South Carolina Baptist Convention (SCBC) leadership will be reviewing questions, opinions, and insights from more than 500 SCBC pastors and leaders attending a one day Great Commission Resurgence (GCR) conversation on Tuesday, Aug. 24, at White Oak Conference Center. Updates will be available at the SCBC Web site (www.scbaptist.org).

The conversational summit was organized in response to a Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) GCR Task Force report adopted Tuesday, June 15, by messengers in Orlando, FL.

The GCR Task Force report was designed, in part, as a response to trends statistically and observationally affecting the historic evangelistic and missions work of the SBC in twenty-first century culture. Ed Stetzer, director, LifeWay Research, and missiologist in residence, was the featured speaker at the White Oak event.

Jim Austin, executive director-treasurer, SCBC, told the audience packing White Oak’s Beacham Auditorium that “even though the SBC Executive Committee has not worked out all the details related to GCR and funding, we in South Carolina want to be on the front end of the conversation. That’s why we are here today.

“We are going to figure out the Great Commission Resurgence together in South Carolina,” Austin said. “Today, I have no more answers than you have. I do know that Southern Baptists used to be a dominant influence in our culture and now we are being deemed as irrelevant and pushed to the periphery of culture. We can’t let that happen.

“You will never meet a person whom God doesn’t love and Jesus did not die for,” Austin said. “There must be revival among us spiritually, and a renewal for life and holiness if we hope to see revival in South Carolina. We don’t yet know what it looks like, but we can do this in South Carolina.”

Stetzer, speaking by satellite feed from Nashville, TN, painted a statistical and observational picture for the state of Southern Baptist life and its influence on twenty-first century.

• Stetzer said the Southern Baptist Convention is in membership plateau, but the SBC percentage of American population has been declining since 1986. “If our membership holds flat, without decline, we will experience a rapid, protracted decline in U.S. population penetration. That’s a trend that is hard to overcome. We will face a challenging future as a denomination. We need to pay attention to this reality, and not be satisfied with where we are in terms of membership.”
   
• Stetzer said the Southern Baptist Convention has a history of seasonal declines in baptisms followed by seasons of rebound, but “if you look at the last 10 years, we are trending down in baptisms. Combined with our decline in membership percentages, this is a tough reality.” He compared SBC baptisms to similar data from Assemblies of God and the Nazarenes, neither of which have experienced decline in baptisms.
   
• “About 11 percent of SBC churches are growing through healthy evangelistic conversion,” he said, and “depending on how you count growth, only about 25-30 percent of SBC churches are growing. The majority of us are stuck in stagnant churches.”
   
• The General Social Survey (GSS), a sociological survey by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, shows that the Southern Baptist Convention is aging. “There hasn’t been a rush of young people in the SBC, even though sometimes we think there has been,” Stetzer said. “Until the early 1990s, our age was similar to the U.S. population. In 2000, we started seeing a significant divide between the age of SBC membership and the general U.S. population. That should be a cause for concern.”

“In the 1980s, we had a conservative resurgence believing that, if we got our biblical theology in order, we would see Great Commission growth. That’s not happened. So, we had a conservative resurgence and now we need a Great Commission resurgence,” he said.

Stetzer also pointed to SBC concerns in the area of ethnicity, pointing to a “great divide between the denomination and the general U.S. population”; the hesitancy of a Southern, rural-based SBC to embrace urban church planting and evangelism, especially beyond the South; a dysfunctional church planting system requiring “too many rules and hoops,” and an inability to raise up younger pastors into positions of denominational leadership.

Lastly Stetzer pointed to “an explosion of diversity within the church today. The SBC has a certain way of doing things and we are suspicious of those who do things differently. There is no longer just one way to be a church. We’ve not handled that well and it’s affecting our cooperation. We believe that our Baptist Faith & Message unites us so we have a confessional consensus. The Faith & Message is the boundary on which we agreed. Our integrity demands that we don’t shift it. Every church can’t set the boundary of the SBC for itself. When churches change the boundaries, moving outside the Faith & Message, the church changes the boundaries of cooperation and that leads to demoralization. We have to agree that, within our confessional consensus, there can be missional cooperation to reach people; we must agree that we accept other approaches within the boundaries of who we are.

“Denominations exist because churches can’t do what God told them to do alone,” he said. “I believe in denominations and I believe in the Southern Baptist Convention. But there are things we are doing that are not helping us. The Great Commission Resurgence puts us in a time of helpful reflection. What should we be doing during this time?

“Right now we are in a season of asking the right questions. Can we come up with the right answers? I believe we can. I believe in the denomination. We want to see a resurgence of the Great Commission.”

In his remarks to the audience, executive director-treasurer Austin said, “We baptized less in 2008 than we did in 1950. We are baptizing fewer teenagers than we once did. About half of the 3.5 billion people on this planet have never heard the gospel, and we are looking at reducing our SBC mission corps from 5,500 to 5,000 because budget receipts are down.

“Our nation grows by three million per year, mostly through minority births and immigration,” Austin said. “Our white population is largely static yet, because we are predominately white, we are only baptizing about 11 percent of the country’s growth every year. About 42 percent of our state’s population live in multihousing communities, and 95 percent of them are lost with very little gospel witness.

We must provide resources for our churches by assisting them in revitalization. The Convention’s CHAMPS process has been well received and widely embraced. It is proving to be an effective tool in assisting churches that sincerely desire to reach their communities.

Until 2008, South Carolina had the highest pastor termination rate in the SBC,” Austin said. “Now, I’m told, we are number two. We are better people than that. We have to help our churches grasp the witness that termination leaves with unbelievers.”

Discipleship resources developed by Avery Willis are really catching on in several of our churches. Trinity Point in Easley currently teaches this process and demand has been so great from interested churches that they are now offering the training on a quarterly basis.

“Secularism is the fastest growing religion in our country,” he said. “We’ve got growing populations of people in South Carolina who are not attending any church on Sunday morning.

“We have so much potential in South Carolina, and we are doing so many things well,” Austin said. “Last year our baptisms were up a bit, church planting is up, and our collegiate work is up. We are breaking records in our summer camp attendance. South Carolina Disaster Relief is strong. We have great partnerships with our colleges and institutions. We are seeing a slight up-tick in CP giving as a percent of undesignated offerings, and are on pace to set a record in White Oak participation. God is doing a great work here. Yes, we are facing the lions, but God is up to the challenge. We have to step out in faith, knowing the resources that we need are often found in the harvest.”

South Carolina Baptist Convention president and pastor of First Pickens, Fred Stone, reminded leaders that, “We are not (at White Oak) for a GCR fight or division, but for conversation and cooperation. The GCR does not undermine the relationship between the SCBC and the SBC.”

Stone reiterated that the denomination is in decline, and that “some things are wrong, outdated, and not working.”

“We don’t have as much money as we once did. Cooperative Program giving is down and the economy is not the only factor,” he said. “We can’t fund everything the way we always have funded it. I agree with an evaluation of everything we do, and that we let our theology drive everything we do. Worthy Great Commission partners, like our institutions, deserve our giving.

“And we are a graying denomination,” he said. “We must get a number of young pastors and leaders in the Great Commission conversation.”

Following lunch, Rich Carney, strategic development coordinator, North American Mission Board, Atlanta, GA, facilitated small group discussions, allowing participants to provide questions, opinions, and insights into the GCR discussion in South Carolina. Individual input collected at lunch, and small group input, was collected by SCBC staff for review by convention leadership. That information will be updated on the SCBC Web site (www.scbaptist.org).

In closing the day, chairman, SCBC Executive Board and pastor, Riverland Hills Church, Columbia, Ed Carney, reminded leaders that many will ask, “ ‘So what?’ and ‘Where do we go from here?’ Our prayer today is that we can have consensus that we don’t like living in the desert and that we are looking at a new day. We don’t know the answers, but there is power in the Good News and there is an answer to every question. We can do this thing.”

“I’m tired of where we are and where we’ve been,” he said. “We don’t fully know where we are going (with the GCR), but we are on the verge and that’s where we need to be. Our prayer today is that we don’t say ‘nevertheless’ and keep things the way they are.”