Young Baptist Preachers Chart Different Courses

[By Eric Gorski - AP Religion Writer]

J.D. Greear persuaded his church to drop the word "Baptist" from its name, sell its historic building in Durham, N.C., and move into a local high school. Greear preaches in an untucked collared shirt, sportcoat and jeans. He generally avoids politics but signed a statement urging action on global warming.

Eric Hankins preaches in a suit and tie at First Baptist Church in Oxford, Miss., where hymns like "Brethren, We Have Met to Worship" are the norm. Change for Hankins means adopting a new discipleship curriculum. He questions whether humans cause climate change.

Both men are Southern Baptist pastors in their 30's and lead growing congregations. Both are theologically conservative and engaged in their denomination.

Yet their different approaches are part of an ongoing debate about the future of the 16.2 million-member Southern Baptist Convention: Is there room for both the guy in the suit and the guy in the jeans? Should pastors shun politics or hand out voters' guides? Is saving the environment an issue to champion or a dangerous detour?

The nation's largest Protestant denomination is at a crossroads. After five decades of growth, membership fell last year and baptisms are dropping at an even faster clip. A growing number of Baptists see the apparent lack of relevancy, and they blame not secular America and liberals but themselves for the problem.

The Rev. Johnny Hunt of Woodstock, Ga., elected as the SBC's new president last week, already has pledged to bring younger leaders to the table. A member of the SBC's conservative establishment, the 55-year-old Hunt has been a mentor to the next generation through a pastors' school he founded in 1994.

"If we think the only ones leading are like us, then we're pretty narrow," Hunt said. "We've tried to push them into our mold instead of letting them use their own creativity."

Greear was 28 in 2002 when he became senior pastor of Homestead Heights Baptist Church, a sleepy congregation with a weekly attendance of 390 in Durham, N.C.

The building was too old, too small and in a bad location. So Greear persuaded the church to sell the building, relocate to a high school and reinvent itself as The Summit Church.

"We did not shed an ounce of Baptist identity," said Greear, whose weekly attendance is now 2,400. "The key is doing these things without compromising what you believe God's message is."

Greear rejects the dominant evangelical church form of the last 25 years: fill-in-the-blank sermon outlines and programs designed for spiritual seekers and baby boomers.

Summit Church members threw a wedding shower for a family that lost its home in a fire and volunteered to renovate a local elementary school.

"We like our community to say, 'We may not believe in everything the Summit Church believes, but thank God they're here because otherwise they'd have to raise our taxes,'" Greear said.
Greear describes his style as "humble orthodoxy." He wants to counter the image of the Southern Baptist preacher as the "angry guy with coifed hair and an out-of-style suit who likes to pick at things."

That doesn't mean watering down traditional beliefs. Greear preaches on sexual purity and believes every word in the Bible is true. But it also means going in some new directions.

Greear said he tries to avoid political stances. Earlier this year, however, he joined other Southern Baptists in signing a statement calling the denomination "too timid" on environmental issues. Global warming is a dire threat that demands action instead of more arguing about man's role causing it, it said.

Southern Baptist Have a New President - Pastor Johnny Hunt

The Rev. Johnny Hunt, pastor of a megachurch in Woodstock, Ga., was elected Tuesday as president of the Southern Baptist Convention, reported the Washington Post. Hunt, 55, acknowledged in a speech to pastors Sunday, that the denomination is facing difficulties:

• Baptisms, a key sign of spiritual health for Southern Baptists, have fallen to a 20-year low;
• Membership dipped to 16.27 million last year from 16.3 million (except for a drop in membership in 1998, the last decrease was in 1926).

Ted Traylor, pastor of Olive Baptist Church in Pensacola, Fla., said he nominated Hunt because of his "heart for the nations" and his "heart for the next generation."

[Focus on the Family]

Church Planting Keeps Christianity Alive

[By Audrey Barrick - Christian Post Reporter]

Church planting is hard, many pastors would say. But it's where much of the church growth is happening in America at a time when most churches are dying.

"Two-thirds of all churches in America are plateaued and declining," said Pastor Rick Warren after speaking Thursday to thousands of church planters at the Exponential Conference in Orlando, "and if it weren't for the growth that's taking place in church plants and megachurches, Christianity would be declining."

Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Community Church in Lake Forest, Calif., says the growth in church plants and megachurches has helped keep the Christian population in the United States from dropping.

His comments come as the latest statistics from the Southern Baptist Convention, of which his church is a part of, show baptisms have dropped for the third straight year in 2007 and total membership dipped. Some say membership has plateaued and is on a trend toward decline unless change happens within the 16-million member denomination. Southern Baptists are now being seen as one among many major Protestant groups that are declining.

News of the denomination's decline was released during the April 21-24 Exponential Conference where over 2,700 church planters and leaders attended to analyze the DNA of successful reproducing churches. The annual conference has been touted as the "mother of all church planting conferences"

Today, church planting has reached an all-time high with approximately 4,000 new churches planted every year in the United States, according to the "State of Church Planting USA" study. Church plants are also starting out with larger crowds with hundreds joining the first worship service, and the survival and success rate of church plants is at 68 percent.

One of the biggest trends in church planting today is the multiple venue church, or the multi-site church. The idea is that one church meets in multiple locations which are fed video satellite preaching from the main church campus.

Dave Ferguson, pastor of Community Christian Church, is expanding outreach and already transitioning from a multi-site church to a "poly-site" church – reproducing different kinds of campuses to reach different kinds of people – where the mission becomes the priority rather than just reproducing the same church, he said.

While some believe the large church trend will soon die out, Warren says the next generation of churches is going to be even bigger.

"They're going to be far larger than the boomer generation of churches because they're not limited to one campus anymore," he said in an interview featured on the Exponential Conference Web site.

Warren's Saddleback has planted over 40 independent "daughter churches" in Southern California and it recently launched a multi-site initiative with a goal of 10 campuses by the year 2010. According to Saddleback's multi-site church blog, its new campuses in Corona and Irvine drew 490 and nearly 2,000 attendants, respectively, to the first service.

"Reproduction is the mark of health," Warren commented.

Meanwhile, Alan Hirsch, co-founder of Shapevine and the founding director of Forge Mission Training Network which focuses on developing missional leaders in western contexts, believes church plants in America need to adopt a more missionary stance.

"I think here in America, I think church planting is still very bonded to church growth methodology and ideas," Australian-born Hirsch said in an interview featured on MondayMorningInsight, a Web site for pastors and church leaders.

"It (America) hasn't really thought through ... the nature of the church as a mission agency. We simply have to adopt a missionary stance in relationship to our culture," he continued. "We've got to break the monopoly that church growth thinking has over our mindset. Because unless we do that we'll never become a truly missionary agency."

The Exponential Conference featured other well-known speakers, including Tim Keller, founding and lead pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian; Ed Stetzer, former church planter and director of Lifeway Research; and Andy Stanley, senior pastor of North Point Community Church.

Southern Baptists Are Now In Decline

For now, Southern Baptists are a denomination in decline. Experts believe it is a local church issue.

Baptisms are at their lowest levels since 1970 with seven of the last eight years showing annual declines. Even though some might hope the decline in membership numbers is due to lack of reporting, the inescapable conclusion is that baptisms by individual churches is falling off. (LifeWay Research will provide more analysis next month.)

Some might say it’s "only one year," and they would be technically right. But, briefly dwell on the top of the above graph. Reality is, they have peaked.

[Click on image to enlarge it.]

Researchers believe three issues are involved:

First, that they have to deal with the continued loss of SBC leaders. They have witnessed a serious (and increasing) depopulation of young leaders at the convention. Also, ethnic leadership remains absent after decades of ethnic change in America. Vacant seats still exist at the SBC table for the ethnic and generational diversity that matches the America they are attempting to reach. The departure by the future leaders of the convention has led to fewer church plants, missionaries, and energetic pastors to lead their faltering churches. They must retain these leaders not because they need them for their churches. They need them to reach the lost whom their churches have yet to touch.

A second issue is the infighting which defines so much of the SBC—its meetings, its churches, and its blogs. It is public knowledge that they do not always settle their differences amicably. The national caricature once again colors many local scenes where First, Second, and even Third Baptist Churches exist in one town because of past infighting. Satan has used their incessant bickering over non-essentials to promote his last great mission on earth—to keep lost people lost.

People simply do not want to hear what they have to say when they can't speak kindly to one another. If the focus of every SBC meeting is a new controversy to be debated, new parameters to be narrowed, and new issues to be fought, the trend toward decline will only accelerate.

The third, and most important, issue is the loss of focus on the Gospel. They must recover a gospel centrality and cooperate in proclaiming that gospel locally and globally. David Dockery and Timothy George pointed the way with their helpful booklet, Building Bridges. They called for a unity around the Gospel, and the time grows increasingly urgent.

The Conservative Resurgence failed to produce a Great Commission Resurgence. It restored the denomination’s value of Scripture but application is often absent, at least in the area of evangelism.