilton: Right after the storm, my wife and I got approached by New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary to come and basically be [some] of the first to be let back on the seminary campus to serve as the camp director and camp pastor for the Mission Live project. The Mission Live project existed years before I was there. Basically, this ministry was a way for the seminaries to host outside groups—youth groups, college groups, family groups. They would come to the city, we would house them, we would feed them, and we’d lead them in worship. Then they would go out and serve our city.

You can imagine, post-Katrina, the need was for people to gut houses and to serve people. My wife and I, we didn’t have any kids at the time—we were newlyweds. We came back to the city, and when we lived on the seminary campus, there were only about ten to fifteen of us living there. Most of the power was on generators. They had the National Guard taking over most of the property. Every night there were shootings. There was still a massive looting problem. I mean, I felt like I was in the middle of a war. Joe McKeever: They turned the fellowship hall into a distribution center for that neighborhood. A man told me a deacon had walked in there one day . . . and said, “Who gave you the authority to turn this into a distribution center?” He laughed and said, “Nobody, it was a no-brainer.” Jay Adkins: We were set up ready to go, and then the American Red Cross director came and talked to me and said, “Sir, would you like us to take your food?” So we were set up, and the Red Cross even took directions from us. We ended up feeding the local hospital here. And then, you know, the units are called out, but the units can’t do anything unless the people show up to man them and do the cooking and do the power washing and do the gut-out and so forth. So [in] that cooperative spirit, we had a kitchen, we had shower units, and we had mud-out teams come in and we hosted them here at the church. They’d bring their equipment and go out, and we’d give them work lists—who we knew needed the work done over in town. It was a very long process but again, man, it goes back to this idea of the generosity and sacrifice of the volunteers, of the individuals, who’d pack up their stuff and head out for four or five days or however long they were assigned to, and just literally get their hands dirty. And you know, being in a place where you generally have to sleep on your own air mattress, [where] there may or may not be air conditioning. It’s not so

Image by Norm Miller

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comfortable, but they sacrificed that comfort to help serve, and it’s an incredible thing. Joe McKeever: Rudy French and his wife Rose came down from Canada and started helping. They were soul winners. The First Baptist Church of Saint Rose asked Rudy to become their pastor. And he told them, “I’m not ready. I’m not a pastor. I’m an evangelist.” And they wanted him. So he said, “The only way I’d become a pastor is you must turn your church into a mission center.” And they said, “What do you mean?” He said, “Host church groups that are coming in to share the Gospel.” And so a lady in the church wrote a check for $80,000, and they turned their fellowship hall into [a mission center]. They put an industrial kitchen in there, and they put bunk beds and everything. Church groups would come in there, and Rudy would give them training in soul winning. And then they would bake cookies and things like this and put cleaning supplies in the bags, and they would go down river and stop at all these FEMA trailers, knock on the doors, present the basket of goodies and tell them what they’re doing. And “Is there any way we can help you folks, anything we can do for you folks, anything we can pray for you?” And they just led hundreds of people to the Lord. Nobody has any statistics except God and heaven. But there’s no question, there are a lot of people who will be in heaven as a result of Hurricane Katrina devastating the New Orleans area. Ken Taylor: After thousands of volunteers came in and stayed at our church and worked in the neighborhood, there was a great opening to the Gospel. People were very receptive. Volunteers were able to lead people to Christ. There was a period of camaraderie, of politeness. There were no traffic lights, [but] pull up to a place where they’d put up a temporary stop sign, and people would let the other person go first. A lot of respect. There was a real sense of community, neighborhood. Volunteers were all over the neighborhood. It was probably the most spiritually exciting time I had ever seen.

“Call the Southern Baptists.” Jay Adkins: I remember very fondly the days after Katrina in part because of the opportunity to serve and how simple life was. I know that sounds crazy, but you woke up and just did the same thing every day, helping people and serving—sometimes to the point of extreme exhaustion and emotional breakdown. But it was almost a simplistic time . . . There is unity, you know the old phrase “strength in numbers”? There’s a psychological encouragement and unity when you know you’re not the only guy going through a thing. Really, Katrina is the starting point of that real closeness with my African and Vietnamese and Hispanic brother pastors, that sort of tight-knittedness. The mayor and our city council knew—word had spread about how we served. Maybe one of the biggest things [to come out of Katrina] was the relationship we built with our community and our city government. That’s a huge blessing and connecting point. Rob Wilton: Because I had been serving in so many ways within the city, I got introduced to a group that had been around before Katrina, but they had hired a brand new president, Michael Hecht. He basically became a catalyst for the boosting of the economy post-Katrina. He began to share with me about how the most untold story, the story that deserves way more credit in the rebuilding of the city of New Orleans, is the impact and sacrifice of the faith-based community helping bring our community back. He pulled me into his office and said, “Look, I don’t even know if my council is gonna let me do this . . . I have a Next Gen council, the Greater New Orleans Inc., but, we need a pastor on this council. Would you consider serving as a Next Gen Council member?” And I didn’t even hesitate.

We get to be a part of hosting multi-million dollar companies, strategizing. We were behind the brand new airport that’s just been built in the city of New Orleans; we’re behind some of the initiatives that are addressing some of the systemic injustices in the city, education reform, all these other different things. And I have had front-row access to some of the top leaders in the city.

“Pastors really need each other.”

Jay Adkins: You know, Louisiana is the only state in the union that doesn’t have counties. We have parishes. And that’s because of the Roman Catholic Church historically. So New Orleans itself is very Roman Catholic in its history and in a lot of its church presence. Here’s the amazing thing: Because of the response of the SBC’s disaster relief, the community, which had been typically very closed off to Baptists, all of a sudden became very appreciative and open to Baptists engaging with them. [We had] a pretty tremendous opportunity there because of the servant-hearted nature of those from all across our Convention descending on New Orleans to serve.

Jay Adkins: I’ll tell you what, just to testify to the psyche of what happened at that time when the caretakers aren’t taking care of themselves: I had what I suppose was the closest thing to a nervous breakdown you can get. That’s a word to pastors that I’ll often share when I’m asked to give that sort of story—it’s important that pastors understand that they can’t just keep going in the midst of difficulty. You have got to be able to take physical and mental care of yourself as well. I’ve not experienced in any other time that foxhole mentality—all having to deal with the same thing, still trying to take care of our people, still trying to take care of other people, trying to love on one another, and trying to pick up the slack for [those] who need to let it down for a while. It was really unbelievable.

Rob Wilton: The Catholic archdiocese was quoted [as saying], “If you want something done and you want it done fast and well, call the Southern Baptists.” I mean, for someone in New Orleans, a predominantly Catholic town, the Southern Baptists didn’t really get a whole lot of props. I’ve never experienced as much multi-denominational [teamwork] probably in all my life [as what we saw] after Hurricane Katrina. Hurricane Katrina . . . was what ended up birthing my call to plant a church. It wiped out a bunch of churches, and as I started to serve not only churches but neighborhoods, I started to see a void, a real need for churches in the city. I’ll never forget, the first time I even introduced the idea of church planting, God started to reveal to me the ministry and the impact and the mission of church planting. Soon enough, my wife and I had the opportunity to lead one of her co-workers to the Lord, a few years after Hurricane Katrina. Through that conversion, we planted a church.

Joe McKeever: One of the most important things that we did while we were in evacuation happened just a few days after [Katrina]. The pastor of First Baptist New Orleans, David Crosby, was up in Monroe, Louisiana, and I was in North Alabama, and we were talking on the phone. He said, “Joe, we need to try to get our pastors together.” So we put out the word, we put out the word on Christian radio stations around the country. And so the next Wednesday morning, we had twenty pastors to show up here in Jackson for this meeting. They came into the church hugging on each other and crying and everything. We had our meeting, and the church served us lunch, and nobody wanted to leave. We would meet and pray together. All the denominational people would come. At 11:30, the church would feed us lunch, and the state convention actually sent money to that church to pay for these lunches. And that’s when I realized these pastors really need each other.

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Jay Adkins: Joe McKeever was our director of missions, and his vision establishing weekly pastor meetings was an incredible time. You know, one of us could say, “Listen, I’ve got a semi-tractor trailer of this coming in, who needs it?” And another one would say, “I’m getting this amount of food coming in, who needs that?” But besides just the engagement weekly with logistics of moving ministry and needs around, the fellowship that we had during that time was really—I don’t know that I’ll ever experience that again. They sent Joe down here, and he was there at all the meetings to encourage us and to work with us. I’m watching all these guys suffer, these pastors who lost their homes, and we’re there to support one another and encourage one another and build up one another. I will never ever be able to express my appreciation enough for what that time was like and for the fellowship that it built among the pastors there. Ken Taylor: The kindness of people and fellowship of people, sharing with us and ing with us and helping us—I’ve learned absolute necessity of Christian community Christian hospitality.

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I’ve learned the absolute necessity of Christian community and Christian hospitality.

“It’s your miracle.” Ken Taylor: We worked with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the Northeast United States. They would come down and spend four or five weeks during February and March. Our folks would cook for them, and it was just really neat meeting a very diverse group of college students and seeing our church members ministering to them and ministering to their neighbors as people grew more mission-minded. They were very resilient as well. We met outside, we met in somebody’s house, we met in a Sunday school room, we met in a gutted sanctuary with no heat, we met in a gymnasium. We learned for sure that

the church was not about the building. It was about the fellowship and about how faithful God was to us. Jay Adkins: The church body radically changed. We became very young, with young couples and young families that ended up connecting with our church, some of them coming to faith for the first time. It really did change the culture of the church. I don’t know that our church, before that point, had ever taken a mission trip in seventy-plus years of existence. In fact, I would argue that it’s really Katrina that is ultimately responsible for this past year, when for the first time, our church took a family mission trip. We took sixteen people to Peru to help do some church planting, and it was just family members. Even children went. I really do attribute that all the way back to the chain that started with Katrina. Ken Taylor: I think the city says, “If we made it through Katrina, we can make it through anything.” It built within us a sense of resiliency, a sense of needing to be prepared. Joe McKeever: Some of God’s people just did amazing things, and I have many, many stories about this. . . . My son had told his children one day, “Be praying for beautiful weather tomorrow. If it’s a pretty day, we’ll go to the park.” The next day, it was beautiful. When they were in the car and going to the park, my son said, “Who asked God to give us this beautiful day? Grant, did you?” “No, I forgot.” “Abby, did you?” “I forgot too.” And Aaron said, “Oh good. Then it was my miracle.” So I tell people that story, because if you came to help us, or if you sent help, or if you prayed for us, or if you contributed in any way, it is your miracle. Rob Wilton: My dad’s church in South Carolina had adopted seven or eight seminary families that lost everything and had been displaced by Hurricane Katrina. We lived in a lake home, and Robby [Gallaty] lived down the street in another lake home. He and his people basically adopted a

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bunch of seminary students, and that’s the time when God called me to return back to New Orleans. I actually took the job that Robby Gallaty had before Katrina, serving with Mission Live. Robby fell in love with being a local pastor while he was being mentored by my dad. So after Katrina, Robby ended up going back down south to a local church in Morgan City, Louisiana, and I went back down south as a Mission Live camp pastor. And then David Platt became the pastor of The Church at Brook Hills and so on and so forth. The blessing of a crisis is how much God grows us. None of us want hard times, but all of us can testify that when hard times come, we actually become more like Christ. I see that happening in our churches today . . . [and] I’ll testify to say that definitely happened during the Katrina season.

MATT ROGERS is pastor of The Church at Cherrydale in Greenville, South Carolina, and is an assistant professor at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is married to Sarah and they have five children.

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Do your circumstances determine your joy? Through Paul in his Letter to the Philippians, the Holy Spirit teaches us that as believers we are not victims of external circumstances, but God wants to use them to strengthen us, mold us, and make us exactly who He wants us to be. Have you made the choice to rejoice?

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The Next Normal HOW COVID-19 HAS SOUTHERN BAPTIST CHURCHES RETHINKING THEIR METHODOLOGY, EMBR ACING NEW MISSION OPPORTUNITIES, AND EVEN INNOVATING F UTURE MINISTRY

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or months, the coronavirus felt foreignâ€”while its deep impact on China and Italy could not be ignored, most Americans simply continued as normal. But soon, cases began to skyrocket, governors began issuing orders, and church leaders met to discuss plans. As workers across the country were furloughed or laid off, churches faced a real financial threat while many of their members needed both spiritual and financial support. Even before COVID-19, Southern Baptist churches were struggling as they experienced their single greatest drop in membership in over one hundred years in 2019. The year 2020 was not an ideal time to cope with a pandemic requiring immediate changes in methodology and missional strategy. COVID-19 has taken a toll on churches across the country. Despite its many challenges, it has forced church leaders to rely on the Lord. As a result, a more resilient, innovative, and focused church has begun to emerge.

We spoke to five pastors about COVID19’s impact on their church communities, and how they have responded. JOSEPH PAYTON is senior pastor of Brookview Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. KEN NETHER a former professional basketball player, teacher, and coach, is a church planting catalyst for North American Mission Board and lead pastor of Crossover Church in Southfield, Michigan, not far from downtown Detroit. STEPHEN SALLARD is a church planter and lead pastor of Mosaic Church in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, New York. JUAN SANCHEZ has served as senior pastor of High Pointe Baptist Church in Austin, Texas, since 2005. He holds a PhD in systematic theology from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and serves as a council member of The Gospel Coalition, co-founder and president of Coalición, assistant professor of Christian theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and former president of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. TRAVIS WHITTAKER is a recording musician, church planter, and lead pastor of Mile City Church in South Lyon, Michigan, just outside of Detroit.

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“Shut everything else down, but you can’t shut down the churches.” On March 11, the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. The next day the NBA and the NHL suspended their seasons, countless schools canceled classes, and governors across the country declared states of emergency. Pressure for churches to cancel gatherings was palpable. The Bible commands believers to assemble regularly (Hebrews 10:25) but it also commands believers to submit to their governing authorities (Romans 13) and love their neighbors as themselves (Mark 12:31). The long history Southern Baptist churches have of meeting together in person to study Scripture, pray, fellowship, and encourage one another was not easy to reimagine, but this was the first great hurdle COVID-19 presented to every church. Joseph Payton: My initial reaction—and I am not the type who is always looking for a religious liberty fight—was, “Shut everything else down, but you can’t shut down the churches.” My mind was going back in history to all the Christians who were present during pandemics, risking their lives to minister to others. I wasn’t really doing the hard work of thinking about our modern context. I was just thinking, “We’ve got to have church.” I pastor an older congregation and the past couple years it feels like it’s a dwindling

congregation. And it’s in a rough, mostly poor, white neighborhood—there are lots of drugs. Other churches might have means to facilitate fellowship and worship through technology, but even some of the younger people don’t have internet in their homes, and they are always getting new cell phone numbers because their plans lapse. Initially, I hoped maybe my church could be exempt from canceling because we are fairly small and some of our eldest members would stay home regardless. Additionally, I have this view of worship that maybe most Baptists don’t really think about, that when we pray and gather corporately together, we’re standing in the gap for those who can’t gather, who can’t lift up their hearts in this corporate act of worship. So I thought, “We will be that.” And then as pressure mounted, I realized, “I’ve got to shut this thing down.” Ken Nether: Our church was one of the first to cancel in-person worship services. Detroit was just behind New Orleans at one point, the number two affected city. And our church is an urban, African American church—African Americans have been impacted 40 percent more than others. And then it hit home for me personally when my former church actually had someone about my age pass away because of COVID-19. He was in good health prior and had no pre-existing conditions, so for me it became more real. Juan Sanchez: For me, COVID became real when I was in Argentina [training pastors]. I had just finished preaching Ruth, and we had hit the theme of the providence of God really hard. So coronavirus was in the background as you were hearing the news, and we were just reminding ourselves how God is in control of all things, including this coronavirus. I finished preaching that series, and I was scheduled to teach at a seminary in Argentina. We arrived there, and the next day we started hearing in Argentina that the president is going to shut it down, and so we’re scrambling to get a flight back.

Stephen Sallard: We had a major outreach event planned for March 11: the Nostrand Avenue Art Collective. We are a multicultural church that draws from over twenty different cultures in Brooklyn, New York. We intentionally planted in a neighborhood with a history of racial tension. This is the neighborhood where Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball and where the 1991 race riots occured. We came believing the Gospel had the power to write a better chapter in this neighborhood’s history. This March 11 event was an attempt to leverage art to engage creatives of different cultures with the Gospel. We had two mission teams here on spring break from two different Southern Baptist churches, one in Mississippi and one in Dallas, Texas. So I had a bunch of teenagers and college kids I was responsible for, and it was like the world just stopped that week. Our outreach event was on a Wednesday, and the NBA canceled its season the Thursday before. Friday, March 13, everything started shutting down. A couple of the artists I booked for our event canceled. At this point we knew very little about COVID-19, so we pressed on with our event. It was well-attended, but that was the last public meeting of our church. A few days later we decided to move to online services. The city had not mandated it yet, but we already had families leaving the city. We made that decision on a Saturday morning, and less than twenty-four hours later, we had our first online church service. Juan Sanchez: The main question that we were confronted with was how do we shepherd our people during this time? So we’re led by a plural team of elders—I’m a senior pastor, but I’m just one of the pastors. We have a combination of staff elders and lay elders. So we just got together and we just started writing down scriptures that would help guide us through this process . . . Now that was a helpful time; it was a fruitful time; it was an encouraging time. One of the things that was most encouraging was that the Lord had already prepared us for this in many ways, not in

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every way, but in many ways, spiritually, by going through the Ruth series and just thinking through the providence of God no matter what happens. Travis Whittaker: We had held a meeting with all our City Group leaders. Some were saying, “It’s going to blow over. It’s not that big of a deal,” but I realized, “Wait, we need to be good neighbors.” Constitutionally, we knew that we could stay open, but doing so wouldn’t be very loving toward our community. It’s not that we didn’t have faith that God will take care of us. It was that we’ve already worked so hard at building a reputation for being a church that cares for the community. We’d invested a lot of time and energy serving our schools and lifting up other nonprofits doing good work in the communities around our church. So it was important for us to approach this season in a way that demonstrated that we really do love our neighbors.

“I can’t ever do that again. I will die.” On March 24, SBC leaders canceled the Annual Meeting “out of a deep concern for the health and

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safety of messengers and attendees.” At this point, the majority of Southern Baptist churches had suspended weekly in-person gatherings. Shifting to meeting online was easier for some churches than others and online services brought a host of new challenges and opportunities. Ken Nether: Initially, I recorded sermons at home. I was spending eight to ten hours between recording and editing, and that’s not including sermon prep. It takes that long when you factor in setting up multiple camera angles, editing, and post-editing to make it look nice. It wasn’t sustainable—I have a seven-year-old and a five-yearold and I would have to pause the recording when I heard them flushing the toilet. The gift and the curse is that I care too much; otherwise I’d probably prop my iPhone up, record a message, and be done. When this first started, I thought, “I’ll have all this free time, I will be able to chill and read books.” But this has been the busiest I’ve ever been. During the first month, I was finishing up seminary—that was brutal. Joseph Payton: The problem for me is that I have a strong aesthetic sense. For example, we are one of the poorest churches in Louisville, but I would put our bulletin right up against the wealthiest church in town. So I’m looking at

these other churches and I’m noticing how polished their Facebook Live feeds are. And then I learned about Facebook Premiere, which allows you to pre-record and create a watch party when the video goes live. I could pre-record on my phone, upload it, and early in the week, people could then click “get reminder” and be reminded as the watch party drew near. I got so carried away with graphics and camera angles. I videoed the whole service in little clips recorded in different locations. One of my friends even saw one of our services and messaged, saying, “I see you have your own TV show now.” One Friday night after spending hours and hours framing everything, getting all the camera angles right, doing transitions and adding graphics, I realized I couldn’t export the file. My phone didn’t have enough memory. Hours of work just stuck in iMovie. I deleted every app on my phone and text messages with my wife from forever ago to get the space on my phone. And I finally got it exported and up on Facebook Premiere. The following Sunday, I watched this with my family in our living room, and I was so proud of it. And then I thought, I can’t ever do that again. I will die. Travis Whittaker: When we first realized we wouldn’t be able to have our normal services, we encouraged people to have watch parties at their houses to watch the service together. I’ll never forget that Sunday. I had neighbors sitting on my couch that I had been praying for three years that they would check out our church. And they were not only watching, but engaging in conversation. One of the guys said, “So, when you’re praying on TV, but you’re here with us in this room, asking us to pray, what are you praying for? Are you praying here or are you listening to your own prayer? Praying it again? I’m really curious.” I said, “To be honest with you, I’m praying for the kids to shut up in the basement.” Our watch parties were great, but then, obviously, we had to shut them down as things escalated.

“In a church like ours, there are people who are truly suffering.” While many Southern Baptist churches have adapted incredibly well to their new normal, there are some things we may never get back. Joseph Payton: I have people in my church that have dementia—our service is the one thing they do each week that gives their life some borders. When they come to church, you almost wouldn’t even know they have dementia. They remember all the hymns, and they worship—it’s healthy for their mind. If they lose this, they’re not going to know what day of the week it is. When this is over, their condition mentally probably is going to be much worse. If I see them again, it is very likely that we will no longer know each other in the same way. I started sending out these newsletters to encourage people to stay connected, but the truth is, we’re suffering when it comes to fellowship. There are people in our church who are hard of hearing, and they are not on Facebook. The only way to have fellowship with them is to look them in the eye and make sure they know what you’re saying. It’s devastating. There’s no way around it. There’s no silver lining. They are stuck at home. I can drive by and wave at them, but we’re not making the connection that we make when we’re together. Some people are able to make the best of it, but the truth is, in a church like ours, there are people who are truly suffering. Juan Sanchez: [I was] really feeling helpless because you have members at home, and the only way you can communicate is through technology. And you don’t know what people are thinking . . . Do our senior adults know how to access our livestream? Do they even have the hardware? Do

they have a laptop or an iPad? Just a lot of frustration and really helplessness, I think, is the best way to describe it. The feeling was—okay, we either prepared our people really well for this, or we didn’t . . . ‘Cause this is gonna be a test of our faithfulness. So what happens now? That was the initial feeling and the initial response.

“We’re going to seize the missional opportunity.” There is a temptation when facing unprecedented trials to simply cope, but some of the most difficult times in church history have also been profound times of spiritual growth. While COVID-19 has certainly stretched many thin, it has also provided unique opportunities for church members to step up and show the love of Jesus to their neighbors. Stephen Sallard: The New York area has obviously been devastated by COVID-19, so since this started, I’ve been telling my church, “We’re going to seize the missional opportunity.” One of the church planters we sent out has a food truck. When the pandemic hit, he converted his food truck to a grocery delivery operation. He asked if we wanted to give away groceries in our neighborhood. The first week we gave away nine boxes of groceries. Now we’ve got close to fifty boxes being delivered every week. Every box has high-quality ingredients. There’s always a spiritual message. We put Bibles in them, there’s always a letter from me encouraging people to open up to the table of contents, find the Gospel of John, and start there for ultimate hope. Early on we delivered three boxes to a mosque. We found out that they wanted boxes, so one of our partners created halal boxes that fit their diet. And then we put the exact same spiritual message in with a Bible and a letter from me. I thought they might be offended because of the

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Bible, but they called and asked if we could do ten boxes next week. Ken Nether: We’re actually one of the churches that benefited from going online. Initially I thought, “I’ll probably have fifty people watch.” That first Sunday had two thousand people tune in to my message. In early June, I was part of this “Praytest,” not a protest, a Praytest, about what’s going on. So I’m there, I had a speaking part, and a young lady I’d never met comes up and gives me an envelope with my name on it. I didn’t think anything of it because I was getting ready to speak. Afterwards she finds me and says, “I just want you to know that during this pandemic you became my pastor, this is my church, and I’ve just been impacted by your ministry during this pandemic.” Juan Sanchez: What’s been encouraging is that it has given me more opportunity to interact with my neighbors. So that’s been really encouraging. One of the things we’ve tried to communicate to our folks is this is not a time to back down—it’s an opportunity for ministry. So we’ve told our staff and our elders at our church the same thing: Look for opportunities right now. People have questions. Many people might be isolated. Take advantage of this opportunity. So that’s what I’m trying to do for myself, as far as evangelism.

“This season has reenergized me to be creative, to not just follow a model, but to actually listen to the heart of God . . .”

While the many ways COVID-19 has interrupted church life are not ideal, this new normal has challenged church leaders to think outside the box. As a result of the pandemic, Southern Baptist churches have been innovating new ways of fulfilling their mission as well rediscovering the value of older methods. Travis Whittaker: In early March, before the first stay at home order hit in Michigan, I realized I had to shut our office down and wasn’t going to have in-person staff meetings. So I went into our boardroom and wrote “70/30” and “P/P” on the white board. I said, “For many of us in this room, 70 percent of what we do is geared towards ‘programming’ for people to hear about the Gospel. And 30 percent of your job is actually dealing with ‘people.’ Now we’re reversing it.” I have an amazing team, we look like a ten-thousand-person church based on my team’s ability to pull off quality programming. But I had to make a very clear decision in pulling back—this was a time to focus primarily on our people. I gave our staff a goal to call, visit, or deliver care packages to a set number of people each day. After a while, I told my team, “We’re going to keep doing this when in-person gatherings resume.” The lengths to which we have to go to try and get people’s attention as American pastors and church planters really discourages me. The thing that excites me most about this season is how it has clarified our mission. Ken Nether: This season has reenergized me to be creative, to not just follow a model, but to actually listen to the heart of God and say, “What have you uniquely designed us to do?” We typically think of church in terms of a particular model and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that, but this has been an opportunity to dream bigger. So the influx of people watching our services from other states has us considering new possibilities. For me, I am okay with online ministry if there’s someone there who can care for and follow up with people in person. When you

start a church, there’s a lot of pressure to grow and meet budget, but now all of a sudden we are not having to pay $4,000 in rent, and we are reaching more people, and our giving has gone up. It puts us in a position to help more people. So next Wednesday, June 7, we are taking some of the money we would have spent on rent buying pizza for people in our community. You don’t have to sign anything, we’re not trying to get anybody to come to our church. This is just us showing the love of Jesus in a practical way to people in need.

“I was helping everybody else but neglecting my own soul . . . ” As hopes that quarantines would last a few weeks quickly vanished and months of social distancing ensued, many pastors found themselves overworked and struggling to maintain their own physical, mental, and spiritual wellbeing. Stephen Sallard: I have a family that I’m caring for in the middle of a pandemic. We’re a family of five sheltering in place in an 850-square-foot New York city apartment. We don’t have a backyard. To be safely socially distanced from people, you’re supposed to stay six feet away. In Brooklyn, we can’t do that even on the sidewalk. So it has been a deeply stressful time. The kids need to get out and play. We need them to let off their energy. So we put on masks and go to this soccer field once a day, but even here it’s difficult to relax. Young kids don’t understand safety requirements. We haven’t been able to relax in over ten weeks. My four-year-old son was deeply concerned when I would strap up my mask and go outside to deliver groceries to people. He said, “Daddy,

I don’t want you to get the coronavirus. I don’t want you to die.” I kept telling him, “I am going to be okay buddy, but even if I’m not okay, following Jesus is worth it.” And he asked me on multiple occasions, “Daddy, can I go instead of you because I’d rather get the virus.” Ken Nether: Thursday, June 4, I was at Lake Pointe Church, another SBC church, where I was recording some teaching with Scott Blanchard. When we were done, his video guy asked me, “Man, how are you feeling?” That was the first time I got emotional because I realized I had not been self aware. I had not grieved. I was helping everybody else but neglecting my own soul—my emotional and spiritual state. It’s been a season of giving, giving, giving. Someone else had to ask the question before I realized, I don’t even know where I’m at, in terms of how I feel. And I know there are plenty of other people in my church that are struggling, too. With my church being 90 percent African American, we are dealing with a lot of grief with regard to the death of George Floyd. So we decided to offer a space on Zoom to talk about these issues moving forward and actually provide counseling for people who need it.

“I think we’re going to be okay.” Every church relies on charitable giving to fund its ministries. And while pastors have trusted God’s provision, the financial strain of COVID-19 has hit some churches harder than others.

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Joseph Payton: Before this happened, it was the first time in my eight years there when we were starting to struggle financially. We are a very simple church; we have hardly any expenses. But the past year our income has been consistently below our basic expenses like utilities and insurance. When our offering plummeted the first couple weeks after lockdown, I thought, “Well, this is it.” But then I had a cousin who gave to our church one week. My boss who I work for sent a check as a gift. And then our local association set up a grant for pastor relief, and they gave me what amounted to my salary for two weeks. It was meant to help me and not the church, but it was a relief to the church not to have to pay my salary for two weeks. And so, by God’s grace, we’ve been sustained. I think we’re going to be okay. Stephen Sallard: We’ve raised over $10,000 to fund the relief boxes we’ve been delivering to people in need—all this is being funded by Southern Baptist churches from all over the country. A Baptist church in South Carolina, for instance, sent a $1,500 check to the Baptist Convention of New York and the executive director of the convention forwarded the money to me because he heard what we were doing. The church has been doing what the church does—stepping up and meeting needs.

“I don’t want to rush opening and miss what God wants to teach us.” By the middle of May, many states had either lifted stay-at-home orders or announced they would be doing so soon. Most plotted phases of lifting restrictions, allowing churches to plot a course for future meetings. By June, many churches had the

option of having some sort of in-person gathering, but things couldn’t go completely back to normal. Coronavirus continues to deeply impact Southern Baptist churches, and while there are many unresolved questions and tensions, the pandemic has also forced churches to learn valuable lessons and embrace unique opportunities. Juan Sanchez: [There’s] just all kinds of questions. So we just decided to go with rows that are six feet apart so they’re social distancing that way and, as far as those who don’t come from the same family unit, have two chairs between them, and so we’re thinking maybe we can fit 150 people in here. Normally we would have 550, 600 people. So then we’re thinking, okay, should we have one service or two services? So you’re kind of making things up as you go along. Then we realize, well, we can fit a lot more people in here than 150. So as we’ve gone along things have changed so that now we’ve come to realize we think we can actually fit three hundred people in there with social distancing . . . So about 50 percent of our normal attendance. The frustrating part is not knowing and just being flexible, but again our folks have been really, really good about that. We have a small group ministry that we call Life Groups. So what we’ve done is encourage those Life Groups to continue meeting via Zoom and keep connected with one another . . . so through the regular structures of the church we’ve been able to keep as many people connected as possible. [I’m] most curious to see what the church will look like at the end of this. I’m convinced it will look different, so that the High Pointe Baptist Church that existed pre-COVID will not be the same church that existed post-COVID . . . I’m always excited to see what the Lord will do. This will not be wasted. This is an opportunity. I think that American Christians, in general, are more American than Christian, and so I think this is an opportunity to see just the reality of people’s commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ. And I’m excited for the Lord to work, build His church, to

strengthen His church. This did not take Jesus by surprise. This will not stop Jesus from building His church. Travis Whittaker: Most likely we might be one of the last churches to reopen. I don’t want to rush opening and miss what God wants to teach us. I don’t say that as a cop-out, and I am not being lazy. What I’ve been doing is I’ve been making decisions based on my neighborhood. I’ve been using my neighborhood to gauge when we should reopen. Some kids can play with other kids right now. Some kids can’t cross to the other side of the sidewalk. So I talk with all my neighbors. Everyone’s got different opinions. Some are ready to go back to normal. Some are still really nervous. It’s all over the board, but as I see my neighborhood get more and more comfortable, then it’s a good gauge for me to know when it’s time. But I believe if we devote a couple of months to a season of watch parties, we will watch God show off his multiplying power. Meeting in homes is a little closer to Acts 2, anyway. I think if we learn what we are supposed to learn from this, then we will be ready to return to the building and party like no other and celebrate what God has done.

DREW DIXON is team leader for student ongoing Bible studies at LifeWay and chief content nerd at Love Thy Nerd. He lives in Nashville with his wife and three children.

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Townes Announces Retirement from SBC Executive Committee BY JONATHAN HOWE

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illiam “Bill” Townes, CFO of the SBC Executive Committee, announced his retirement from the post effective December 31, 2020. Townes and his wife DeAnna will relocate to Georgia to assist with care for their special needs grandson who faces significant life challenges due to his genetic conditions. “I have had the honor of serving Southern Baptists for nearly thirty years both in my local church and denominationally, including the Georgia Baptist Mission Board, the International Mission Board, and the North American Mission Board, before coming to work with the SBC Executive Committee nearly a decade ago,” Townes said in his resignation letter. “During that time, I have had the privilege to stand on the shoulders of faithful servants who came before me and work alongside dedicated men and women who love the Lord and love serving Southern Baptists.” In his role as CFO, Townes’s duties included oversight of the financial operations of the Executive Committee and the organization of the SBC annual meeting. “The loss of Bill Townes on our team is challenging for everyone here and also for the SBC,” said Ronnie Floyd, Executive Committee president and CEO. “He is a trusted, proven leader God used in so many ways—always doing his job with excellence, integrity, and the highest competency. I will miss working with him as he has become a dear friend and partner in ministry to me. Please pray for Bill as he transitions to giving his focus on his calling to his family.”

Townes joined the Executive Committee in December 2010 and was named vice president for Convention finance in February 2011. During his time with the Executive Committee, Townes has been the lead innovator for the SBC Annual Meeting. He led the expansion of the exhibitor policy resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings for the Executive Committee. He launched an app for the event, negotiated new contracts with host cities, and oversaw the development of updated technology used at the event. He brought that same innovation to the workplace with new travel management, human resources, and expense reporting systems, which came online in the past year. Townes also provided counsel to several SBC entities and state CFOs throughout the COVID-19 global pandemic and the related time of financial uncertainty. Born in the Central African Republic to missionary parents, Bill is a licensed Certified Public Accountant and an ordained Baptist minister. Prior to his time with the Executive Committee, he served as an interim pastor, college professor, and camp and conference center director. A version of this column was published in Baptist Press on August 17, 2020.

JONATHAN HOWE is vice president for communications at the SBC Executive Committee.

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Charles Grant Named Executive Director of African American Relations and Mobilization BY DIANA CHANDLER

harles Grant has been named executive director of African American relations and mobilization at the SBC Executive Committee. In a partnership jointly funded by the SBC EC and the North American Mission Board, Grant will work to equip and mobilize African American churches, as well as to engage potential new churches. In announcing the hire, Ronnie Floyd, president and CEO of the SBC EC, called Grant a “gifted, experienced, and highly respected leader.” “We believe God will use him in a great way,” Floyd said. “As a former pastor, church planter, and ministry leader with a state convention as well as with a national entity for over a decade, he has relationships with pastors and churches all over the country.

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“We believe Charles will be used of the Lord to further our commitment to serving African American churches and continuing to mobilize them towards the Great Commission.” Willie McLaurin, the SBC EC vice president for Great Commission relations and mobilization, called Grant “a gifted leader” who will help Southern Baptists increase the mobilization of African American churches. “His high levels of character and competency will assist the entire network of Southern Baptist churches in their task of fulfilling the Great Commission,” McLaurin said. “For such a time as this, Charles is the right man who will lead our Convention in serving Black churches. Charles has an authentic love for his wife, children, and for the local church. “I am extremely grateful that God has led Charles Grant to the SBC Executive Committee.” Grant comes to the EC from LifeWay Christian Resources, where he had served since 2008 as a regional church partner. He also served concurrently with the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board since 2013 as a new church catalyst. Before coming to Nashville, he planted New Life Baptist Church in the Tampa area in 1997; he served as New Life’s senior pastor until 2007. In accepting the position, Grant thanked God for guiding his life since his 1985 salvation at a Black Southern Baptist church. “I am honored for the Lord’s preparation and strategic timing to serve the Southern Baptist Convention,” Grant said. “I recognize that I stand on the shoulders of many faithful servants before me who have served churches passionately for the glory of God. I am most grateful to each of them. “I am excited and look forward to serving alongside Dr. Ronnie Floyd as he leads the SBC Executive Committee, Dr. Willie McLaurin as he leads our Great Commission relations and mobilization efforts, and our entire team as we endeavor to serve churches for the purpose of fulfilling the Great Commission.” NAMB President Kevin Ezell said Grant “will

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help keep Southern Baptists focused on the need for more evangelistic churches that will reflect the diversity in North America.” “Charles knows Southern Baptists well, and he has a heart for reaching everyone with the Gospel,” Ezell said. “As we take to heart the command from Jesus to disciple all nations, Charles brings the skills and background to help us do that.” Grant holds a Master of Divinity from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary (now Gateway Seminary), a Master of Special Education from the University of South Florida, and a Bachelor of Science in business management from San Jose State University. Grant’s wife Jackie is an administrative assistant for the Black Cultural Center at Vanderbilt University. The couple has three adult children. Grant’s arrival marks the fulfillment of Floyd’s commitment to hire three full-time associate directors to focus on diversity. Julio Arriola was named executive director of Hispanic relations and mobilization in November 2019, followed in December 2019 by Peter Yanes as executive director of Asian American relations and mobilization. Filling Grant’s position was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic. The three executive directors promote active participation at every level of Southern Baptist life among their respective demographics, as well as increased Cooperative Program engagement and involvement. Referencing John 9:4, Grant said he desires “to partner with our various SBC entities and churches to help us respond to the . . . Vision 2025 call to reach every person for Jesus Christ in every town, every city, every state, and every nation.” A version of this column was published in Baptist Press on August 27, 2020.

DIANA CHANDLER is Baptist Press’s senior writer.

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We Must Not Be Silent on Racism BY RONNIE W. FLOYD

ecent months in American life have truly been difficult. We witnessed with our own eyes this past spring, in the streets of one of our major cities, a Black man being murdered slowly and cruelly. Over the course of a long eight minutes, George Floyd cried out for help and mercy while a white police officer continued to place his knee over this Black man’s neck as his face was forced onto the pavement. The end result: George Floyd died in a cruel, demeaning, and needless way. This event poured fuel upon a nation that is already angry about many things. On top of the COVID-19 global pandemic—which had already claimed more than 106,000 American lives from January to that point—we have now witnessed another horrendous act of racial injustice. The racism that plagues our culture today is inextricably tied to the past, and continues to disproportionately impact the African American community.

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Across many of our cities, there have been peaceful protests of citizens expressing their freedom of speech. Unfortunately, those peaceful protests have also been drowned out by the actions of those wanting to incite destruction. Consequently, violence has erupted, resulting primarily in the loss of more human lives but also secondarily damage to properties at an already very difficult economic moment in America. I call upon Southern Baptists to join me in praying for an end to this violence. We are extremely grateful for our law enforcement officers who risk their lives daily to protect us in every way; but we are also saddened when any misuse of authority causes harm to the very people they are to protect. I want to remind us that the Southern Baptist Convention believes and stands upon the infallibility, inerrancy, and sufficiency of the Holy Scriptures, and we believe those Scriptures are very clear regarding how we are to treat others.

The Baptist Faith and Message states in Article XV, “In the spirit of Christ, Christians should oppose racism,” and “We should speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death.” Southern Baptists must not only be known to stand for the sanctity of human life, but we must also be known to stand for the dignity of all human life regardless of the color of skin. To our African American pastors and churches across America: We stand with you, and we mourn with you in times like these. We will commit to the truth found in Micah 6:8: We are called to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with God. We commit ourselves to be doers of the Word by pursuing racial reconciliation in all our relationships. Racism is sin. It is blasphemy against the God who created each of us in His divine image. We cannot justify or rationalize racism, bigotry, or prejudice in any way. Each is ungodly, inhumane, and stands arrogantly against the life and teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is no way the government can fix this problem. Nor can one’s politics provide healing. It never has and never will. This is a problem of the human heart. It is a spiritual problem. Acts of criticism and cynicism that result in calling each other names and classifying one another will just divide further and intensify the moment even more negatively. We may make statements, but change will only come through the choices we make each day. We may say things through tweets or posts, but real change will only be seen through our conduct toward one another. None of this will go away with violence, but only by developing relationships with each other, working together, and resolving to press forward together in the spirit of Christ, who is the Prince of Peace. Church after church and pastor after pastor must stand for righteousness and holiness. One church at a time, one town at a time, one city at a time, we must look into the mirror and see in complete reality where we are individually and

collectively. We, the churches in America, are the ones that must be faithful to call upon God to come and to give us His guidance and provide His pathway to healing in our nation. We are the ones that must answer this moment. Jesus Christ is the only answer to this problem, and we must start with ourselves. We need to return to Jesus Christ in deep repentance of sin. Until we repent and change the way we are looking at one another, talking to one another, and treating one another, spiritual revival and awakening will not come. Without relationships and conversations, we will never understand one another. Silence is not the answer and passivity is not our prescription for healing. Pastor after pastor, preacher after preacher, evangelist after evangelist, teacher after teacher, must boldly and forthrightly call upon each Christian to love God with all of our heart and to love our neighbor even as we love ourselves. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” Our Southern Baptist Convention must not be silent. We must stand in solidarity with one another. We must continue to work with compassion until justice is served. And we must commit to eradicate racism in all its forms. A version of this column was published in Baptist Press on June 2, 2020.

RONNIE W. FLOYD is president and CEO of the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee.

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SBC Executive Committee Launches New Branding, Websites BY BP STAFF

he Convention-approved SBC logo with its globe, Bible, and cross remains the official and “classic logo” for the Convention, but a new modern alternative has been released and features the same elements in a format more suited to today’s digital environment. “We are so excited about the result of our rebranding project,” said Jonathan Howe, vice

president for communications at the SBC Executive Committee. “The new logos and visual elements are true to who the SBC is as well as to what the original designers desired when they launched the classic logo in 1978. “Notes from that 1978 Convention action requested the logo be simple and uncluttered, easily recognizable, and flexible. When they approved

The new logos and visual elements are true to who the SBC is as well as to what the original designers desired when they launched the classic logo in 1978.

the classic logo, the Executive Committee also requested that it lend itself to updating. We truly believe they’d be pleased with the modern version of what Southern Baptists have come to recognize as a symbol of theological steadfastness and Great Commission endeavor.” Useful Group, which works primarily with churches and ministries, aided in the rebranding effort that includes new looks for the Cooperative Program, Baptist Press, and SBC Life. All the branding guidelines and files can be found and downloaded at branding.SBC.net. “It was an honor to get to help the SBC create its new branding,” said Nick Rynerson, chief creative officer at Useful Group. “We wanted to create something that got to the core of the SBC’s vision in a way that is innovative and engaging. As a member of an SBC church I felt the weight of crafting something that would be faithful and accessible; accurately communicating the DNA of the SBC winsomely and disarmingly. “I’m super thankful and humbled that the SBC entrusted us to help develop that public brand. It’s been one of the highlights of my career, and I hope it can be used to encourage Christians,

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create meaningful conversations, and ultimately help bring Good News to the whole world.” This new branding has a new online home thanks to Mere Agency, an Iowa-based web design group focused on church and ministry websites. The SBC main website has been broken down into a number of microsites to better serve Southern Baptists. “We are so grateful for the opportunity to be part of this effort,” said Matt Heerema, founder of Mere Agency. “Our mission is to help the church use the web to impact the world with the Gospel. Our prayer is that these new sites serve churches and enhance cooperation and unity to take the Good News to the whole world.” In addition to redesigned websites at SBC. net and BaptistPress.com, a jobs-specific site (SBCJobs.net), a church search site (churches. sbc.net), a site specific to The Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (bfm.SBC.net), and an updated site for the SBC Annual Meeting (SBCannualmeeting. net) are all new to the SBC web offerings. A version of this column was published in Baptist Press on August 5, 2020.

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Racial Reconciliation Not a ‘Finished Project’ Twenty-Five Years After Historic Resolution BY DAVID ROACH

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harles Carter chaired the Resolutions Committee that led the Southern Baptist Convention to repent of racism and make a historic push for racial reconciliation at the 1995 SBC Annual Meeting in Atlanta. But what may have been his most significant act of racial reconciliation that summer occurred after he returned home to Birmingham, Alabama. “As chairman of the Resolutions Committee,” Carter said, “I was going to do something specific and concrete to implement what we had tried to say in words.” So he arranged to have lunch with an African American pastor whom he had known casually. At lunch, Carter expressed his desire to be a friend and “meet occasionally.” He will never forget the pastor’s response: “I’ve met about all I want to. I’m ready to do something.” That launched a years-long partnership between Shades Mountain Baptist Church, where Carter was pastor, and the Black church his new friend served. They exchanged pulpits, partnered to bring biblical justice to the inner city, and saw church members become friends across racial lines. A quarter century later, many Southern Baptists tell stories like Carter’s. The SBC’s words caused people to notice its racial reconciliation resolution. Subsequent actions made the statement’s impact reverberate. Still, on the resolution’s twenty-fifth anniversary, Southern Baptists have more progress to make when it comes to race. Some key architects of the resolution believe America’s present

racial strife presents the opportunity for another stride forward.

‘One of the Greatest Days of My Life’ By 1995, the Convention had a history of making statements when current events brought racism to the fore. In 1954, the SBC affirmed the US Supreme Court’s school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. In 1968, messengers denounced racism following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and riots in more than sixty American cities. (Four years earlier, the Convention missed an opportunity when it narrowly defeated a motion to affirm the Civil Rights Act of 1964.) Events in the 1990s again caused Southern Baptists to think collectively about racism. Riots in Los Angeles left sixty-three people dead and more than two thousand others injured after four police officers were acquitted in the beating of Rodney King, an African American. The 1995 O. J. Simpson murder trial aired public allegations of racism against the Los Angeles Police Department once more. Those two events “helped set the need” for a 1995 SBC resolution, said Gary Frost, a Black pastor who served as SBC second vice president that year. But the Convention’s 150th anniversary “was the trigger” for a resolution acknowledging the SBC’s racist past. Then-SBC President Jim Henry told a conference audience in late 1994 he had confronted prejudice in his own life and believed Southern Baptists needed to repent of racism. Henry, Frost, Christian Life Commission Executive Director Richard Land, and others discussed the need for a resolution on the topic, and their efforts eventuated in a May 1995 multiethnic meeting in Nashville to draft a resolution. “The most powerful memory of that process” was the “absolute unity in the room about what we wanted to say together,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr., then and now president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, whom Frost credits as

the resolution’s primary author. “It was all saturated in prayer and commitment to Christ.” The draft was submitted to the SBC Resolutions Committee, which presented it to the Convention the next month largely unchanged. The SBC adopted it by a nearly unanimous vote June 20. “That was one of the greatest days of my life,” said Frost, who is now associational missionary for the Steel Valley Baptist Association in Warren, Ohio. The resolution acknowledged that the Convention’s relationship with African Americans “has been hindered” by slavery’s role in the SBC’s founding and stated “many” churches had “excluded African-Americans.” Messengers “lament[ed] and repudiate[d]” historic acts of racism and “apologize[d] to all African-Americans for condoning and/or perpetuating individual and systemic racism in our lifetime.”

‘Real Advancement’ With the resolution adopted, the question became whether Southern Baptists would live up to it. Leroy Gainey, the first trustee-elected Black faculty member at any SBC seminary, says the Convention has made definite progress in racial reconciliation since 1995. He noted his own experience as pastor of the 1,200-member First Baptist Church of Vacaville, California, and his service as a professor at Gateway Seminary. He added that he was among four finalists considered for the seminary’s presidency in 2004. “I’ve seen a real advancement, some real reaching out, some real desires at brotherhood and sisterhood,” said Gainey, J. M. Frost Senior Professor of Educational Leadership at Gateway. Among advancements, nearly one in five Southern Baptist churches is predominantly non-Anglo. Fred Luter became the SBC’s first Black president in 2012, and more than two dozen Baptist state conventions that cooperate with the SBC have elected non-Anglos as their presidents. During current SBC President J. D. Gree-

ar’s first year in office, 48 percent of his committee appointments were people of color. At its June meeting, the SBC Executive Committee elected Rolland Slade as its first African American chairman. In March, GuideStone Financial Resources became the first SBC entity with a Black female as trustee chairman when its board elected Renée Trewick, a vice president at the New York-based insurance and risk management company Marsh USA. Yet work remains for the SBC to live up to its 1995 resolution. Despite the high percentage of non-Anglo Southern Baptist churches, 85 percent of all Southern Baptist church members are white, according to the Pew Research Center. (Just 60 percent of the US population is Anglo.) SBC entities are still seeking to increase the number of non-Anglos on their ministry staffs. The International Mission Board set a goal this year to have seventy-five Black missionaries by 2025. At the end of last year, the number stood at thirteen out of 3,700 career missionaries, according to the IMB’s 2020 CP Ministry Report. Gainey said SBC seminaries likewise have had difficulty recruiting African American professors. Racial reconciliation is never “a completely finished project,” Mohler said. “Sanctification individually and as God’s people together comes progressively, and we need to lean into what honors God.” Frost said two problems Southern Baptists should mobilize to address are a lack of equality in the criminal justice system and the breakdown of Black families. Additionally, he said, Christians can show America that creation in God’s image is the only objective basis for racial equality. “Conservative African American Christians need our white brothers to step up,” he said.

‘A Strong Hope’ In the wake of protests over the killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man, by Minneapolis police, there are indications some believers may

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indeed be stepping up. A Barna survey released June 16 found nearly all US pastors agree that “the church has a responsibility to denounce racism,” and most (62 percent) say their church has made a statement on the unrest stemming from Floyd’s death. SBC leaders issued a statement May 30 acknowledging that “in the hearts of our fellow citizens of color,” incidents like Floyd’s death “connect to a long history of unequal justice in our country.” Three SBC seminary professors wrote a June 15 op-ed in North Carolina’s Biblical Recorder newsjournal noting “examples of racism” across America “just in the last few weeks.” They urged believers to “listen willingly” to the perspectives of all people and “strive sincerely to find common ground.” This summer, the SBC was scheduled to elect more non-Anglos to boards and committees and hear Greear’s vision for racial reconciliation during the contentious 2020 US presidential election. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which prompted cancellation of the 2020 SBC Annual Meeting, those plans were put on hold. Nonetheless, observers inside and outside the SBC have noted new opportunities to build on the 1995 resolution. Among them is Charlie Dates, a Black Chicago pastor whose church recently began to cooperate with the SBC. He expressed his view during a June 17 online conversation about “race in America” hosted by Executive Committee President and CEO Ronnie Floyd. “If some strategic moves are made beyond resolutions and declarations,” said Dates, pastor of Progressive Baptist Church, then “the Southern Baptist Convention actually has a strong hope of putting feet to its Gospel proclamation.” A version of this column was published in Baptist Press on June 19, 2020.

DAVID ROACH is a writer based in Nashville, Tennessee.

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The Charge Every Senior Pastor and Student Pastor Needs to Hear Richard Ross’s Vision for a New Day for Student Ministry BY RICHARD ROSS

hat if a billionaire believer approached me and said, “Ross, something has to be done about unbelieving young people who are heading toward a life of spiritual ruin and eternity without Christ. I’m going to pay to fly every SBC senior pastor and student pastor to Cowboy Stadium. That should just about fill up the place. Then I’m going to give you a microphone and let you say whatever you want to say to those folk.” If I were given such a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I would give prayerful thought to every sentence—indeed, every word—I was going to say. After fifty years of pouring over Scripture, serving as a student pastor, teaching student pastors, observing student ministries, and digesting research, I know what I would say. My brief presentation to a packed stadium would go like this: Pastors, welcome to this historic gathering. I know you did not come here just to get more discouraged about the future of the church. Instead, I’m praying we will leave here encouraged and optimistic about what the future may

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bring. But very briefly, we must take a look at our current situation. In the May 24, 2019 issue, Christianity Today reported that the biggest factor in the Southern Baptist Convention’s decline is not gaining new converts—“it’s keeping their own. . . . Nearly half of Southern Baptist kids leave and never come back.” The latest Annual Church Profile found the SBC had the largest drop in more than a century, according to Baptist Press. I strongly believe in Ronnie Floyd’s Vision 2025 for the SBC. I especially embrace Strategic Action Four offered by Floyd, president and CEO of the SBC Executive Committee. Between now and 2025, I fully believe we can “turn around the ongoing decline in the SBC in reaching, baptizing, and discipling twelve- to seventeen-year-olds.” In the power of the Spirit, we can see the declining graph of student baptisms begin to move upward. We can see far more students graduate from high school with a deep love for Jesus, the local church, and the Great Commission. All of that can happen. But it won’t happen un-

less we make some significant changes in how we do ministry. Teenagers can accelerate the decline of the SBC. Or, in the power of the Spirit, they can spark renewal in our churches and Kingdom impact in the culture. Here are the five factors most likely to make the difference.

We must introduce many more students to Jesus. Since student baptisms decline every year, things must change. We need strategies to take the Gospel outside the church. We need students, leaders, and parents trained to have Gospel conversations. We need student ministry events planned specifically to present the Gospel. However, church programs make a lasting difference only if the senior pastor and the student pastor model evangelistic lifestyles. Maybe both of you do. If not, for accountability, perhaps the two of you need to go out together to share the Gospel weekly. Then, when it becomes second nature, each of you can take out others— until it permeates the DNA of your church and student ministry.

We must involve every student in missions. Rich missions experiences while young lead to adults who pray, give, and go for a lifetime. The absence of such experiences usually leads to adults who don’t. Every student needs multiple missions experiences locally each year. Every student needs a major missions experience in a challenging location in the US each year. At least once during high school, every student needs an international missions experience. Every missions experience should be strategic. Whether local or global, the ultimate goal

should be to lead people to Jesus and then baptize them into churches. Compassionate service is Christlike, but such ministry should always lift eyes to Jesus and multiply the number of worshipers around the throne for eternity.

We must bring students into the full church family. Students are the church today, as well as the future. Pastors should lead students to function as full church members and to fill church leadership roles. Students should be part of men’s ministry and women’s ministry. Students should be on adult ministry teams and participate in community outreach. When teenagers spend almost all their time in a student ministry silo, we create students who love the youth group but not the church. Once they outgrow the youth group, where will they focus their loyalty and energy? I strongly believe in weekly ministries and special events just for teenagers and their leaders. I also believe in those times when students function with the full congregation. We choose between those two approaches by asking: With this specific ministry event, are we most likely to achieve our mission through an age-specific or an intergenerational approach?

We must spiritually awaken parents so they can lead their children. Church parents are going to support teen sports on Sunday mornings until their hearts change. And they’re going to outsource to the church the spiritual leadership for their children until their hearts change. Church teenagers are full of moral therapeutic deism because church parents are full of moral therapeutic deism (i.e., me-centered faith).

Pastors may try to prod parents to change, but that will not happen until their hearts change. Corporate worship and open-group Bible study are central to the mission of the church. We need to give our best to both of those hours. But what’s missing is intensive, small-group discipleship modeled after Jesus’s investment in Peter, James, and John. We need disciplers who adore King Jesus to massage Scripture into the hearts of three or four others. As that tiny group also begins to grasp the enthroned glory of His Majesty, they will welcome His reign over their lives. Parents awakened to the greatness of Jesus will talk about Him at home, with their eyes sparkling. They will honor the King on Sundays. They will prioritize the youth mission trip over sports camp. They will want to attend your parenting seminars. And most of their children will walk in faith all their lives.

We must thoroughly disciple specific teenagers. We want every student to attend corporate worship, open-group Bible study (often on Sunday mornings), and student worship. After those three hours, students may only give us one additional session. How do we construct that fourth hour to create thoroughly discipled high school graduates who adore Christ and live out of gratitude for the Gospel, take responsibility for their own spiritual growth, articulate what they believe and why, know how to disciple others, live to take the good news to the nations and the hard places in the US, and impact churches, business, entertainment, and government? Teenagers can spend part of student worship answering questions about the student pastor’s talk. But that’s seldom intensive discipleship. For those students who are motivated and want to be disciples of Jesus, we need to saturate them

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with core doctrines, apologetics, biblical interpretation, worldview, evangelism, ethics, spiritual disciplines, etc. And, just as with adults, they are most likely to be transformed by such content in tiny, gender-specific groups that feature gracefilled accountability and a life-on-life relationship with the discipler.

The Value of Student Pastors Student pastors, few realize how valuable you are to the Kingdom today. Only in eternity will we know all King Jesus has done through you in the lives of teenagers. And here is some excellent news. As the church makes the changes we are discussing today, your current value is going to increase dramatically. Who will mobilize the student group and the entire church to introduce many more teenagers to Jesus? Who will ensure every teenager is involved in missions locally and even globally? Who will build around every teenager a rich web of relationships with the congregation? Who will guide every teenager to find places of service with the adults? Who will be the most passionate to see parents spiritually awakened and then leading at home? Who will create a new discipleship strategy for those teenagers who want to follow Jesus? Student pastors, most of the time, the answer will be you. Those of us who teach student ministry stand ready to help you quickly retool for new and wonderful ways to express your calling. Senior pastors, I pray you will help your congregation celebrate and express gratitude for new directions your student pastor is taking. Turning the big ship of the church will not happen overnight. But always keep focused on where you are going. Bring stakeholders to the table and invite them to dream with you. Early on, plan for small wins that will build motivation for more significant changes.

Final Challenge In many ways, the future of our churches depends on our reaching, discipling, and mobilizing a young generation. I am not despondent. If pastors and churches make some Spirit-directed and Spirit-empowered changes, we are going to see the graphs move in new directions. In 2025, I believe we will hear Ronnie Floyd say, “By God’s grace and power, we did it! We turned around the ongoing decline in the SBC in reaching, baptizing, and discipling twelve- to seventeen-year-olds.” All for the glory of the King!

RICHARD ROSS, PhD, is professor of student ministry in the Jack D. Terry School of Educational Ministries at The Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. He is online at richardaross.com.

A version of this column was published in Baptist Press on August 3, 2020.

Job Description for the Student Pastor A complete job description for a student pastor might include Title, Rationale, Qualifications, Character, and Supervision. The following statements might then appear under Essential Job Functions. Churchwide Ministry

• Support the senior pastor in the accomplishment of the church’s mission for the glory of God. • Serve as a pastor aligned with the other pastors to that same end. • Provide caring pastoral ministry and biblical counsel with students, their parents, their leaders, and the full congregation. • Preach and teach the Word of God. • Partner with pastors to lead significant adults in the lives of students to embrace the kingship of Jesus and to be transformed into His image. • Partner with pastors to lead parents, leaders, and members of the congregation to build warm heart connections with students. • Partner with pastors to lead parents of students to be effective, biblical parents and primary spiritual leaders in their homes.

Evangelism and Missions

• Share the Gospel weekly with lost students and lost parents of students, individually and corporately. • Coordinate a strategy for evangelizing and baptizing lost students and parents, including frequent training for students and leaders in having Gospel conversations. • Equip students to share the Gospel, especially at school, in coordination with other churches and campus ministries. • Lead students to be directly involved in missions—locally, nationally, and globally—with families, the student group, and the full body of Christ. Worship and Fellowship

• Coordinate planning to ensure students experience authentic worship personally, with their families, with the full church body, and with the student group. • Coordinate planning to ensure students experience true fellowship and bonding with their families, the full body of Christ, and the student group. Discipleship

• Coordinate weekly Bible study open to all students. • Coordinate weekly discipleship groups open to students who have made a firm decision to be disciples of Jesus, who welcome accountability, and who have made commitments to attendance and preparation. • Coordinate an overall curriculum plan, leading to properly sequenced, balanced, and comprehensive discipleship for students. • Lead in the permeating of student ministry with prayer. Ministry

• Coordinate the mentoring of students sensing a call to ministry vocations. • Lead students to function as full church members, to fill church leadership roles, and to participate in the ministries of the full church. • Coordinate the enlisting, discipling, equipping, and motivating of leaders to serve in student ministry. Administration

• Lead a core planning team in annual, prayer-filled, strategic planning. • Coordinate weekly ministries and special events that accomplish the vision of the church and student ministry. • Coordinate the creation of the annual student ministry budget, and wisely administer that budget. • Coordinate protocols that protect the physical, spiritual, and emotional well-being of students. • Fine-tune skills through formal and informal education.

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We exist to equip you as you engage the culture with the gospel of Jesus Christ, even in the midst of uncertain times. Find COVID-19 Resources For Your Church ERLC.com/COVID19

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In Historic Election, SBC Executive Committee Elects First African American Chair BY DIANA CHANDLER

Image Courtesy of Baptist Press

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he Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee elected its first African American chair in a special called meeting June 16. Rolland Slade, pastor of Meridian Baptist Church in El Cajon, California, was unopposed as EC chair and was unanimously elected by ballot vote. Outgoing chair Mike Stone called for a ballot vote, he said, to mark the historic moment. “I think we all realize by what is going on in this country as well as in our Convention, this timing is in many ways the providence of our Lord,” said Stone, pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Blackshear, Georgia. Many, including Slade, attributed his election to God. “I don’t think there was ever a plan for me to be in this position,” Slade told Baptist Press. “I think it’s what God has done. . . . I believe God loves diversity; He created us and we are all diverse. I think for us to not embrace it is saying that, ‘We’ve got a better idea than You [God].’”

In other business, the EC voted to recommend SBC Annual Meeting sites for 2025 and 2027 in Dallas and Salt Lake City, respectively; elected a complete slate of officers and EC committee chairs; voted to allow the EC to participate in the Paycheck Protection Program if deemed necessary; and received Cooperative Program allocation and EC operating budget reports. The called meeting was conducted on Zoom and livestreamed, as the COVID-19 pandemic prevented the EC from meeting at its Nashville headquarters. The EC conducted business delayed by the cancellation last March of the 2020 SBC Annual Meeting, originally slated June 9–10 in Orlando, Florida. Slade served the last two years as EC vice chair. As EC chair, Slade leads the SBC’s fiduciary, fiscal, and executive arm. He was nominated by EC member Jared Wellman, pastor of Tate Springs Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas. After the vote, Slade thanked EC members, his family, and his church for their support. “We praise God together and let’s pray together and let’s stay together,” he said, “because I’ve learned that a family that prays together, stays together.” Marshal Ausberry, SBC first vice president, said Slade’s election shows how far the SBC has come, and also shows the “mighty hand of God at work.” “His election shows the positive transformation that is occurring in the Convention,” said Ausberry, president of the National African American Fellowship of the SBC and pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Fairfax Station, Virginia. “When you think of the founding of the SBC in 1845, largely over the issue concerning the ownership of enslaved persons by missionaries, to the election of Rolland Slade in the 175th year, this is a seminal moment for the Convention and all Southern Baptists.” Slade served on the EC search committee that recommended in 2019 the hiring of Ronnie Floyd as SBC EC president and CEO. “For the first time in the 103-year history of the SBC Executive Committee, we have today

elected our first African American chairman,” Floyd commented during the meeting. “God bless [him] and may others follow [him] in days to come.” SBC President J. D. Greear, who has made diversity a major emphasis of his term, has lamented that SBC leadership does not reflect current SBC diversity. He called Slade’s election an “exciting day for our Convention.” “Rolland Slade’s election demonstrates we are moving in the right direction,” Greear, pastor of The Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina, told Baptist Press. “During my two years as SBC president, I have worked alongside Rolland and seen his leadership and character to lead this body at this time.” Fred Luter, the only African American ever elected as SBC president, praised God for Slade’s election, especially in the midst of nationwide racial tension. “Rolland is certainly deserving of this historical honor not just because of the color of his skin but because of his knowledge, skills, and leadership as a member of the Executive Committee through the years,” Luter said. “I am proud of Rolland and proud of the men and women of this committee for making this such a historic moment in the Southern Baptist Convention. To God be the glory for the things He has done!” Luter, pastor of Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans, was SBC president from 2012–2014.

Other Elections Tom Tucker, a vocational evangelist from Rock Hill, South Carolina, was elected as EC vice chair. Joe Knott, an attorney from Raleigh, North Carolina, was reelected EC secretary. The EC also elected four committee chairs: Robyn Hari, a financial advisor from Brentwood, Tennessee, was elected chairman of the Committee on Convention Finances and Stewardship Development. Rob Showers, an attorney from Leesburg, Virginia, was elected chairman

of the Committee on Convention Missions and Ministry. Jim Gregory, senior pastor of First Southern Baptist Church in Mountain Home, Idaho, was elected to chair the Committee on Southern Baptist Relations. Rod Martin, CEO of The Martin Organization in Destin, Florida, was elected to chair the Committee on Convention Events and Strategic Planning.

Paycheck Protection Program The EC granted permission for the entity to apply, if deemed necessary, for a Paycheck Protection Program loan of up to $750,000 through the US Small Business Administration under the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. Bill Townes, SBC EC chief financial officer, noted that a loan could be used to potentially offset an anticipated decrease in Cooperative Program giving during the economic downturn related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Venue Changes Acting as the SBC after the cancellation of the 2020 SBC Annual Meeting, the EC voted to move the 2025 SBC Annual Meeting from Salt Lake City to Dallas. The proposed date of the Dallas meeting would be June 10–11, 2025. EC members also voted that the 2027 SBC Annual Meeting be held June 8–9 in Salt Lake City. Both recommendations are contingent upon satisfactory contract negotiations.

Other Business At the close of the meeting, the Credentials Committee notified the EC of the election of a new chairman, Mike Lawson, pastor of First Baptist Church of Sherman, Texas, and an EC member. Stacy Bramlett, the outgoing chairman who is also a member of the EC, remains a Credentials Committee member. Messengers to the 2019 SBC Annual Meeting

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established the committee to receive reports of a church’s suspected departure from Southern Baptist polity, doctrine, or practice, and to make recommendations to the SBC Executive Committee regarding the possible disfellowship of churches from the SBC. In other business, the EC received a 2019– 2020 second quarter Cooperative Program budget report of $101,138,686, dated March 31, a 0.40 percent increase of the report for the same time the previous year. The EC received a second quarter 2019–20 EC and SBC operating budget report, showing a negative total change in net assets of $1,882,883. During the first six months of the fiscal year through March, revenue was under budget by $395,098, and expenses were under budget by $441,131. The second quarter 2019–20 EC and SBC operating budget results for the period ending March 31, 2020, was negatively impacted by the economic downturn. A version of this column was published in Baptist Press on June 16, 2020.

DIANA CHANDLER is Baptist Press’s senior writer.

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Early Adopters Pave the Way for GO2 Initiative BY TIMOTHY COCKES Submitted Photo

ost college students struggle figuring out their next step after graduation, but for Bob Smith,* a memorable mission trip to Southeast Asia after his freshman year cemented exactly what he wanted to spend his life doing. “I’ll always remember sitting across from a student who we had just met and shared the Gospel with, and tears just began to fill his eyes, and he said, ‘This is the kind of love I’ve been searching for my whole life,’ in response to the love of Christ,” Smith said. Smith recently returned from spending his first two years after graduation from the University of North Carolina once again ministering in Southeast Asia through the International Mission Board’s Journeyman program. A global studies graduate with a minor in biomed, Smith is no longer pursuing medical school and instead plans to return to Southeast Asia to do full-time ministry. He also encourages other college seniors to pursue some type of ministry work immediately upon their graduation.

“Everything we do can expand to the global goal of God being worshipped among all people and nations,” Smith said. “Not only will it be a great adventure, but it will allow you to experience God’s glory and know Him more than anything else will. We make His glory known and enjoy Him more.” College students such as Smith are the target of the newly-established SBC initiative called GO2, which challenges college seniors to give their first two years after graduation to the mission field as either a Journeyman missionary with the International Mission Board or as part of a church plant in one of the North American Mission Board’s Send Cities. SBC President J. D. Greear launched the mobilization strategy in partnership with NAMB and IMB in 2018. Todd Unzicker, associate pastor at The Summit Church, where Greear serves as lead pastor, said the concept of sending out college students after graduation is something their church has been doing for many years. Greear wanted to bring the same focus to the whole

We believe this is a movement of God that will sweep across the Southern Baptist Convention and beyond.

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Convention when he became president in 2018. Unzicker said GO2 “seemed like a natural fit” within two of Greear’s five initiatives as president of the SBC in terms of missions and church planting as well as reaching the next generation. “When Southern Baptists have been at their best they’ve always been about sending, and we want sending to be not only the primary but also the main purpose of our Convention of churches coming together,” Unzicker said. “NAMB and IMB are 100 percent committed to this, and want to be the pathway for sending all graduates to church plants and missionary teams. We believe this is a movement of God that will sweep across the Southern Baptist Convention and beyond.” Along with Smith, many college graduates have committed their early years after graduation to missions before GO2 was made an official SBC initiative by Greear last year. One such student is Melissa Fredrick,* who grew a desire for global missions after spending a summer doing mission work in South Africa. Fredrick is planning on future foreign mission work as a Journeyman once travel is cleared again by the IMB. Fredrick expects her time overseas to be a difficult but rewarding experience. “I know going overseas can be stressful and I definitely expect to see a lot more of my weakness and my sin,” Fredrick said. “I also am hoping that I will get to learn from people who have been on the field for a long time and sit under their teaching as I go along with their ministry.” International ministry is not the only avenue in which college students have paved the way for the GO2 movement. Unlike the IMB, the North American Mission Board previously did not have a follow-up program to their summer missions internship taking place throughout the Send Cities, titled GenSend. However, many students informally have chosen to relocate to one of the Send Cities as a result of time spent there during their GenSend summer. One such example is Abbey Caudell, who relocated to New Orleans, Louisiana, after being a

part of New Orleans’s first ever GenSend team in the summer of 2016. Caudell now serves as the missions director at Lakeshore Church in New Orleans and additionally will soon be working for Send Relief full-time on a two-year contract. Caudell said GenSend taught her both how to live on mission and about the role of domestic ministry. “Learning how to live on mission with a lens of intentionality was a game-changer for me, and it shaped evangelism for me and the weight and practicality of it,” Caudell said. “Before GenSend I was very much on team ‘foreign missions is basically the only thing that matters,’ but coming and serving here totally changed my view of that. We need people on the ground bringing the Gospel to places in the States too because not everyone has access to Bible-believing and Jesus-preaching churches. I think GO2 will be a great way to equip and raise up future leaders in the SBC.” The GO2 initiative will also be available to newly married couples with no children. Dylan and Autumn Pentecost currently serve as part of a church plant in Montreal, Canada, after both doing GenSend there in separate summers. Dylan said after they were engaged in 2017, his fiancée Autumn decided she need to do the GenSend program to see if she was called to live in Montreal as well. Autumn said she quickly felt broken for the lost in the city the same way Dylan had when he did GenSend there. The couple married that August and moved to Montreal as NAMB church planters in early 2018. Dylan now encourages other couples to consider mission work during the early part of their marriage. “Now that you are married, you are a team and the Lord has created you to be a team, you both have to have this vision,” Pentecost said. “Think about how the Lord could strengthen your marriage and your faith in Him. It will be one of the hardest and most rewarding experiences for your marriage.” Pentecost said he started advertising GO2 to

college students he knew as soon as he heard about the initiative. “I think it’s a great option for college students who are really trying to figure out the rest of their lives,” Pentecost said. “We are called to live life on mission at all times, and then you just do it wherever you are at the time. You have to be saying ‘yes’ in your obedience right now in your walk with the Lord and then GO2 will be an easy ‘yes’ for you.” Whether foreign or domestic missions, married or single, Unzicker imagines a future movement within the Southern Baptist Convention where all college seniors give their first two years after graduation to missions. Unzicker encourages college students to surrender to God wherever and however He might use them. “We tell graduates do what you do well, and do it somewhere strategic for the mission of God,” Unzicker said. “Put your ‘yes’ on the table and let God put it on the map.” College seniors can get involved with the GO2 movement by visiting go2years.net. A version of this column was published in SBC Life online on May 5, 2020.

TIMOTHY COCKES is a graduate divinity student at Liberty University and freelance writer in Lynchburg, Virginia.

* Name changed for security reasons

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Photo courtesy of SBC Executive Committee

Addison Named SBC Executive Committee Executive Vice President BY GEORGE SCHROEDER

reg Addison has been named executive vice president for the Southern Baptist Convention’s Executive Committee. Officers of the Executive Committee approved Addison upon recommendation of EC President and CEO Ronnie Floyd during a September 8 conference call. Addison has been associate executive director of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention (ABSC) since 2014. He joined the EC staff in early October. Addison will be tasked with working alongside Floyd to lead the EC staff and coordinate Convention policy and legal affairs for the EC. He will also serve as a liaison to various SBC standing committees and assist with the orientation of new committee members and appointees.

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The position is new to the EC staff. Floyd, who was elected as the EC’s president and CEO in April 2019, said he became convinced in recent months of the need for the position. He said God put Addison “on my heart” as he prayed during a recent forty-day fast, and added that Addison’s “great pastor’s heart” will help to further Floyd’s mission of serving Southern Baptist pastors and churches. “He will be an outstanding addition to our team,” Floyd said, “bringing a unique giftedness that is needed.” Bob Sorrell, the former executive pastor at Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis who is Addison’s longtime friend and mentor, praised Addison’s combination of character, experience, and ability. In addition to almost a quarter century in full-time ministry—nearly half as a senior pastor—Addison has a law degree. Sorrell, who also formerly served as an SBC Executive Committee member and a former trustee of GuideStone Financial Resources, called him an “exceptional Christian man in every way.” “He is very relational, outgoing, and charismatic,” Sorrell said, “and at the same time he has incredibly strong administrative skills. Greg is blessed with leadership qualities, takes the initiative, and is a problem-solver. He is a significant team player.” Archie Mason, senior pastor of Central Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and a current EC member, who has known Addison for fifteen years and worked closely with him on ABSC issues, called him “a great communicator, a servant, a true Baptist, and a believer in the power of the Cooperative Program.” “He is strong in building relationships, communicating vision, and leading others,” Mason said. “I believe Greg will do a great job serving Southern Baptists as part of the EC team.” Addison said he is excited to begin working with Floyd and the EC staff to “encourage Southern Baptists toward Vision 2025.” He recalled being in the audience during the February 2020 EC meeting, when Floyd unfolded specifics of the five-year initiative, a call to reach

every person with the Gospel in every town, every city, every state, and every nation. “I knew immediately that this is the vision that speaks to the heart of our churches and people,” Addison said. “Joining together cooperatively to reach the nations, to send more missionaries, to see the next generation of Southern Baptists join the mission—that’s why we are Southern Baptists.” Addison said while considering the opportunity with the SBC EC, he recalled something ABSC Executive Director Sonny Tucker had told him years earlier, when he wrestled with leaving the pastorate of First Baptist Church of Cabot, Arkansas, for the state convention post. Tucker told Addison then: “There’s a piece of us that hurts not being a pastor. But if you ever stop hurting for the church, you’re probably not good in a denominational role—because it’s about serving churches.” Addison, who has served as an interim pastor for several churches while at the ABSC, said he takes that ache—and that approach—into the new position. “In my heart, I will always be a pastor,” he said. “Serving with the great staff at the Executive Committee gives me the privilege of serving churches all over the SBC.” Originally from Memphis, Addison sat under the teaching of Adrian Rogers at Bellevue Baptist Church for more than thirty years, beginning at age seven. He gave his life to Christ at age nine, and counts Rogers’s ministry as critical in his growth, as well as his call to ministry and subsequent work within the SBC. “He taught me as a Christian to walk with Jesus, as a preacher to preach the Bible and call people to Jesus, and as a Southern Baptist to obey the Great Commission through missions,” Addison said. Addison is currently vice chairman of the board of directors of Love Worth Finding, the ongoing media ministry of Rogers. In a 2019 article posted to the ministry’s website, he said when he hears “the word ‘pastor,’ that means Adrian Rogers to me. . . . There’s a whole bunch of us out there just doing what God wants because that’s what we’re taught.”

Addison earned a bachelor of business administration in marketing from the University of Memphis and a doctor of jurisprudence from the University of Tennessee. Before entering fulltime ministry, he spent six years practicing law in Memphis. He was ordained in 1996 at Bellevue and served on staff there from 1996–2002. Prior to joining the ABSC, he was senior pastor at East Side Baptist Church in Paragould, Arkansas, and First Baptist of Cabot. He served as president of the ABSC in 2012–2013 and as chaplain of the Arkansas House of Representatives in 2013–2014. Floyd cited Addison’s unique experience as an additional asset in the new role. “While I did not set out to hire someone with a legal background, it will be great to have someone with this expertise to serve by my side,” Floyd said. “But even more importantly, Greg is a man with a great pastor’s heart who also understands the enormous challenges that face us here daily.” When not serving as interim pastor, Addison is a member of First Baptist of Cabot. He and his wife Janet, who were high school sweethearts, have two adult children: Mabry Anne and John Grant. Citing Addison’s experience as a pastor and state executive, as well as his legal background, Tucker said Addison is “more than prepared” for the new role with the EC. “It is obvious that God’s hand has been on Greg to uniquely prepare him to serve the SBC in this capacity,” Tucker said. “. . . Greg’s great leadership capabilities and warm, servant’s heart will be an incredible blessing to Southern Baptists.” A version of this column was published in Baptist Press on September 9, 2020.

GEORGE SCHROEDER is associate vice president for Convention news with the SBC Executive Committee.

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Cooperative Program Giving Tops $16 Million for Two Consecutive Months Amid Pandemic BY BP STAFF

leven months into the 2020 fiscal year, giving through the Cooperative Program remained steady despite challenges faced by churches and members through the COVID-19 global pandemic. Gifts in August totaled more than $16 million, marking the first time that threshold has been reached in consecutive months since the pandemic began. “This is a remarkable reflection of the commitment our churches have to give through the Cooperative Program,” SBC Executive Committee President and CEO Ronnie Floyd said in a statement. “Southern Baptists should be encouraged by our churches and their continued faithful commitment to giving through the Cooperative Program this year. It is their faithfulness that has carried us through this season; therefore, let us give glory to God alone and thank our cooperating churches for their giving through our Cooperative Program. “I rejoice that even as some continue to project the future to be dismal and filled with doom, our churches continue to rise up with a strong, faithful commitment to give toward forwarding the Great Commission. One thousand ‘thankyous’ to each of our pastors, church leaders, and churches for their faithfulness in giving!”

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As of August 31, gifts received by the EC for distribution through the CP Allocation Budget totaled $178,077,541.19. This is $3,394,538.33 or 1.87 percent less than last year’s budget contribution of $181,472,079.52. The amount given was slightly below the $180,125,000.00 year-to-date budgeted projection to support Southern Baptist ministries globally and across North America by $2,047,458.81 or 1.14 percent. The final amount received in August 2020 totaled $16,078,609.05, which was $1,388,285.48 (7.95 percent) less than the $17,466,894.53 received in August 2019 and $296,390.95 (1.81 percent) less than the monthly budgeted amount of $16,375,000.00. Designated gifts received in August amounted to $6,173,277.47. This total was $69,794.03 or 1.12 percent below gifts of $6,243,071.50 received last August. Also, this year’s designated gifts through the first eleven months of the fiscal year amounted to $169,508,225.40, which was $17,814,131.94 or 9.51 percent less than the $187,322,357.34 given through same period in the previous fiscal year. The Cooperative Program is the financial fuel to fund the SBC mission and vision of reaching every person for Jesus Christ in every town, every

Image Courtesy of Send Relief

city, every state, and every nation. Begun in 1925, local churches contribute to the ministries of their state conventions and to the missions and ministries of the SBC through a unified giving plan to support both sets of ministries. Monies include receipts from individuals, churches, and state conventions for distribution according to the 2019– 2020 Cooperative Program Allocation Budget. State and regional conventions retain a portion of church contributions to Southern Baptists’ Cooperative Program to support work in their respective areas and forward a percentage to SBC national and international causes. The percentage of distribution is at the discretion of each state or regional convention. The Convention-adopted budget for 2019– 2020 is $196.5 million and is disbursed as follows: 50.41 percent to international missions through the International Mission Board, 22.79 percent to North American missions through the North American Mission Board, 22.16 percent to theological education through the six SBC seminaries and the Southern Baptist Historical Library and Archives, 2.99 percent to the SBC operating budget, and 1.65 percent to the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. If national CP gifts exceed the $196.5 million budget projection at the end of the fiscal year, the Executive Committee’s portion of any overage falls to 0.0 percent while IMB’s portion increases to 53.4 percent of the overage. The other entities’ percentage distributions of the overage remain the same. The

SBC Executive Committee distributes all CP and designated gifts it receives on a weekly basis to the SBC ministry entities. Month-to-month swings reflect a number of factors, including the timing of when the cooperating state Baptist conventions forward the national portion of Cooperative Program contributions to the Executive Committee, the day of the month churches forward their CP contributions to their state conventions, the number of Sundays in a given month, and the percentage of CP contributions forwarded to the SBC by the state conventions after shared ministry expenses are deducted. Designated contributions include the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions, the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions, Southern Baptist Global Hunger Relief, Disaster Relief, and other special gifts. This total includes only those gifts received and distributed by the Executive Committee and does not reflect designated gifts contributed directly to SBC entities. CP allocation budget gifts received by the Executive Committee are reported monthly to the executives of the entities of the convention, to the state convention offices, to the state Baptist papers, and are posted online at sbc.net/cp. A version of this column was published in Baptist Press on September 2, 2020.

Our vision is more attainable than ever.

2 0 2 0 GOAL

$175 million

Find Lottie Moon resources to lead your church to give at imb.org/lmco. The Lottie Moon Christmas OfferingÂŽ is a registered trademark of WMUÂŽ.

Dear Fellow Servants, I thank Jesus for the incredible work that has been accomplished for the sake of the gospel this year, even in the midst of a global pandemic, as we continue to work toward our goal of making Revelation 7:9 a reality; a great multitude of every tribe, tongue and nation worshiping God together. For 175 years, through the International Mission Board, Southern Baptists have continuously carried out the work of the Great Commission. Nevertheless, there are still billions of humans from thousands of people groups who have not heard the good news of Jesus Christ. We must not waiver from our mission to share the gospel to people around the globe; yet it must begin at home. With about half of Southern Baptist churches contributing to the Lottie Moon Christmas OfferingÂŽ for international missions annually, IMB received $157.3 million in the 2018-19 offering. What could we do together if we all give this year? Will you help reach our 2020 Lottie Moon Christmas Offering goal of $175 million in honor of our 175th year of service in partnership with the Southern Baptist Convention? Thank you for your prayers, as well as your generosity through the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering. Blessings,

Paul Chitwood

Week of Prayer preview Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4

Sunday, November 29

Monday, November 30

Tuesday, December 1

Wednesday, December 2

The Naivasha Childrenâ€™s

In an area of Croatia

Doug Derbyshire has been

Farmers harvest fish from

Shelter in Naivasha,

with 250,000 people

faithfully visiting Baan Po

a pond built to provide a

Kenya, provides a safe

and only one Baptist

as a medical missionary

sustainable livelihood for

place for boys who would

church, Eric Maroney

for the last six years. After

11 indigenous missionary

otherwise be living on

works with a team

trying every evangelism

families. IMB missionary

the dangerous streets.

to broadcast an

technique he knew, there

Joe Brewster and his team

The shelter workers seek

evangelistic program,

was still no church in

partner with indigenous

to reunite them with

which airs twice a week

Baan Po. His last visit in

missionaries in Peru to

their families.

and reaches more than

January 2020 sparked

engage unreached tribes

40,000 people.

new hope as three patients

with the gospel.

made decisions of faith.

PREPARE WITH PRAYER Begin praying for this year's Lottie Moon Christmas OfferingÂŽ.

Pray for wisdom in planning sermons and setting a church goal.

A WEEK OF PRAYER FOR A LIFETIME OF CHANGE.

Day 5

Day 6

Day 7

Day 8

Thursday, December 3

Friday, December 4

Saturday, December 5

Sunday, December 6

Throughout their 175-

Working alongside Italian

For 20 years, the IMB

IMB missionaries say

year history, Southern

and US partners, the

worked to maintain a

thank you to Southern

Baptists have maintained

Worthys bring the gospel

gospel presence among the

Baptists who give

an uninterrupted witness

to areas of Italy with little

Khaleela, a Muslim people

generously so that the

among the nations, in

to no evangelical witness

group in South Asia. After

gospel spreads to all

spite of famine, war

by strategically placing

years of setbacks, Luciano

nations.

and civil unrest. This

partnering groups in areas

and Sofia Serrano moved

commitment has not come

of Italy where churches do

to the region and are now

without sacrifice.

not exist.

discipling a woman from the Khaleela who decided to follow Christ.

Lead your church to pray through these mission stories during the Week of Prayer for International Missions. Find resources at imb.org/lmco.

Pray for your missions team as they encourage giving and inspire your congregation.

Pray that the Lord would prepare the hearts of your congregation to respond with generosity.

Will you join other churches in setting aside one Sunday this fall to focus on the Biblical call to care for vulnerable children?

â€œDefend the cause of the fatherless.â€?

Promotional Resources & Bible Study Curriculum are available, in English & Spanish, at

lifelinechild.org/orphansunday

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