NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) – Seven recommendations to the Southern BaptistConvention are specified by the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force in the final report released May 3.
The recommendations, for example, include a call for “the adoption of the language and structure of Great Commission Giving as described in this report in order to enhance and celebrate the Cooperative Program and the generous support of Southern Baptists channeled through their churches.”
The recommendations as stated in the GCRTF report are:
1That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in Orlando, Florida, June 15-16, 2010, adopt the following as the mission statement of the Southern Baptist
Convention:
As a convention of churches, our missional vision is to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every person in the world and to make disciples of all the nations.
2 That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in Orlando, Florida, June 15-16, 2010, adopt the following as Core Values for our work together:
CHRIST-LIKENESS
We depend on the transforming power of the Holy Spirit and prayer to make us more like Jesus Christ.
TRUTH
We stand together in the truth of God’s inerrant Word, celebrating the faith once for all delivered to the saints.
UNITY
We work together in love for the sake of the Gospel.
RELATIONSHIPS
We consider others more important than ourselves.
TRUST
We tell each other the truth in love and do what we say we will do.
FUTURE
We value Southern Baptists of all generations and embrace our responsibility to pass this charge to a rising generation in every age, faithful until Jesus comes.
LOCAL CHURCH
We believe the local church is given the authority, power, and responsibility to present the Gospel of Jesus Christ to every person in the world.
KINGDOM
We join other Christ-followers for the Gospel, the Kingdom of Christ, and the glory of God.
3 Final Report That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in Orlando, Florida, June 15-16, 2010, request the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to consider recommending to the Southern Baptist Convention the adoption of the language and structure of Great Commission Giving as described in this report in order to enhance and celebrate the Cooperative Program and the generous support of Southern Baptists channeled through their churches. We further request that the boards of trustees of the International Mission Board and North American Mission Board consider the adoption of the Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong offering goals as outlined in this report.
4 That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting June 15-16, 2010, request the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to consider any
revision to the ministry assignment of the North American Mission Board that may be
necessary in order to accomplish the redirection of NAMB as outlined in this report; and that the Board of Trustees of the North American Mission Board be asked to consider the encouragements found within this report in all matters under their purview.
5 That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting June 15-16, 2010, request that the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention and the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention consider a revised ministry assignment for the International Mission Board that would remove any geographical limitation on its mission to reach unreached and underserved people groups wherever they are found. 6 That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting June 15-16, 2010, request the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention to consider working with the leadership of the state conventions in developing a comprehensive program of Cooperative Program promotion and stewardship education in alignment with this report.
7 That the messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting June 15-16, 2010 in Orlando, Florida, request the Executive Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention
to consider recommending an SBC Cooperative Program Allocation Budget that will increase the percentage allocated to the International Mission Board to 51 percent by decreasing the Executive Committee’s percentage of the SBC Allocation Budget by 1 percent.”
The full Great Commission Resurgence Task Force report was posted this morning (May 3) atwww.pray4gcr.com. The recommendations will be presented on June 15 at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Orlando, Fla.
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) – They’re called “challenges” in the final report of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force.
They encompass nine pages in the report, apart from seven GCRTF recommendations
to be presented to the Southern Baptist Convention during its June 15-16 annual meeting in Orlando, Fla.
The challenge section encompasses 10 different groupings, from individual Christians,
to churches and pastors, local Baptist associations and state Baptist conventions, various SBC entities and SBC leaders.
The GCRTF, in an explanatory note regarding the challenges, states, “We hold to an ecclesiology that honors and affirms both autonomy and cooperation. The Great Commission Resurgence Task Force is well aware of this, and we realize that we cannot
direct individual Christians, local churches, associations or state conventions to take
any particular or specific action.”
“However, our doctrine of the church does not prevent us from challenging and encouraging, admonishing and advising, one another at all levels of SBC life for greater passion and effectiveness in pursuing the Great Commission…”
Some of the challenges issued by the GCRTF are as follows:
CHALLENGES FOR INDIVIDUAL CHRISTIANS
* Return to God in deep repentance of and brokenness over sin, denying self, and coming to God with complete humility.
* Commit to the total and absolute Lordship of Jesus Christ in every area of your life.
* Devote yourself to a radical pursuit of the Great Commission in the context of obeying the Great Commandments of loving God and loving others.
* Participate in a local church sponsored evangelism training class sometime during 2011 and make this a regular component of the discipleship process in your life.
* Grow in giving as a faithful financial stewardship with at least 10 percent of your income going to your local church. However, see 10 percent as a place to begin in grace giving but
not the place to stop.
* Determine to exercise a greater level of stewardship through estate planning and planned
giving, leaving a percentage of your estate to your local church, the Cooperative Program, and to a faithful Baptist entity such as NAMB, IMB, a Baptist college, or our seminaries.
* Give serious consideration to adoption and orphan care as a component of Great
Commission living.
* Determine to develop a well-rounded Christian worldview that allows you to clearly articulate both what you believe and why you believe.
CHALLENGES FOR INDIVIDUAL FAMILIES
* Emphasize biblical gender roles with believing fathers taking the lead in modeling Great Commission Christianity and taking the primary responsibility for the spiritual welfare of their families.
* Recognize that parents have the primary responsibility of educating their children and helping them to cultivate a Christian worldview way of thinking and living.
* Build gospel saturated homes that see children as a gift from God and our initial mission field. Consider, in this context, the vital ministries of adoption and orphan care.
* Make prayer for and the evangelism and discipleship of children a family priority that begins with parents and is assisted by local churches.
* Spend a family vacation participating in a local church or association sponsored mission trip.
* Consider setting up a mission’s savings account for each of your children that would enable them to spend six months to a year in a North America or International Missions context soon after graduating from high school.
CHALLENGES FOR LOCAL CHURCHES AND PASTORS
* Lead your church by calling a Solemn Assembly in January 2011 for the purpose of calling Christ’s people to return to God, to repentance, and to humility in service to a renewed commitment to Christ and the Great Commission.
* Become knowledgeable of the mission field of your specific region, identifying the various people groups and developing a strategy to penetrate the lostness in your region. Be
intentional in working with your local association, state convention and NAMB in pursuing this task.
* Working with the IMB and NAMB, set goals for Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong that will enable us to send $200 million to the IMB and $100 million to NAMB in annual gifts by 2015.
* Strengthen missions education for believersof all ages, working with the Woman’s
Missionary Union and other missions education programs. Every believer must be made aware of the global missions challenge.
* Lead your church to grow and increase in sacrificial Cooperative Program giving.
* Honor the role of the evangelist, affirming the calling and witness of those who give their lives to the call of the Gospel.
* Get involved in a regular church plantingprogram at some level of your congregation’s capability. This can include specific partnerships with another church, your association, state
convention or NAMB.
* Adopt an unreached people group and an underserved megacity in North America and regularly inform the membership about them, pray for them, and when applicable work toward short-term mission trips to serve them. Encourage families to consider moving to those cities to be part of the core group for that plant.
* Plan at least one evangelism training course annually for your church members; consider inviting members of other churches in your association to participate, especially smaller churches.
* Plan at least one North American or international mission trip a year and/or encourage
members to participate in mission trips sponsored by a local association.
* Enter, if possible, the world of private Christian schooling and Christian homeschooling to provide a Christian alternative for the education of children, especially in areas hostile to the Christian worldview.
* Encourage Christian schools to send each student in their high school year on a cross-cultural missions experience or to an international mission field for at least one week before they graduate, developing a strategy to pay for these trips as a school in order to build a genuine passion and commitment to reach the nations.
* Reclaim the Baptist vision of regenerate church membership, recognizing that this vision
is central to our Baptist identity and understanding of the church.
* Reclaim corrective church discipline as the biblical means of restoring believers to a healthy discipleship and faithfulness to God.
CHALLENGES FOR LOCAL ASSOCIATIONS
* Enthusiastically embrace the missional vision and core values of the SBC allowing them to guide your work and set your priorities.
* Adopt the Baptist Faith & Message 2000 as your confessional basis of association and adopt some shared core values and priorities that characterize the cooperating churches of your association.
* Organize quarterly associational prayer meetings for the conversion of the lost and the planting of sound churches in the underserved and unreached areas of North America and around the globe.
* Work with state conventions and the SBC to set aside January of every year as a month of
prayer for the conversion of unreached people groups around the globe.
* Plan at least one annual foreign mission trip and one annual North American mission trip and encourage all the churches in the association to participate, especially smaller churches.
* Work with cooperating churches to plant at least one new church a year in an underserved area within or near to the association.
CHALLENGES FOR STATE CONVENTIONS
* Embrace with enthusiasm the missional vision and core values of the SBC allowing them
to guide your work and set your priorities.
* Adopt the Baptist Faith & Message 2000 as a confessional basis for cooperation and adopt shared core values and priorities that characterize cooperating churches.
* Make church planting a priority and develop church planting partnerships with North American urban centers and underserved regions outside of the Southeast and Southwest.
* Determine to return to the historic ideal of a 50/50 Cooperative Program distribution
between the state convention and the SBC.
* Hold state convention colleges and universities accountable to Baptist convictions and an authentic Christian worldview education.
* Eliminate programs that do not directly assist local churches in fulfilling their biblical
mandate to make disciples of all people.
* Work with the SBC and local associations to set aside January of every year as a month of prayer for the conversion of unreached people groups around the globe.
* Encourage state convention children’s homes to consider deep investment in Great
Commission adoption/foster ministries that connect children with Baptist families within the state.
* Recognize the powerful witness of Disaster Relief programs as Southern Baptists have touched millions of lives in the aftermath of disaster and in a moment of acute need.
* Develop and celebrate mercy ministries which can be used as avenues for churches to
serve others and open doors for evangelism.
The aforementioned is only a partial listing of challenges issued by the GCRTF. All of the challenges may be viewed as part of the task force’s final report on the Internet at www.pray4gcr.com.