Nashville, Tenn. | A report to be brought by the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force this June at the SBC annual meeting could be considered as one 15 years in the making.
The group was formed last summer at the New Orleans gathering of Southern Baptists and has since spent considerable time in reviewing documents, conducting interviews and holding discussions over the impact of the GCR.
Task Force chair Jay Adkins told Baptist Press that the group’s work has been kept close to the vest on purpose. “I will say that we have read an enormous amount of material and are knee-deep in interviewing individuals who were involved with the formation and implementation of the GCR report,” said Adkins, pastor of First Baptist Church in Westwego, La., and current SBC first vice president.
By spring 2009, after steady years of growth, SBC membership had begun to decline after reaching 16.3 million in 2006. Baptisms had been in a freefall for 10 years. Worship and small group attendance remained steady, but would soon be lagging as well.
Southeastern Seminary President Daniel Akin delivered a chapel sermon titled “Axioms for a Great Commission Resurgence,” stirring chatter on the blogosphere. “There had been conversations for a while, months,” Akin said recently. “My message was a kind of call to arms.”
A GCR declaration emerged that featured signers such as then-Lifeway President Thom Rainer and Southern Seminary President Al Mohler who called it “a good faith effort to provide direction for Southern Baptists moving into the future.” Non-signers questioned its tone, focus and clarity.
“Overlap and duplication in our associations, state and national conventions is strangling us!” Akin said at the time.
At the SBC Annual Meeting that June, messengers overwhelmingly approved the GCR Task Force. The Task Force provided seven recommendations to messengers prior to the 2010 annual meeting in Orlando. Following debate, they were adopted by an estimated 3-to-1 margin.
Perhaps no entity was as affected by the GCR as the North American Mission Board (NAMB). Part of their proposals was dissolving the cooperative agreements between NAMB and state conventions in order to “reprioritize” $50.6 million. Of course, that also greatly impacted state conventions in pioneer areas while providing the fuel for NAMB’s church-planting emphasis.
Art Toalston, former editor of Baptist Press, recently posted an extended “10-year evaluation” of the GCR and its impact at arttoalston.com. He called the lengthy article “the most important piece of Baptist journalism I have ever written.”
A notable critic of the GCR’s effects is Chuck Kelley, who led New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary as president for 23 years. His book, The Best Intentions: How a Plan to revitalize the SBC Accelerated Its Decline, was released last year.
Kelley did not oppose the Task Force recommendations in 2010 because, “I did not want to be viewed in any way as opposed to the need for a Great Commissions resurgence,” he told Toalston in an email exchange. “I simply could not support the approach taken by the task force,” resolving to “assess its impact ten years down the road.”
—Scott Barkley, Baptist Press