English
Korean
Spanish
EDITOR’S NOTE: The TEXAN conducted interviews with each of the candidates for SBC President. The following is the second of a two-part series. Part 1 is available here and printed in the May 2016 edition where candidates discussed their priorities, tent-broadening, ethnic and generational diversity and religious liberty.
ST. LOUIS In interviews with the Southern Baptist TEXAN, three pastors nominated for Southern Baptist Convention president offered their viewpoints on issues such as funding Southern Baptist causes, the role of state conventions, the use of alcohol, and their views on soteriology.
The TEXAN asked direct questions of 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, after reviewing information available on their church and personal websites as well as interviews with SBC Voices.
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 on the afternoon of June 14.
Missions Strategies
Missions and money were frequent concerns in light of funding challenges that triggered the severe downsizing of the International Mission Board. All three men pastor churches that are engaged in stateside and international missions strategies through Southern Baptist entities.
“My commitment to missions is both cooperative and community-oriented,” Crosby said. “I hope I can give greater visibility to the necessity for community involvement by our churches,” he said, pointing back to the life-changing experience of hurricane relief.
“[Hurricane] Katrina washed us out of our pews and into the streets and lanes of our city. If churches are interested in becoming relevant to their communities, we can show them how it is done,” citing ministry in prisons, nursing homes, and public schools, extending their reach to hungry children, recent immigrants, foster families and even strip club employees.
The New Orleans church sponsors NOLA Baptist Church, a NAMB church plant and sends teams to Ghana in conjunction with its adoption of an unreached people group through IMB.
Similarly, Gaines’ church has embraced Memphis by strategically partnering with 50 churches, parachurch and civic organizations to serve in schools and hospitals, as well as offering free dental care and ministering in prisons, senior facilities, fire stations and apartments.
“I hope to encourage all our SBC members and churches to 1) pray for missions, 2) give financially to support missions, and 3) go on a mission trip,” he said.
Bellevue partners with NAMB’s Send North America church planting efforts in Seattle, with other efforts in New York, Massachusetts and Las Vegas, and Native American church planting in New Mexico, South Dakota and Montana. Internationally, the church sends teams to Nicaragua in partnership with IMB, as well as conducting ministry in Haiti, Honduras, Uganda, Guatemala, and Guatemala, networking with additional mission organizations.
“Southern Baptists should be known for their excessive love toward their neighbors and nations,” Greear said on his website. “We must, like Christ, enter into the world that God loves, with the courage to speak the truth and the compassion to do so with grace.”
The Summit Church where Greear pastors connects members to minister with neighbors who are homeless, orphans, prisoners, single moms and disconnected youth. Other examples of outreach include ministry to single moms, international students, trafficking survivors and assistance with refugee resettlement.
Last year The Summit Church supported a network of 21 churches spread across North America. They also network with several mission organizations, including IMB, to deploy short- and long-term missionaries internationally, some of whom are fully funded by the sending organization. Strategic partners include NAMB, North Carolina Baptists, Acts 29, IMB and Fellowship Associates.
Funding Missions
The manner in which Crosby, Gaines and Greear lead their churches to finance local, stateside and international missions varies—as does the way they’ll motivate Southern Baptists to be more generous.
“I really believe in cooperation, and I believe the Southern Baptist Convention exists primarily to facilitate cooperation among our churches for the world mission of the gospel,” Crosby told Baptist Press.
“Cooperation, to me, has a financial component, and my churches have always been deeply invested in the Cooperative Program and the special missions offerings.”
He observed that many churches do independent missions, stating, “There is nothing distinctive about it. What is distinctive about Southern Baptists is that they do missions together. That can and should remain our heart and our reputation,” Crosby said.
Gaines believes CP is the financial lifeline of the SBC. “While it might need tweaking, it does not need to be tossed. We do not need to abandon it and digress to an independent form of supporting missions.”
He draws the line at dictating percentages at any level. “Just as we must not impose on our churches a specific percentage to give to the CP as the ideal, neither should we impose on our state conventions a certain percentage as the ideal to forward to the SBC.
Greear said he hopes his church has been a model in increasing both CP and Great Commission Giving, reiterating his call for the next generation of Southern Baptists to increase giving to cooperative efforts.
“I believe we in the convention need to recognize that God is doing new things in our generation, and we need to create new pathways for new generations of Southern Baptists to get engaged.”
Counting the Cost
Crosby’s church leads in the percentage of undesignated receipts given through the Cooperative Program with 7 percent—higher than the average amount of 5.47 percent that SBC churches typically give, according to 2013-14 records. Gaines’ church is set to give 4.6 percent this year while Greear’s church is committed to 2.4 percent.
In 2010, Southern Baptists approved a new funding category known as Great Commission Giving, one of several initiatives advanced by the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force. It includes all monies channeled through the causes of the SBC, state conventions and associations.
Crosby’s church allocates at least 10% of its budget to GCG, including gifts to New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, New Orleans Baptist Association, Baptist Friendship House and a local seafarer’s ministry—all of which have ties to Southern Baptist ministry.
Gaines’ church anticipates giving 6 percent of undesignated receipts to Great Commission Giving in 2016, including direct gifts to SBC entities, associational giving and state convention ministries.
At Greear’s church, GCG has been at or around 10 percent for the last several years, including direct gifts to SBC entities as well as the local association and state convention ministries.
“We all have things we favor, things that are exciting and have local connections,” Crosby said. “But it is the unrestricted money that funds the strategies and visions of our entity boards and leaders.”
Gaines stressed the need to encourage increased giving “so we can put an additional 1,000 missionaries back on the field instead of bringing them home.”
Greear notes the Cooperative Program is his church’s primary means of funding the Great Commission. But, he said, “The SBC has recognized the category of Great Commission Giving as a legitimate way to support Southern Baptist mission. We need to respect the autonomy of churches in deciding where and how to allocate their resources between these.
While calling for the kind of generosity he said C.S. Lewis described as “to give away more than we can spare,” Greear also expects Southern Baptist institutions at all levels to ask how they can get more money to the mission.
“We believe the Spirit of God is leading us to take radical measures in response to the pressing needs of the hour, and that if we put his kingdom first in all things, he will take care of us.”
Funding challenges
In SBC Voices interviews, all three candidates agreed support of missions is directly tied to an individual’s personal missions experience, as going encourages giving.
“Nothing so inspires mission work like going yourself and lending a hand and a voice in a cross-cultural presentation of the gospel,” Crosby said. “I encourage our people to go as well as pray and give.”
But managing the shortfall is the immediate challenge at hand. Crosby said the best way to do that is through the Cooperative Program. “Southern Baptists got this right back in 1925, and it is still right today.”
Crosby said, “We must forget turf wars. This cannot be a power struggle. Lording it over one another is how the world operates, not the church of Jesus Christ. All we do together must be placed on the table as we seek to evaluate our effectiveness and develop a strategy for the deployment of our resources going forward,” Crosby added.
In his appeal to pray, give and go, Gaines said, “We need more people to pray for the specific needs of our SBC missionaries. We also need to encourage church members to have a personal stewardship revival and get their own financial house in order so they can give more to their churches, and enable their churches to give more to missions.”
Gaines said, “We also need to encourage more of our people to go on short-term mission trips.” Such ventures will be used by the Holy Spirit to call more people to full-time missions or as bivocational missionaries.
“There are two sides to the current struggle we’re seeing when it comes to Cooperative Program giving and the IMB downsizing,” Greear said. Both involve the younger generation of Southern Baptists, who he said must take personal responsibility for the funding and operations of missions.
“The next generation needs to sacrificially give, support and serve in these entities, boards and institutions,” Greear said.
As churches give away more money to missions than they feel they can spare, Greear said, they can trust when seeking the kingdom of God first that “he’ll supply to us the rest of what we need,” citing Matthew 6:33.
State Conventions
State conventions also play a role in asking hard questions and making sacrifices to get more of the money they receive from churches to the mission field, Greear said. “We need to be willing to ask uncomfortable questions. For the sake of the Great Commission, we have to ask what we most need to accomplish the task the Lord Jesus has given us and direct the lion’s share of our resources to that.”
Crosby favors state conventions becoming specialists in planting churches among the dominant people groups and cultures in their particular region.
Gaines noted that associations and state conventions are able to minister to the needs of churches in ways that the national convention is not able to do. Similarly, seminaries and other SBC entities help churches in ways the local association and state convention do not.
“The SBC will self-destruct if we digress to a society model of doing missions where every level is aggressively competing financially with the others,” he added. “We do not need to compete. We need to cooperate with each other and complement each other,” Gaines concluded.
Alcohol Use
Asked for their perspective on the interpretation of “freedom in Christ” in regard to the consumption of alcoholic beverages, candidates gave different responses in light of increasingly varied convictions within SBC churches.
“I am a teetotaler,” Crosby said. “I don’t drink a drop. I think that is the best answer and the best position,” he added. “We do not need alcohol for medicine anymore. We have many better choices. We do not need it to purify water. Our water is pure. We do not need to consume alcohol. Its negatives far outweigh any imagined benefits,” Crosby said.
He hopes churches will continue to teach abstinence as the best approach in regard to alcohol, adding, “I have always included warnings and sometimes prohibitions concerning alcohol use among church leaders.”
Gaines said he doesn’t believe Christians should drink alcoholic beverages. “It is not a matter of ‘freedom/liberty,’” he said, adding, “I believe it is a matter of wisdom.”
Noting that neither he nor his wife drink alcoholic beverages, Gaines said his reasoning is based on several points, including “the fact that it doesn’t take much alcohol to become intoxicated,” skewing a person’s ability to respond mentally and physically; and the abundance of other legitimate and less dangerous choices as compared to a time when wine was more sanitary than water and sometimes served a medicinal purpose.
Furthermore, he said, Christians should not be “mastered” by anything, according to 1 Corinthians 6:12, citing the addictive nature of alcoholic beverages. “What one does in ‘moderation,’ someone else might do in excess,” Gaines added, warning against setting a bad example for others people.
Gaines said he has asked his congregation how they would react if they saw him and his wife drinking wine with their meal at a restaurant. “Every time I’ve asked that question over the last 33 years, the majority of the people in our churches raised their hands, indicating they would be highly offended if we drank alcoholic beverages.”
He added, “Frankly, I’m shocked at how many pastors say that drinking alcoholic beverages is okay. It’s not wise, and it’s not okay. I pray that Southern Baptists never capitulate in this area.”
Greear said he knows “sincere, godly Christians on both sides of the alcohol question.” He explained, “I know many who believe that this is an area where we should respect one another’s ‘freedom in Christ,’ and others who believe that while we are indeed free in Christ, considerations of wisdom and witness compel us to abstain from alcohol
altogether.”
As for him, Greear told the TEXAN, “All things considered, I choose to abstain from consumption myself.”
Influence of Calvinism
Asked how the ongoing debate over Calvinism will affect presidential appointments, all three men offered assurances that the Baptist Faith & Message provides the theological parameters for selecting committee members.
Crosby said he believes God is sovereign and humans are free and therefore accountable for their choices. Noting that the Southern Baptist tent has included both camps since the beginning of the convention, he added, “We have not considered these views as heresy.”
“We can resolve to work together and love each other for the sake of the gospel.” Crosby stated.
Gaines said he is not a Calvinist but has friends who are and can fellowship with any Christian who believes salvation is “by grace alone, through faith alone and in Christ alone,” that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God, and that in order to be saved one must “repent of sin, believe savingly in Jesus and receive Jesus as Lord and Savior.”
“As long as a man believes these biblical doctrines and is an avid soul-winner, I can work with him,” Gaines said.
Greear said he has never been comfortable with “the neat and tidy Calvinist or non-Calvinist labels,” but believes God’s work in salvation is “always prior, and that no man can say that ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.” Observing much in Scripture about “whosoever will may come,” he believes “we are to spread the gospel promiscuously and that our prayers and evangelistic efforts have real effect.”
He said his church staff includes people “who lean more reformed and others who lean the other way,” and would personally prefer to be known for the gospel and the Great Commission than a particular stance regarding Calvinism. “The majority of Southern Baptists just want to love Jesus, believe and teach the Bible, and see people saved. That and the doctrinal confession of the BF&M 2000 should be our point of unity and our evaluative tool for leadership,” Greear said.
