Editor’s note: Audio recordings of meetings held by the SBC’s Great Commission Resurgence Task Force in 2009 and 2010 were released earlier this year after being embargoed for 15 years. Baptist Press has spent the past few weeks listening to these recordings and talking with key task force members to get their thoughts on the task force’s effectiveness. This piece is the fourth in a four-part series. Read previous installments here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
NASHVILLE (BP) – The Great Commission Resurgence Task Force report given at the 2010 SBC Annual Meeting presented seven components for messengers, all of them intertwined with the goal of reenergizing Southern Baptists toward spreading the Gospel around the world.
The fourth component – central in number, and perhaps in scope – was restructuring the North American Mission Board, an entity that had been a source of consternation for years.
Reports in 2006 and 2008 by The Christian Index, news journal of the Georgia Baptist Convention, questioned ministry effectiveness and leadership decisions at NAMB. Each report led to the resignation of the mission board’s current president. In the latter case, Geoff Hammond and three associates stepped down on Aug. 11, 2009.
NAMB was still being assessed, formally and informally, on its ministry effectiveness after the messenger-approved Covenant for a New Century in 1996 had formed the entity by combining several others, including the Home Mission Board, the Brotherhood Commission and the Radio and Television Commission.
The impact of The Index’s reporting (disclosure: this story’s author was Index production editor during that time) appeared during the GCRTF’s meeting in Arkansas later that month.
Chairman Ronnie Floyd had turned things over to Ted Traylor, pastor of Olive Baptist Church in Pensacola, Fla., and Harry Lewis, who was serving as NAMB senior strategist.
“At the North American Mission Board, we have four less employees than we did two weeks ago,” began Traylor, a NAMB trustee at the time. “Things are in good shape with Gerald Har … uh, Richard Harris leading as an interim.”
Gerald Harris was the editor of The Index at the time, though managing editor Joe Westbury wrote the NAMB coverage
Restructuring NAMB to focus on church planting brought the topic of evangelism to the forefront. Namely, which entity would take that on in its ministry assignment? Lifeway was considered, but NAMB seemed the more obvious choice. After all, task force members discussed, doesn’t planting a church have a heavy dose of evangelism baked in?
And yet, existing churches also desire resources for evangelism.
“I think this is a clear vision distinction, perhaps even in this room, and one that needs to get out,” said Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Albert Mohler in one task force meeting. “How much [should] we ask some entity to do to service existing churches in terms of evangelism? It’s fair to say that that’s an open question, I think, and obviously we need a lot of input to think that through.
“… [But] if we’re going to do something new, regardless of whether there’s one missionary board or two or 12 … then we’ve got program assignments under those that we’re gonna have to think through.”
“It would be a terrible mistake to put evangelism at Lifeway,” said then-Georgia Baptist Convention Executive Director J. Robert White. “Missiologically, evangelism is evangelism. Evangelism and church planting go hand in hand. It is the North American Mission Board for a reason, and I think evangelism is such a critical part of our mission.”
Restructuring NAMB would also affect funding through cooperative agreements with state conventions, particularly those in pioneer, or new work, areas where such funding provided many salaries and resources.
The Utah/Idaho state convention lost directors in women’s ministry, state missions, associations and church planting through the restructuring, that convention’s executive director, Rob Lee, told Baptist Press.
Those losses were painful. But looking at the GCR’s effects requires a bigger scope.
“Most of the states out West, if not all, were planting churches,” Lee said. “But the GCR and NAMB’s efforts definitely helped after that.”
Component 4 of the GCR report in June 2010 addressed “the mission of reaching North America with the Gospel [as] a clear concern and priority.” Discussions ultimately settled on language that “refocused and unleashed” NAMB “for greater effectiveness through a priority to plant churches” for the purpose of reaching “cities and underserved regions and people groups.” The report also called on Southern Baptists to “affirm NAMB” in those areas.
The task force sought a balance between affirming NAMB in its church planting emphasis while resourcing and encouraging churches in their own efforts to reproduce.
At the August 2009 GCR Task Force meeting in Arkansas, Mohler spoke on the “very clear acknowledgement” of the local church’s responsibility for making disciples.
“The Great Commission wasn’t given to the Southern Baptist Convention,” he said. “The Southern Baptist Convention can pass away, and the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ still has this mission. The local congregation still has this. And this is the genius of our polity. We’ve got to get back to the explicit acknowledgement and responsibility for the Great Commission to the local church.”
An overhanging question remained during task force meetings: who would be the president of NAMB if the GCRTF report were accepted?
In June 2009, the pastor of Southern Baptists’ largest church claimed in an email that he had been approached – without specifying by whom – to be president of NAMB “years ago” and sent a “12-step recovery plan” for the SBC.
“It was ignored,” Saddleback Church’s then-pastor Rick Warren added in the message about his signing the GCR statement to then-SBC President Johnny Hunt and Southeastern Seminary President Danny Akin.
Louisville pastor Kevin Ezell would be elected NAMB president in September 2010. In a recent interview with BP, Ezell reiterated Mohler’s concern that church planting originate with churches, using NAMB as a resource.
“We have worked hard since 2010 to make sure that every church NAMB helps plant has a sending church,” Ezell said. “That is a church that will take ownership in the plant and consider it its own, even if it didn’t come directly out of that sending church.”
At the recent annual meeting in Dallas, Ezell cited the GCR recommendations passed a few months before his election.
“They made recommendations,” he said. “… I did some of those recommendations and I did not do some of those recommendations. … They were not mandates.”
Based on what Ezell told BP recently, adjustments were made regarding the recommendations, particularly one calling on NAMB to partner with state conventions located in unreached and underserved populations.
“We have done that, but several years into it we also realized that we had to keep Southern Baptists strong in the South,” he said. “So now we have Send Network agreements with most South state conventions, helping them with church planting efforts. If the foundation of our strength in the South erodes, we won’t be able to reach the lesser-served areas.”
His Dallas comments raised eyebrows, but Ezell was right. SBC Bylaw 18.E.9 states that the SBC Executive Committee, which the messengers effectively constitute during the SBC Annual Meeting, cannot direct entities. That responsibility belongs to each entity’s “trustees elected by the Convention and accountable directly to the Convention.”
To that end, correct verbiage was a point of discussion with GCR Task Force members. Wording in the report was crucial.
“Mandate” appears three times in the GCR report, but only regarding the local church fulfilling the Great Commission. Messengers are urged to “consider recommending.” Entities are asked to “consider” the recommendations. Language was still being parsed in April 2010, with “liberate” jettisoned in favor of “fully authorized” when it came to NAMB’s leading Southern Baptists to minister to unreached and underserved populations in North America.
Phrasing a GCR recommendation as a mandate could lead to its being ruled out of order, Mohler said in the April 2010 Nashville meeting.
“Let’s say we come up with an entirely rational and reasonable approach,” he said. “If we did not have this protection, the whims of messengers in any convention could determine the work of the SBC through its entities.”
Opinions on the GCR’s impact on NAMB and Southern Baptists’ missional efforts are varied. Former New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary President Chuck Kelley wrote a book, in retirement, highly critical of the GCR and NAMB’s work. On the other hand, Southern Baptists have voted with their wallets, increasing the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering by 30 percent since 2010, including a record high of $74.7 million in 2024.
Looked at as a movie, Lee chose a classic Western.
“The Good, Bad, and the Ugly,” the state exec said. “I wasn’t happy with the GCR passing, and it cost us some good people. But it also planted more churches than we could have, and I give NAMB credit for that.
“On the other hand, losing those positions hurt us because it decimated our associational work. That has affected a current leadership and discipleship shortage where many of our churches are bringing pastors who, while evangelical and conservative, aren’t Southern Baptist. They lose that sense of being a part of the national Convention and our cooperative work.”
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