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IRVING The Southern Baptists of Texas Convention’s Empower 2020 conference saw record attendance as 3,355 registrants enjoyed a diverse lineup of speakers—from Christian hip-hop artist Lecrae to SBC Executive Committee President Ronnie Floyd—in packed assemblies, breakouts, meals and late night events Feb. 24-25 at the Irving Convention Center at Las Colinas.
Speakers stressed community engagement, spiritual health and alert evangelism.
“It was our biggest Empower conference ever,” Shane Pruitt, Empower consultant and NAMB director of next gen evangelism, told the TEXAN.
Empower offered something for everyone.
Monday’s Classics luncheon on Feb. 24 with Mark Lowry welcomed nearly 900, while 1,300 attended the afternoon Classics session in the main auditorium featuring music by Charles Billingsley and messages from Mac Brunson, Herb Reavis and Fred Luter.
The ladies’ session with Jen Wilkin on Monday saw enthusiastic participation, as did the two dozen breakouts Monday and Tuesday covering multiple evangelistic topics.
Empower’s main sessions kicked off Monday evening as Pruitt and his wife, Kasi, welcomed an estimated crowd of more than 2,500.
Composer Matt Boswell, pastor of The Trails Church in Prosper, led worship throughout the conference with the Matt Boswell Band, performing a mix of traditional and contemporary hymns and praise songs.
Robby Gallaty, pastor of Long Hollow Baptist Church in Nashville, opened with a message from 1 Timothy 4:6-8 filled with personal anecdotes, including the story of his own salvation.
Gallaty likened physical discipline to spiritual discipline, asserting that those lacking spiritual discipline also lack motivation, joy, passion and the abundant life promised by Christ. Introducing the Ephesians passage, he noted Paul’s exhortation to Timothy to pursue godliness while avoiding bad doctrine and “silly myths.”
Citing recent statistics from LifeWay indicating 67 percent of students desert the church after high school, Gallaty said, “When they get to college, they don’t know why they believe what they believe.”
Reminding his audience that there are three things eternal: God, God’s Word and the human soul, he stressed the importance of prayer, Scripture reading and memorization. We are to emulate Christ in performing the spiritual disciplines. “Not only did Jesus tell us to do these things, Jesus did them himself,” he challenged.
Gallaty’s own story is a case in point. The former Roman Catholic rejected the gospel as a scholarship basketball player at William Carey University. Drifting after college, he worked as a professional fighter, club bouncer and bartender before a collision involving an 18-wheeler left him with severe neck and back injuries and, eventually, an opioid addiction.
Crediting his mother’s “tough love,” Gallaty said he became a Christian during his second stint in rehab. He “wandered into the Christian life,” until fellow church member David Platt, then a seminary student, discipled him, having him memorize the book of Romans.
Gallaty later quoted Romans to his family during a holiday gathering. Years later, they trusted Christ.
Hip-hop artist Lecrae was then interviewed on-stage by Grant Skeldon of the Initiative Network and Pruitt. Lecrae talked about his relationship with Christ, among other topics. “God doesn’t just snap his fingers and fix our problems. He wants to walk through our problems with us … he’s relational.”
“Devotion is not about how devoted I am to God,” Lecrae said. “Devotion is about recognizing how devoted he is to me.”
Closing out the Monday evening’s main session, Carey Nieuwhof, founding pastor of the multi-campus Connexus Church in Ontario, Canada, spoke about the surprising turns life takes.
Nieuwhof said he attended law school, worked for a year in downtown Toronto, passed the bar, and then went to seminary, admitting his “wiring” is more that of “a lawyer than a pastor.”
His message focused on avoiding collapse in ministry, discussing seven challenges “no one expects and everyone experiences in leadership”: cynicism, compromise, disconnection, irrelevance, pride, burnout and emptiness.
California pastor Bryan Loritts of Silicon Valley’s Abundant Life Christian Fellowship, began Tuesday morning’s session with a message from Ephesians 2, first emphasizing eternal security from Ephesians 1.
Ephesians 2 offers both the “bad news” that, before Christ, we were dead in our trespasses and sins, and the “good news” of the gospel, Loritts said.
While the emphasis in Ephesians 2 is on the grace of Jesus Christ, the passage also illumines the disturbing topic of racism. Paul moves from considering man’s “vertical reconciliation to God through Christ” to the “horizontal implications” of what this looks like when relating to others, Loritts said. He stressed Paul’s point that Christ’s work on the cross must inform how we treat various ethnicities.
Pleading for unity, Loritts argued, “a racist Christian or a racially indifferent Christian is an oxymoron,” discussing the origins of the historically black American church in the late 1700s when a black worshiper was removed from a Philadelphia church for praying in the white section.
Following Loritts, H.B. Charles, pastor of Shiloh Metropolitan Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Florida, spoke on Luke 15, crafting his message to complement the Who’s Your One? evangelism initiative.
Charles focused on the three parables in Luke 15, all highlighting a similar truth: “Lost people matter to God.”
“No one of us can reach all the world for Christ, but each of us can reach one for Jesus,” he urged.
“Sinners are lost, but sinners are loved,” Charles said, reminding all that in an “impersonal society” where people are numbers, God knows our names.
Following an announcement of the top baptizing churches in the SBTC for 2019, Ronnie Floyd rounded out the morning session with a message from Acts 17:16-31.
“Is your vision big enough?” Floyd asked the crowd.
Floyd emphasized evangelism in context. Paul, in Athens, the intellectual center of the world, debated in both the synagogue and the marketplace because he “understood the community clearly.” He unfurled sacred scrolls in the synagogue when speaking to Jews and he referenced the statue to an “unknown god” when addressing philosophers at Mars Hill.
Likewise, pastors and church leaders must “work diligently” to understand where God has sent them, Floyd said. “Go to places that matter in your town” he urged, adding, “You cannot learn about your town sitting in your office on a computer all day long.”
Floyd also urged the creation of multi-tiered strategies reach all at town’s citizens of all ethnicities, particularly recommending evangelizing 12-17 year old students, whose baptisms have fallen by 38 percent since 2000. Doing so will reverse the SBC’s decline in overall baptisms, he claimed.
Finally, Floyd exhorted the audience to lead toward the vision with intentionality in preaching and sharing the gospel.
That afternoon, at Empower’s closing assembly, Pruitt presented Tony Mathews, pastor of North Garland Baptist Fellowship, with the W.A. Criswell Award honoring pastors faithful in evangelism. Ted Elmore, evangelist and SBTC prayer consultant, received the Roy Fish Lifetime Evangelism Award.
Kie Bowman, SBTC president and pastor of Austin’s Hyde Park Baptist Church, delivered the conference’s final sermon on John 4:35-38.
“Do you believe in evangelism?” Bowman opened, noting that last year the SBC reported a 74-year low in baptisms.
“Jesus encourages harvest awareness,” Bowman said of the passage, which comes at the end of the Lord’s conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. Jesus’ two commands in John 4:35, “look” and “see,” signify ample opportunities for evangelism.
The phrase “four months more and then the harvest” (4:35a) was a colloquial statement, Bowman explained, what people would say to justify procrastination.
Rather, the Lord emphasizes action in the passage by calling the fields “white for the harvest,” Bowman said, explaining that rice growers know white grains indicate over-ripeness, making immediate harvest imperative.
“We are living in the era of almost too late,” Bowman said. “Everyone you know has a short life and a hard heart.”
Emphasizing urgency in evangelism, Bowman related the story of his best friend who tragically died just before Bowman returned to his native Alaska where the two intended to have a gospel conversation.
“My best friend walked into eternity without Jesus,” Bowman said. “I learned eternity is too long to be wrong.”
Jesus also promises “harvest rewards,” to both sower and reaper, Bowman noted.
Reflecting on the 2020 Empower conference, SBTC Executive Director Jim Richards told the TEXAN, “While this year [featured] record-setting attendance … the most important presence was that of the Holy Spirit. God moved in lives. Pastors, staff members, and laypersons were challenged, encouraged and informed. Spiritual renewal in the churches and spiritual awakening among those who need Christ continues to be our focus.”
