Indianapolis | Though Victoria Awbrey didn’t become a Southern Baptist until adulthood, the Cooperative Mission built into the SBC had a profound impact on her early life. “I was saved at Falls Creek Camp in Oklahoma as a seventh grader, when a friend invited me to church camp,” she said.
Years later, she and her husband, Michael, would find themselves in Tremont, Illinois, where he was a pastor. When the church decided to begin cooperating with the Illinois Baptist State Association, Awbrey started to really learn how much Southern Baptists do together, to serve one another and to take the gospel to their state and around the world.
“I really enjoy the broader SBC life,” she said, from the Registration area of the 2024 Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis. “(This meeting) is something I look forward to every year. In fact, my birthday often falls over convention. And I like to say I enjoy spending my birthday at a good Baptist business meeting!”
This year, Awbrey took her newfound love for Baptist cooperation to a new level. She served as a member of the SBC Registration Committee.
By mid-afternoon on June 11, the first day of the annual meeting, just under 14,000 total messengers and guests had been checked in by the staff working the registration desks inside the Indianapolis Convention Center. That equals processing about 583 people per hour during their check-in times, a testament to their efficiency and planning.
The large Indianapolis total is a strong showing for an annual gathering held outside of the SBC’s historical geography. Last year, in New Orleans, messengers and guests totaled just over 16,500.
Most of this year’s enormous crowd, convened to make decisions affecting the cooperative fellowship of churches, were pre-registered, so they sailed smoothly through the line to receive their credentials.
However, those who had not completed pre-registration were directed to a separate area, where members of the Registration Committee like Awbrey greeted them to walk them through registration as a messenger or guests.
“I was nominated by my church’s pastor and received a phone call from Bart Barber to ask me to serve in this capacity,” Awbrey said as she chatted about how she ended up on the committee and how members serve. A new computer system was in use this year, she said, so they expected that she and her fellow committee members might handle more requests for help as bugs were worked out of the new system.
“They were expecting about 11,000 registered messengers, and they expected to have problems or need assistance from the committee with about 350 of those. That’s the estimate. But they did 350 on Sunday,” Awbrey said.
That pace had slowed dramatically as the software engineers quickly made adjustments and the early rush of messengers subsided. And Awbrey enjoyed the work.
“Everybody’s been pretty polite, a few confused people here and there, but you just work through it,” she said.
When asked how she has bridged the gap between what she experienced as a child at Falls Creek and being part of this big missional family, she pointed to the Convention.
“It’s not something I fully comprehended until I visited my first convention,” Awbrey said. When I walked in and I saw the depth and breadth of everything that the cooperation brings to the individual churches, to the people, to the missionaries, that’s when I really realized that I’m truly a part of something that’s greater than just our individual church—just my individual self. But together we can do such amazing, huge things that we wouldn’t be able to do without one another.”
–Ben Jones in Indianapolis