Greear’s farewell address honors past, urges Great Commission unity

NASHVILLE  J.D. Greear began his farewell address to the 14,227 registered messengers plus guests filling the Music City Center’s auditorium the morning of June 15 by recalling the challenging pandemic conditions that led to his three-year presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention.

When COVID-19 caused the cancellation of the 2020 SBC annual meeting, Greear, pastor of The Summit church in North Carolina, retained the SBC presidency. His tenure would be marked by tensions within the convention exacerbated by the pandemic. His final message as president would both do homage to the past and call for action in the future.

“It’s been a long 30 years these last three years,” Greear said as laughter rippled throughout the auditorium. He also called his time as president “a joy, an honor, an unspeakable blessing” that he had cherished.

No one could have been ready for 2020, Greear said, noting that he had finished his 2020 challenge sermon series as the pandemic struck.

Lockdowns provided time for spiritual reflection, but also revealed “fault lines and fissures” in the Southern Baptist Convention, Greear said. “COVID did not create those divisions; it just exposed them.”

Putting his “cards on the table right up front,” Greear said it was “a defining moment in our convention … a crossroads that may be the most important in our generation” since the Conservative Resurgence of four decades ago.

At that time, Southern Baptists had to decide if they were going to “hold fast to the authority of God’s Word” or follow the path of every major denomination into the “darkness of liberalism and the wilderness of cultural accommodation.” The Conservative Resurgence righted the doctrinal ship at a time when even Baptist seminary professors “openly undermined, even mocked” the gospel in the Baptist Faith & Message.

Of the generation of men and women who led the Resurgence, Greear said, “Their courage God used to save our future,” and called for applause, which followed.

Who are we?

Moving to the present, Greear called the current moment equally defining for Southern Baptists: determining the direction of the SBC.

No room for compromise exists regarding the Baptist Faith & Message, he said, noting its stance on the sufficiency of Scripture, the exclusivity of Christ, the sanctity of marriage and God’s complementary design for gender, positions all affirmed by the 13 SBC entity heads, state executives, SBC officers and associational leadership.

The question, rather, is not about doctrine but culture and identity.

“Is the Baptist Faith & Message 2000 still the basis of our unity? Is the Great Commission our rallying point?” he asked. “Are we primarily a cultural and affinity group or do we see our primary calling as a gospel witness for all people and all places at all time? Who are we?”

He cautioned that Jesus had warned there “is more than one way for a generation to lose the gospel.”

Beware the leaven of the Pharisees

While the curse of liberalism exists, Jesus warned of a potentially greater danger: the “leaven of the Pharisees,” which grows “in the soil of orthodoxy.”

Using Matthew 23 as his text, Greear discussed pharisaical attitudes that can negatively affect our gospel witness.

1. The Pharisees conflated the “traditions of men” with the “authority of God.” Today, Greear said, this occurs when we take cultural, stylistic or political preferences as divine truth.
2. The Pharisees focused on the minor parts of the law while ignoring the weightier parts. Today this looks like “insisting on accountability in our leadership while allowing gossip and slander and cynicism to go unchecked in ourselves,” he said. Such attitudes result in institutions creating “unnecessary obstacles” for victims of sexual abuse or an SBC that spends more energy decrying Critical Race Theory rather than “lamenting the devastating consequences of racial bigotry.” Greear called for “robust, careful … on our knees discussions” about issues of social justice, guided by Scripture and not the world. “The vast majority of Southern Baptists and all of your convention’s leaders, both Black and White, recognize that CRT arises our of a world view at odds with the gospel,” Greear said, warning that calls for justice seem hollow when suffering and racial injustice are ignored.
3. The Pharisees ignored God’s focus on the outsider. Instead they “obscured the portal for the outsider with conveniences for the insider,” making the gospel inaccessible. The danger today is when we forget how outsiders may perceive our “statements and resolutions,” Greear said, in which our “haste to condemn our society’s answers” leads us to ignore the legitimacy of honest questioning.
4. The Pharisees loved the praise of men. Greear recommended servanthood and warned against becoming “white-washed tombs.” He called baseless accusations against Christian leaders “reprehensible,” giving examples of social media misused to accuse others falsely. Such actions make us “smell like death even when our theology is squeaky clean.” If we do not change, we risk not only alienating our brothers and sisters of color, but also losing our own children, Greear cautioned. “What a tragedy if we withstood the leaven of liberalism only to suffocate under the leaven” of the Pharisees, he said.

Of his presidency, Greear said a surprising discovery was how unified “rank and file” Baptists were about the primacy of the Great Commission.

“You want to see us focus on the main thing,” Greear told the crowd, noting how horrified Southern Baptists are at both sexual misconduct and coverups.

A negative surprise, Greear said, was loudness of the voices of those who would keep Baptists a “cultural affinity group” or a “political voting bloc.”

“Great Commission Baptists are for the most part ready to walk into the future, but we are spending way too much time ripping each other apart or listening to those who do,” he warned, calling such attitudes “demonic,” citing James 3:14-17 and cautioning that they distract from the gospel.

Calling for a renewed focus on the Great Commission, Greear announced three commitments.

1. Announcing “we are going to be Great Commission Baptists,” Greear called for evangelism to be the forefront of the convention with a renewed commitment to personal evangelism and assisting church plants. Not only are “people of color welcome in our convention, but they will be an essential part of our future,” he added, citing NAMB statistics that 22 percent of SBC congregations are non-Anglo, representing the largest growth in the SBV. Calling for diversity not because it’s “cool, woke or trendy,” Greear told leaders of color: “We need you. There’s no way we can reach our nation without you” to which the audience gave a rousing and lengthy standing ovation.
2. “We will exalt the gospel above all” as the “North Star of our convention,” Greear continued. The gospel will “expose our errors” and correct our course: “The gospel saves our souls and calls us into truth.”
3. “We will unify around the gospel and the Great Commission,” Greear urged last.

“The gospel that unites us is bigger than the cultural differences that divide us,” Greear said, again urging messengers to work together and eschew politics: “God has not saved us primarily to save American politically. He has called us to make the gospel known to all,” his comments drawing loud applause.

“We are Great Commission Baptists … we are not the party of the elephant or the donkey, we are the people of the Lamb,” Greear said, reassuring messengers that this does not mean ambiguity on the things Scripture is clear about. He concluded with a reminder of the gospel from John 17.