Revised June 5, 5 p.m. Eastern to reflect 2006 ACP figures
TYLER, Texas (BP)–Missionary David Rogers, son of the late Adrian Rogers, will be nominated for first vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Texas pastor David Dykes announced June 5.
Rogers has served with the SBC’s International Mission Board in Madrid, Spain, as a church planter and mobilization coordinator the past 13 years.
Dykes, pastor of Green Acres Baptist Church in Tyler, Texas, said in a news release, “For 162 years, Southern Baptists have been driven by a missionary heart. Like never before, we need to refocus our convention on the fields already white unto harvest. I believe a convention that is serious about missions should have a missionary leading us.
“Southern Baptists need a new vision to plant churches,” Dykes continued. “Who better than an experienced church planter to lead this effort?”
Dykes said Rogers has worked to plant numerous Baptist churches in what the news release described as one of the world’s most culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse mission fields. Dykes said Madrid has the third-largest population in Western Europe at 5.8 million, with one of the fastest-growing immigrant populations in Europe, pushing into the hundreds of thousands every year. North African Muslims and South American Catholics have flooded the city in recent years as Baptist churches have struggled to keep pace.
Rogers, a 1989 graduate of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas, first sensed God’s call to foreign missions as an 11-year-old at a Royal Ambassador camp. Rogers followed the call as a summer missionary among Navajo peoples in North America and then serving two years aboard the missionary ship M.V. Doulos with Operation Mobilization.
“As a pastor,” Dykes said, “I’ve made a commitment to lead our church to be on mission with God.” Although Green Acres Baptist Church, which is affiliated the Baptist General Convention of Texas, has led the Southern Baptist Convention in Cooperative Program giving the past several years, Dykes noted: “We can give all the money in the world, but budget percentages don’t plant churches. Missionaries plant churches, and if it weren’t for field missionaries like David Rogers, we wouldn’t have a Cooperative Program to start with.
“The reason we cooperate — first and foremost — is to do missions,” Dykes said. “David Rogers represents everything that the Conservative Resurgence was about. He believes the Bible, he believes lost people need Jesus and he believes that hell is waiting for those who never trust Christ as their Savior.”
Rogers and his wife Kelly of 19 years have two sons, Jonathan, 17, and Stephen, 10.
On the mission field, Rogers and his family are members of Iglesia Bautista Buen Pastor in Madrid, while their home membership remains at the Memphis-area Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova, Tenn., where his late father was pastor for 33 years.
Information for Bellevue Baptist Church from Southern Baptists’ Annual Church Profile survey for the most recent year, 2006, lists 668 baptisms and primary worship service attendance of 8,291. The church gave $338,947, or 1.3 percent, through the Cooperative Program from total undesignated receipts of $24,846,883. According to the ACP, the church’s total mission expenditures were $7,185,285, including $84,500 for the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions and $39,000 for the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions.
Dykes said, “I will not ask Southern Baptists to elect David Rogers to honor his father, though his father is worthy of great honor. I will not even ask them to elect David Rogers to honor our missionaries, though they certainly deserve our honor. Quite simply, I’m going to ask Southern Baptists to elect David Rogers to honor the Lord Jesus Christ.
“God willing, this convention will keep our focus where it ought to be: going to the ends of the earth to tell people about Jesus. I believe that electing David Rogers will help us keep that focus,” Dykes said.
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