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EDITOR’S NOTE: The TEXAN conducted interviews with each of the candidates for SBC President. The following is the first of a two-part series. Part 2 appears in the June 2016 edition and can be read here.
ST. LOUIS Three pastors nominated for Southern Baptist Convention president are offering indications of how they will address issues such as presidential priorities, committee appointments, denominational diversity and religious liberty, if elected.
The SBC Voices blog interviewed each man within days of his nomination being announced. The Southern Baptist TEXAN followed up with additional questions and reviewed information available on their church and personal websites.
Messengers to the annual meeting in St. Louis will vote June 14 on new officers, with the possibility of additional nominees being offered when that item of business is considered.
David Crosby of First Baptist Church in New Orleans, Steve Gaines of Bellevue Baptist near Memphis, and J.D. Greear of The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, share a call for increased support for missions by Southern Baptist churches. All three declared their expectation that individuals appointed to committees by the president should serve within the parameters of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, expressed support for the Cooperative Program, and pointed to experience with their own churches that can serve as a model for spreading the gospel.
Priorities
Crosby said the willingness to “voluntarily join our resources to accomplish greater things for Christ and the gospel” is a key distinctive of Southern Baptists.
“I want to help facilitate the discussion about changes that need to be made in our structure and our funding process,” he said, noting his congregation’s “deep and consistent participation in our cooperative missions effort.”
Reliance on the Cooperative Program does not preclude his consideration of new initiatives, Crosby added.
“We must enlarge the tent and increase participation in our cooperative efforts.”
To that end Crosby wants to call pastors and churches to “a new submission to Christ as Lord that transcends both national and denominational politics,” with a commitment to missions that is both cooperative and community-oriented.
As for his priorities, Steve Gaines expressed a desire to work with all Southern Baptists, continuing current president Ronnie Floyd’s emphasis on spiritual awakening and revival.
Concerned at the downward trajectory of baptizing 100,000 fewer people than were reported 16 years ago, Gaines told SBC Voices he wants to see Southern Baptists embrace a “Great Evangelism Resurgence” that begins with training pastors and people to share Jesus one-on-one with lost people.
“Each of us must own this, including myself,” he told the TEXAN. “I must share Jesus with more lost people. I must be more intentional about opening my mouth and telling people what the Bible says about Jesus in order to win them to faith in him,” he said.
Addressing the SBC’s “stewardship crisis,” Gaines said, “We must teach our church members to handle money God’s way. We must teach them to tithe to their churches, set reasonable budgets and live within them, pay off debt, save for future needs, and give generously to those in need as the Lord leads.”
Ultimately, those actions will increase funding to the Cooperative Program and, hopefully, he said, lead to “an additional 1,000 missionaries back on the field instead of bringing them home.”
J.D. Greear addressed the priorities that would shape his presidency as he described his own call to the ministry that began with two years of service with the International Mission Board as a sending pastor. He told SBC Voices that his candidacy is “all about the Great Commission.”
With more than 6,000 unreached people groups in the world and the number of unchurched in the United States increasing, Greear said, “We can’t be okay with these things. This has to break our hearts, and we have to do something.”
He is calling for a new generation to take personal responsibility for the agencies of the SBC. “It is time for us to step up and own this mission, and the vehicles God has given us for accomplishing it, as our own,” he said on his personal website.
In addition to calling for a new era of engagement, Greear hopes to keep the focus on gospel-centeredness in both theology and missions, engage the culture with both grace and truth, and “platform and equip non-Anglo pastors and members.”
How big a tent?
“I think the BFM 2000 is intended to be a pretty big tent,” Crosby said when asked by the TEXAN what he means by the reference. “I think it provides sufficient parameters for our work together. Within these parameters we should welcome churches who wish to join us in our world mission enterprise,” he said.
“I can live with unresolved theological tensions. I embrace the mystery of God, and I hold my own positions with humility, I hope, knowing how limited my puny comprehension of our great God surely is,” he said. “When I pull in the tent pegs and make my tent smaller, I am usually trying to winnow the crowd to make them look more like me, not more like Jesus.”
He advised, “Forget about being an evangelist for your own point of view. People need Jesus, not your own best ideas. A lost world needs us both to speak and to model the gospel. Living in unity and loving our neighbors is our greatest apologetic. Unity has never been as important to us as it was to our Lord.”
If elected, Crosby told SBC Voices, he will appoint Baptists from churches large and small who “have a reputation that they love God and love others. I want to appoint people who are truly cooperative, who know how to speak their minds, advocate for their perspective and submit to the will of the majority in order to get things done.”
Greear also sees the BF&M 2000 as an ideal doctrinal statement that serves as a guide and rallying point for the convention. “It is narrow enough to keep us unified on the essentials and broad enough to encompass all gospel-loving, scripturally faithful Baptists. For the sake of the mission, that kind of unity is absolutely crucial. Every time we fight about a non-essential, evangelism loses and the enemy wins.”
Asked by the TEXAN to clarify his use of the wide tent analogy, Greear said, “The SBC intentionally has a ‘wide tent,’ but sometimes we let our rather minor differences obscure the glorious gospel and urgent mission that unites us.”
He called for Baptists of all kinds to be engaged in the mission—“traditional as well as younger; black, white, Hispanic and Asian,” adding, “It’s all of our convention.”
Greear pledged to look for people who sincerely support the SBC statement of faith and “display a love for the Great Commission, a passion for local churches, a habit of evangelism and a disposition toward a wide tent of SBC life.”
Gaines said Bellevue cooperates with many gospel-preaching churches in the Memphis area that are not Baptist. “But we do not plant churches with them. We can serve in harmony with other gospel-preaching churches that engage in such non-biblical practices as infant baptism, but those churches should not be allowed membership in the SBC,” he explained.
“I am happy to ‘broaden the tent,’ but there must be biblical, Baptist parameters,” Gaines said.
He said he will use the same standard for appointments that he has used in selecting people for leadership and service in the churches he has pastored. “I will simply look diligently for the most qualified people, those who are actively involved in the life of a Southern Baptist church that is itself involved in and committed to the various levels of SBC life,” he said, including financial giving through the Cooperative Program as a factor.
As a member of the committee that drafted the 2000 revision, Gaines said, “I will make sure that each person appointed is committed to the doctrinal beliefs set forth in the Baptist Faith & Message.”
Ethnic and Generational Diversity
All three nominees recognize the importance of ensuring SBC leadership is representative of the Southern Baptists sitting in the pews each Sunday. Each recounted their efforts at the local level to create multi-racial and multi-ethnic congregations reflective of their communities. How they approach intergenerational cooperation differs.
“[SBC President] Ronnie Floyd really has done an outstanding job in bridging the gap between younger and older Southern Baptists,” Greear told the TEXAN. “He exemplifies the kind of unity amidst diversity that I believe we need in our convention in the coming days—a spirit that encourages both young and old, those from both majority and minority cultures, those with a more traditional and those with a more modern approach to ministry, to look to each other as indispensable and valuable parts of the convention.”
Crosby said, “We need their voices now at the tables where we make decisions and develop strategies. If they see our cooperative work as their own, they will embrace it and undergird it.”
Gaines said young Southern Baptists, particularly church planters, need to take the initiative to make the denomination and its convictions their own. Drawing inspiration from “spiritual generals” like Adrian Rogers, Jimmy Draper, Charles Stanley and Jerry Vines can serve young pastors and members well, he added.
“I long for our SBC to be united,” Gaines said. “People over 40 need the fire and the fresh ideas of the people under 40. And people under 40 need the veteran wisdom and life experience of those of us over 40.” He called for multi-ethnic and multi-generational representation on SBC boards as well as trustees from all sizes of congregations.
As it relates to multi-ethnic and multi-racial congregations, each pastor has moved from high hopes to practical application. Gaines, Crosby and Greear recounted the transformation of their congregations and, for Greear, church staff.
The Summit Church has seen its non-Anglo membership rise from 5 to almost 20 percent. Half of the campus pastors and worship leaders are non-Anglo.
“Our church still has a long way to go, but we are proof that diversification is possible,” Greear said. He hopes to see minority leaders take “places of real prominence in the SBC, such that diversity might become a hallmark of our denomination” and the world sees “a uniquely united fellowship.”
As a Memphis-area pastor for more than 10 years, Gaines made it a priority to reach out and make friends with gospel-centered pastors and churches of all ethnic and denominational backgrounds.
“We don’t just talk about racial reconciliation; we actually experience it and live in it as a reality,” Gaines said. “It works in our church because we focus on Jesus-centered racial reconciliation.”
Crosby said, “I hope to make this a matter of consideration from the very first as we seek to structure in the present for a future gospel strategy that is ever wider in its reach.”
Religious Liberty
Although each pastor supports states’ efforts to pass religious freedom legislation protecting the conscientious objections of individuals regarding sexual morality and marriage, they addressed
LGBTQ activism differently. The TEXAN asked these pastors if Religious Freedom and Restoration Act (RFRA) laws discriminate against gays, lesbians and transgender persons.
Greear and Crosby said the government should never demand, under the force of law, a citizen violate his conscience. Local and state laws establishing civil rights protections based on sexual orientation and gender identity do just that and should be repealed, all three argued.
“Marriage is a sacrament within many churches, a holy ordinance—a fundamentally religious institution,” Crosby said. “Weddings for us are filled with prayers, Scripture readings, hymns and vows made before God. No government can tell us how this worship service should be conducted or who may or may not participate.”
He added, “We are dealing in these bills with an emotional and painful situation that has touched our families, our churches and our individual lives. We must walk and talk in the mercy and grace of God as we express our differing perspectives.
“My heart is with those who are defending freedom of conscience, our most fundamental liberty,” Crosby added. “As I understand these bills, they prevent government from violating conscience. If participating in a same-sex marriage is against religious belief, then the government should not coerce participation or punish those who decline for conscience’ sake,” he said. Those who feel constrained by conscience in such situations should act in love and kindness toward those seeking services and assist them in finding alternative providers for their weddings.
Gaines cut to what he views as the heart of the issue—sexual sin.
“God created every person as a male or female. The only kind of marriage Jesus sanctioned was heterosexual, monogamous marriage (Matthew 19). Thus, that is the only kind of marriage a Bible-believing church should sanction. Our government should not discriminate against Christians and Bible-believing churches that adhere to such principles,” he said.
He supports religious liberty bills because of his belief that homosexuality and lesbianism are sexual sins prohibited in Scripture, the same as adultery and fornication. “In my opinion, that precludes homosexual marriage from being a ‘civil right,’” Gaines said. “Civil rights have to do with things people cannot help such as the color of their skin. But sexual sins are different in that they are choices.”
Greear emphasized the dual nature of the situation—the local church should want to be good neighbors with those who share our convictions and those who do not. In so doing, his congregation has established a relationship with gay individuals, seeing some of them come to faith in Christ.
“Christians should despise discrimination with every fiber of their being,” Greear said, “and we should be the first to stand up against it whether it affects us directly or not. But religious liberty is a sacred right—the first right protected in our Bill of Rights. Our Constitution respects the right of private individuals and corporations to live according to conscience. Recent laws, under the guise of anti-discrimination, force conscientious believers of multiple faiths to not only tolerate, but participate with others in practices that violate their consciences.”
In the case of the law passed in his home state prohibiting men from entering women’s restrooms and vice versa, Greear said it is not so much a case of religious liberty but whether one group can mandate acceptance of and participation in their views by the whole.
“If someone wants to redefine gender for themselves, that is one thing, but to thrust their redefinition on the whole of society by opening up public bathrooms is to go far beyond individual liberty to coerced compliance. It is not only the rights of the transgender person that are in question but the rights of people everywhere. Opening up public bathrooms to both genders jeopardizes multiple public interests and individual liberties, like safety, privacy and so forth,” he told the TEXAN.
“But as the church, we want to be good neighbors with those who share our convictions on this and those who do not. We want to live peaceably with everyone and to be the first to stand up to love and protect our neighbors,” he said, describing ministry by his church to gays and lesbians. “We believe it is important to posture ourselves, as much as we can, like Jesus, speaking with both truth and grace. Both are necessary if we’re going to reflect the ministry of Christ.”
Greear reminded that truth without grace is fundamentalism, but grace without truth is just sentimentality. “I think it is important that we refuse to reduce gay and lesbian people to their sexuality. They are individuals made in the image of God, like us, with the same basic problems—sin, and the same hope—gift righteousness through the blood of Jesus.”
Read Part 2 of the TEXAN’S Q&A with Steve Gaines, David Crosby, and J.D. Greear
