SBC needs major overhaul, says writer of Great Commission Resurgence document

WAKE FOREST, N.C. (ABP)—The lead author of a Great Commission Resurgence document circulating among Southern Baptist Convention leaders says a major overhaul of denominational structures must occur if the convention is going to engage younger pastors.

Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wake Forest, N.C., said the most important article in the document he wrote with SBC President Johnny Hunt is the first, which calls Southern Baptists to commit to the Lordship of Christ first and foremost.

“If we get that one right, everything else will fall into place,” Akin said in an interview.

While the declaration, which began as a sermon by Akin with the same title, contains 10 articles, the one gaining most attention leading up to the upcoming SBC annual meeting in Louisville, Ky., is a call for developing “a more effective convention structure.”

An early version of that article described “a bloated bureaucracy” in the current system with duplicated staff positions at local, state and national levels. Akin said some state convention executive directors who were offended by the characterization “didn’t understand” the comment, which was toned down in subsequent revisions.

“I’m their friend, not their enemy,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt them.”

Denominational executives at all levels need to understand that the “under-40” wave of church leadership has no “blind loyalty” to existing structures and will fund “only what they believe in,” he stressed.

“They don’t believe in the bureaucracies of the SBC,” Akin said. “They’re walking and now beginning to run away from the SBC.”

When churches run into bureaucratic roadblocks that hinder them from funding missions in creative or unique ways, they simply go around them, he observed. Younger ministers no longer care if their mission gifts are counted as part of the Cooperative Program, a unified funding mechanism by which churches simultaneously fund state and national Baptist organizations, he asserted.

Baptists must have confidence their mission gifts are doing more than just feeding a bureaucracy, Akin emphasized.

The Great Commission Resurgence document, posted online, has garnered nearly 3,000 signatures. Akin said he would have been happy with 500.

Hunt, pastor of First Baptist Church in Woodstock, Ga., has announced he will recommend appointment of a study committee at the June 23-24 SBC annual meeting to flesh out the document and make recommendations.

Akin and Hunt will meet June 8 with state-convention executives to try to assure them their only agenda is finding a way to relieve “stagnation” they feel in the convention.