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"Helping Louisiana Baptists Impact the World For Christ"

Chuck Kelley on the state of the SBC (Evangelism)

By Dr. Chuck Kelley In 1906, the SBC voted to create a Department of Evangelism to be placed under the umbrella of the Home Mission Board (now North American Mission Board). Its purpose was to provide encouragement, strategies, and resources for evangelism to Southern Baptist pastors and churches. From that day until this, the Convention has expected the North American Mission Board to take the point in promoting evangelism in Southern Baptist life. In the face of growing decline and perhaps in part as a result of the enormous attention to evangelism created by SBC President Bobby Welch, NAMB prepared what was intended to be a massive evangelism initiative involving every level of the SBC. In the words of NAMB president Geoffrey Hammond to the 2008 SBC meeting: “This National Evangelism Initiative is a huge task, and we are praying that this will be a part of a Great Commission resurgence” (Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention, 2008, p.184). God’s Plan for Sharing (2008) Through the years, the Board perfected ways to mobilize SBC churches for national evangelism campaigns with significant success. All those lessons learned were incorporated into an effort to create the largest and most comprehensive evangelism initiative … [Read more...]

Chuck Kelley on the state of the SBC (Bully Pulpit)

By Dr. Chuck Kelley With the dawning awareness of the decline creeping into Southern Baptist churches came a slowly growing determination to turn things around. Over the next two decades, five distinctive approaches to ending the decline were undertaken. Each approach was unrelated to the others, a factor which may have affected their effectiveness. These approaches were: the SBC president’s use of his position as a bully pulpit to emphasize evangelism (2004-06); a National Evangelism Initiative (2008); the Great Commission Resurgence (2010); the Pastor’s Task Force on Evangelistic Impact and Declining Baptisms (2014); and the Evangelism Task Force (2018). What follows in this and future blogs is a brief description and assessment of each approach in an effort to discover what we can learn about how to help the diverse and loosely organized churches of the SBC find ways to reach their communities for Christ and begin to grow again. The Bully Pulpit (2004-2006) The instinctive response of Southern Baptists to major issues and challenges has always been to address them through preaching. The President of the Southern Baptist Convention traditionally preaches more widely and more often to a greater number of Southern Baptists each … [Read more...]

Chuck Kelley on the state of the SBC (Origins)

By Dr. Chuck Kelley The Southern Baptist story to date can be summarized in three words: growth, plateau, and decline. In 1845 in Augusta, GA, individual Baptist churches from across the South came together to form a Convention of churches that would hold two conflicting realities in permanent tension: true congregational autonomy for every church and deep missional cooperation to prepare ministers and fulfill the Great Commission. After the ravages of the Civil War, Southern Baptists grew steadily until World War II. After World War II, the growth became explosive, driven by aggressive evangelism and even more aggressive discipleship, making Southern Baptists the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. The growth began slowing in the sixties, although baptism numbers did not peak until the Jesus Movement in the early seventies. In spite of the Jesus Movement spike, the period of plateau had begun for Southern Baptists, and from that point the statistics began to flatten out. The numbers moved up and down, but the peaks were lower and the valleys more frequent. The days of steady, continual growth were over. I suggest the turning point from plateau to decline can be traced to the year 2000, when records indicate a … [Read more...]

Chuck Kelley on the state of the SBC (Background)

By Dr. Chuck Kelley The year 2000 marked a profound turning point for the Southern Baptist Convention. The beginning of a new century brought a new and unexpected problem to Southern Baptists: prolonged decline. Not noticed at the time, the official SBC statistics from the 2000 church year proved to be a harbinger of things to come. It started with baptisms. Because Jesus identified baptisms as a marker for making disciples in the Great Commission (Matthew 28:18-20), the number of baptisms recorded by its churches has always been an important measure of progress for Southern Baptists. For much of SBC history, the proportional growth in the total number of baptisms consistently exceeded growth in the total number of SBC churches. As the number of churches grew, so did the number of baptisms by those churches. However, in the 2000 church year those trend lines crossed. The number of churches continued climbing, but the number of baptisms by those churches began dropping. That year proved to be a sea change, not an anomaly. A new phenomenon in the Southern Baptist story began to unfold. The graph above was prepared by Dr. Bill Day of the Leavell Center for Evangelism and Church Health at New Orleans … [Read more...]

Dew, Horn sign statement of grief over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis

NEW ORLEANS (LBM) -- Jamie Dew, president of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, has penned a joint statement with J.D. Greear, outgoing president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of The Summit in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, expressing grief over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Steve Horn, executive director of the Louisiana Baptist Convention, signed onto the statement with all of his fellow state convention executive directors, as well as the officers and entity heads of the SBC.   Statement on the death of George Floyd As a convention of churches committed to the equality and dignity of all people, Southern Baptists grieve the death of George Floyd, who was killed May 25, 2020, in Minneapolis, Minn. While all must grieve, we understand that in the hearts of our fellow citizens of color, incidents like these connect to a long history of unequal justice in our country, going back to the grievous Jim Crow and slavery eras. The images and information we have available to us in this case are horrific and remind us that there is much more work to be done to ensure that there is not even a hint of racial inequity in the distribution of justice in our country. We grieve to see … [Read more...]