Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Not Freaking-Out

I heard that the Southern Baptist Convention is declining. Overall membership in SBC churches are significantly less and continuing to drop and the number of baptisms are down. The solution from the Southern Baptist Convention Pastor's Conference is to emphasize evangelism again! Really? Is the current state of the Southern Baptist Convention not a product of a false understanding of evangelism? And we want to emphasize that more?
Look at what the tactics of the 1950's and 1960's revivalism-era produced. Yes, we have church rolls filled with names of people, many of which have not been back to a church building since the 1950's and 1960's. Expectations were lowered. Tactics that aren't found in scripture were used and still linger today. These tactics include the Invitation/Altar Call (which isn't bad in itself only that it isn't mandated in scripture and has been used to play on people's emotions and provide a false sense of salvation in many cases), using sales pitches to sell the gospel to someone with words and phrases that aren't found in scripture, and having the church and pastor vote someone into fellowship and approve his or her baptism without even trying to find out where the person really is with God. These are methods that I've seen all my life having grown up in Southern Baptist churches. I want no part of these methods. Isn't it interesting that Billy Graham himself has said that if he had to do it over again, he would have done it differently. He said he would have discipled the 12. He said that because he believes that 12 men properly discipled could do more for God's kingdom than the thousands and thousands who came forward during his crusades over the years. He and his organization tried to do a lot as far as discipling those who came forward following his preaching, but he admits that he is certain that a good number of them weren't sincere commitments.
So when I hear this same convention getting nervous because they are baptizing less people and calling for putting evangelism back at the forefront, I wonder if they even know what they are saying. When Paul gave the instruction to "do the work on an evangelist," I'm certain he meant more than just telling people about Christ and he certainly didn't mean many of the methods that have become popular among evangelics over the past century.
Yes, the Southern Baptist Convention as a whole is in decline as far as numbers. And now we're supposed to ask our people to start evangelizing. People who likely don't understand what evangelism really is because they aren't discipled. Again, they are a product of years and years of a false sense of evangelism.
As a pastor of a Southern Baptist Church, I am not freaking-out at all about these recent statistics. Instead, I'm called to prayer as I seek how to be more concerned about having quality baptisms over quantity of baptisms.
So yes, let's get back to the way we used to do evangelism. Let's get back to the first-century method of evangelism that we find in the scriptures. Let's put the tactics of the 1950's and 1960's revivalistic era in the archives and get to doing it the way it should be done. Doing so may result in even significantly less baptisms over the next several years, but may produce something greater later.