The GCR Task Force has been meeting since its creation at last summer’s SBC in Louisville, and chairman Ronnie Floyd reported on its progress during the SBC’s Executive Committee meeting Feb. 22. The report, which is available online at Pray4GCR.com, included six “components” of a vision they believe Southern Baptists will rally around and experience a renewed passion for the Great Commission – making disciples of all the world’s people groups.

During the 90-minute presentation, Floyd said the Task Force will offer the following six “components” of a “new and compelling vision for the future” of the SBC:

1. A “missional vision” statement with eight “core values” in hopes they would be emphasized at national and state meetings and at SBC agencies.

2. A “reinvention and release” of the North American Mission Board to focus on doing direct missions emphasizing church planting, evangelism and discipleship, and leadership development, and phasing out current cooperative funding agreements between NAMB and state conventions.

3. Authorization of the International Mission Board to work in North America including the funding of missionaries “upon North American soil.”

4. Movement of responsibility for promotion of the Cooperative Program (CP) and stewardship education from the SBC Executive Committee to state conventions, saving the EC over $1 million a year.

5.  Affirmation of the current CP definition, but creating a new category of church giving called “Great Commission Giving” that would include designated giving to local, state and national SBC causes.

6.  And, increase of the IMB’s CP budget share by one percentage point amounting to $2 million, less than 1 percent of the IMB’s budget, by cutting the Executive Committee’s budget by the same dollar amount, which would be a 30 percent reduction in the EC’s budget.

Asked how the proposed changes might impact Illinois Baptists, and the Illinois Baptist State Association, Executive Director Nate Adams said, “The report obviously recommends some shifts in responsibilities and in the flow of funding for cooperative missions.  New leadership in key national positions will no doubt interpret and help determine exactly what that means, if the recommendations are approved.”

“Clearly each state convention of churches will need to carefully navigate the impact on their unique setting and make necessary adjustments,” Adams said.

“The proposed phasing out of cooperative budgets between NAMB and state conventions is significant, and smaller state conventions would probably have to respond quite differently from larger ones.  We will continue to study this interim report and watch its evolution through the Orlando convention.”

“I’m confident that Illinois Baptists will continue to cooperate faithfully with other Southern Baptists through the national Convention and its entities, while continuing to do all we can to reach the 13 million people in our mission field here in Illinois,” Adams concluded.

Floyd emphasized that the report as presented before the Executive Committee was only a progress or interim report, saying the Task Force will continue to make changes until its final release May 3. He told The Illinois Baptist the Task Force will meet again in April although the date has not been set.  Asked how complete he thought the report is in its present form, Floyd said, “It’s substantial, but there’s still a lot more to come.”

During an interview with four state Baptist papers, including The Illinois Baptist, the morning following his report, Floyd said he is working to develop a number of motions to pre-sent to the SBC in Orlando that, if approved, would implement the recommended changes including changes in ministry assignments and funding.

He said it is his understanding, and he is hopeful that, none of the recommended changes will require a change in the SBC by-laws so they could be done in one meeting of the SBC, not two as was required for the Covenant for a New Century, an SBC re-organization in 1995-96.

In concluding his report, Floyd said, “We believe the vision we are unfolding to you tonight provides major momentum for the continuation of this Great Commission Resurgence movement and vision. However, a real, long-lasting Great Commission Resurgence must happen personally, as well as in our churches, and in all of our Southern Baptist local associations, state conventions and national entities.”

With additional reporting by James A. Smith, editor of Florida Baptist Witness, and Mark Kelly, Baptist Press.

“I asked our congregation if they thought we were a mission-minded church.” Knox said. “They said yes, and I said, ‘That’s partly correct.’ We’re a very generous mission giving church, but we haven’t been a mission going church.”

Knox challenged FBC Royalton, located 15 miles northeast of Carbondale, to embrace a more outward focus, committed to Kingdom-building prayer and ministry. The change in perspective, and the growth they’ve experienced, is representative of a 3.7 percent increase in total baptisms statewide.

According to 2009 Annual Church Profile (ACP) reports, Illinois Baptist churches baptized 5,383 people in 2009, up from 5,189 in 2008. 

“God has truly blessed our churches in the past year,” said Pat Pajak, IBSA associate executive director, Church Strengthening Team. “We’re grateful to Him, and to our churches for their commitment to sharing the Gospel.”

While the increase is cause for celebration, Pajak said, there is still much work to be done.

“While baptisms have increased, unfortunately there are 390 churches that didn’t report a single baptism in 2009,” said Pajak. “There also are more than 200 churches in Illinois that haven’t reported any baptisms in the past five years.

“It forces us to ask the question: How can this be turned around? How can we help churches struggling to reach their communities with the Gospel?”

The first step is expecting God to move, Pajak said. Eternity Baptist Church in Centralia prepared for how God could work in their church through a series of messages preached by Pastor Gary Allen, who sensed God moving the church toward breakthroughs in all areas of their ministry. Over the past year, Allen said Eternity has seen spikes in attendance and enthusiasm, as well as more than double the number of baptisms reported the previous year.

First Baptist Church of Jonesboro baptized more people in 2009 than in the three previous years combined; already this year, they’ve baptized eight more individuals. Robbie Ralls, director of children and youth ministries, credits the change to his church’s investment in their community. They’ve built a children’s ministry by knocking on doors, meeting families, and inviting them to church.  

“We prayed, and that’s where God led us,” Ralls said. He remembers one visit with a woman who said she’d lived in the neighborhood for years and never had been invited to church.

“That kind of hit us between the eyes,” Ralls said. “As a church, we’re moving out and doing what God’s called us to do. We were doing our own thing, and now we’re going out into the community.”

Pajak urged churches to contact IBSA for resources to help them impact their communities, and see more people come to know Christ personally. Upcoming training events like Vacation Bible School clinics and Churches of Strength Super Saturday Seminars also will have evangelism tracks. For more information about any of these resources, contact Pat Pajak at (217) 391-3129 or
patpajak@IBSA.org.

Pajak said he is anticipating that this spring’s Across Illinois emphasis will have a significant impact on professions of faith and baptisms this year. He also is looking forward to welcoming a new director of Evangelism and Discipleship Ministries in the next few weeks who will be tasked with helping churches further their outreach efforts. Watch for updates in future issues of The Illinois Baptist.

In materials sent to local associations last week, DOMs are encouraged to bring their key leaders to the training event. Jerry Day, IBSA associate executive director, said, “The goal of SALT is to train associational leaders who will in turn train church leaders in their context. SALT is there to encourage and assist them in doing their job of helping church leaders.”

The free training event, which will be held at Tabernacle Baptist Church, Decatur, begins Friday, April 16 at 6 p.m., Saturday at 8 a.m. and concludes at 12:15 p.m.

Day worked with DOMs to plan and offer leadership tracks tailored to their and their association’s needs. One of those tracks is specially designed for DOMs, and is based on Strategic Focused Leadership, one of the four core competencies developed by the North American Mission Board (NAMB) working with DOMs around the country.

“We wanted to offer something new for DOMs and felt the need to address the core competencies. To do this, we invited NAMB to partner with us to provide the training,” Day shared.  NAMB leaders will include Tom Billings, executive director, Union Baptist Association, Houston, Texas; Steve Bass, executive director, Arizona Baptist Convention and former director of missions, Tulsa, Okla.; Mark Elliot, director of missions, Eastern Nebraska Baptist Association, Omaha, Neb.; and David Smith, director of missions, Austin Baptist Association, Austin, Texas.

The track will help DOMs think and act strategically, as well as provide the tools to help them develop the skills and discipline of being a strategic leader.

Featured tracks for association leaders include: Women’s Missions, Men’s Missions, Church Planting, Renewal/Stewardship, Evangelism, Worship, Sunday School/Discipleship and Family/Student Ministries.  Association leaders will also have the opportunity to take cross-functional electives during the event’s final two sessions.

“Local associations are our strategic partners in helping churches and part of our mission is to help them so we all can work together to do our work more effectively for Christ,” stated Day.

For more information about SALT, contact Linda Darden at (217) 391-3137 or
outbind://6-000000000D93738BCF83D411BB5000508B8B07E20700C0DF0283CF83D411BB5000508B8B07E20000000050DD000076C78464656239438E5CEDC18F29D13F0050AE0EA81E0000/lindadarden@IBSA.org.

Fortunately, Don lives in my neighborhood. On snowy mornings I usually wake to the sound of Don revving up his snow blower.  By the time I can roll out of bed, peer through the darkness to see how much snow has fallen, and pull my clothes on backwards, Don often has cleared his entire driveway and sidewalk and is halfway finished with mine.

But Don’s grace doesn’t stop in my driveway.  He moves on to the next neighbor, and the next. He does the walkways as well as the driveways.  His work is precise and thorough; I think you’d have to say perfect.  He never accepts payment, and quickly waves off expressions of gratitude with a smile and an assurance that he loves helping.

After our last overnight snowstorm I awakened to see a snowfall of several inches. As my head cleared, I wondered why I hadn’t yet heard Don’s snow blower alarm clock.  Then I remembered that it was a holiday.  Most people were sleeping in, and I guessed that even Don was getting a later start.

I quickly bundled up and scurried outside with my shovel.  We don’t own a snow blower, partly because we’ve invested instead in three sons who serve the same purpose.  But two of those boys are now away at college and the third was elsewhere that weekend.  So it was left to my shovel and me to get started alone.

Just as I dug in, I heard Don’s blower rev into action.  I shoveled faster, thinking I could save him the trouble of at least one driveway this time.  But there was a lot of snow, and I was only about half finished when he plowed his way over and finished my driveway in a fraction of the time and effort I had invested.  

About that time, however, Don’s wife called to him from the doorway of their house.  He returned home, shut down the blower, and went inside.  That’s when I noticed that he had only plowed one small path from his driveway to mine.  Seizing the opportunity, I started shoveling the rest of my walk, and then the rest of his.

As I did so, Don started backing his car out.  He had an urgent errand to run for his wife, he said, but I didn’t need to shovel the walk – he’d be back later that morning to do it. My response was automatic.  “Come on, Don, you do so much for us, let me do this little bit for you!”  He smiled and waved, accepting my small gesture the same gracious way he accepts my thanks when he’s helping me.  

I finished Don’s walk and then turned to see the other neighbors’ driveways, still buried in snow.  Don would normally do that, I thought, and much quicker and better than I could.  But I think it was in some small way to honor him, that I turned and started shoveling my way down the sidewalk toward their houses.  

More than an hour later, when Don returned home, I had worked up quite a sweat, and barely finished two neighbors’ sidewalks.  But as Don started up his powerful blower again and finished the job, I felt a great satisfaction in having joined him.  It was then that I recognized the glimpse of God that I was seeing through this storm.  Let me describe Don, and you drop in God’s name and see if you agree.  

Don always gets up before I can, and he’s already at work when I join him.  He has equipment, expertise and power that I don’t have and never will.  He even has desire and motivation to help others that far exceeds mine.  Don’s work on my behalf is undeserved.   It’s greater than I could ever do for myself, and he does it for me time and time again.  He doesn’t look up for gratitude, or credit.  He just keeps working for my good.

Don’s goodness, his grace invested my life, made me want to shovel back in his direction, to make my own walk look better, and eventually to shovel my neighbors’ walks as well.  What I did to clear the path to my neighbors’ driveways made it a little easier for Don to get there, but once he got there, he worked far more powerfully than I ever could.  Yet, somehow it pleased him that I joined him in that work to serve them.  

The second neighbor whose walk I shoveled came outside just as I was starting. He told me it wasn’t necessary, that he could do it himself.  I know how he felt.  It’s not always easy to receive grace from someone else.  But I told him I’d enjoy doing it, if he didn’t mind.  He didn’t yet know what I knew, that I was mainly doing it to say thank you to Don.  But I had only recently learned that the best way I could honor Don was by joining him in the work that he loves doing, the work of bringing grace into others’ lives.

Many cities today offer church hunters a wide variety of choices. Sometimes when people have a painful church experience, their next stop is a mega-church. A larger church apparently seems to be a safe place to chill and re-group.

This family was about to make the same decision, but they didn’t realize that the church they were visiting wasn’t Southern Baptist. It looked Baptist, sounded Baptist and featured leadership of former Southern Baptists. But it was not a cooperating Southern Baptist church.

So I asked, “What about the missionaries?”

The question confused them, so I further explained that moving their membership to an independent church would mean they would no longer be supporting more than 11,000 Southern Baptist missionaries as they had much of their lives through the Cooperative Program and annual mission offerings. These friends had what I would call a deer-in-the-headlights look as they had not considered what it meant to attend a non-Southern Baptist church.

More recently, I had a workman in my house. As we talked, I learned that he was raised Methodist, his wife was raised Southern Baptist, and now they sporadically attend a large non-denominational church. He figured it didn’t matter because they all worshipped the same God.

On one level, I can agree with him. Most communities have a host of non-Southern Baptist churches that are biblically sound. Likewise, there are respected para-church ministries that meet real needs.

However, on another level I couldn’t disagree more. It does matter where we worship and how we invest our lives in the fulfillment of the Acts 1:8 mandate. If you only get one life to invest in the propagation of the Gospel, don’t you want to do that as effectively as possible? And is there a better way for a church to accomplish a huge task than to work with more than 44,000 cooperating partners?

Southern Baptists adopted the Cooperative Program in 1925 as a plan through which churches could voluntarily combine resources to accomplish objectives bigger than any one church could do. This has included starting mission boards, seminaries, children's homes and sending missionaries.

Looking back, it’s not hard to see how the Cooperative Program was a God-ordained vision that now results in the mobilization of more than 11,000 missionaries around the world.

To what degree are Southern Baptists committed to maintaining and growing this missionary force?

My guess is that families rarely think of this when they are church hunting. The way families switch churches, denominations and even religions today is mind-boggling. Do churched people know why they are what they are? If you are going to be a Methodist, I encourage you to make that choice based on good reason that includes theology, missions and history.

For my wife and me, we’ve found a good reason to be Southern Baptist long before entering vocational ministry. We attend a church that unashamedly proclaims the Gospel as truth. With our regular tithes, we know that our investment literally goes around the world through the Cooperative Program and when combined with the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering and the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, we know that we’re having a tremendous impact on the mission field.

Through the services of the North American Mission Board and the International Mission Board, we’ve been engaged in meaningful mission experiences around the world. We know that we have joined more than 44,000 other Southern Baptist churches and church-type missions in a vision that’s as valid today as it was 84 years ago.

When someone casts a larger vision than the cooperative missions method of Southern Baptists, I’ll join them. For me, that’s how important it is to spend my life wisely invested in the propagation of the Gospel.

I trust the missionaries would agree.

Jim Burton is team leader for mission education at the North American Mission Board.

The ride will begin on May 27 at 10 a.m. at the Cracker Barrel parking lot in Mt. Vernon.  From there, riders will travel to the Knoxville/ Pigeon Forge, Tenn. area for the night.  The next day they will ride a portion of the Blue Ridge Parkway and Tail of the Dragon into Ridgecrest for a weekend of worship, fellowship, training and preaching featuring keynote speaker Lt. Colonel Oliver North, USMC (Ret.).

Lt. Col. North served in the U.S. Marine Corps for over 40 years, and as a member of the National Security Council Staff and a government counter-terrorism coordinator from 1983-1986.  In recent years he has covered the U.S. military’s War on Terror and hosted the documentary series, War Stories, for the Fox News Channel.  Additional speakers and artists include Lt. General William G. Boykin, David E. Burton, DeGarmo and Key and Dave the Horn Guy.

Riders will begin the two-day trip back to Illinois following the worship service on May 30.

The entire cost of the Weekend Ridgecrest Rally is $175.25, which includes the registration fee, room at the Mountain Laurel Lodge (2 persons per room) and meal tickets. To register call (800) 588-7222 by April 24. Request the IBSA Group rooms.

For more information visit lifeway.com/motorcyclerally.

If you would like to add your name to the database of other motorcyclists from IBSA churches across Illinois, or if you have any questions, call Cliff Woodman at Harmony Baptist Church, Medora (618) 836-7722 or e-mail
outbind://6-000000000D93738BCF83D411BB5000508B8B07E20700C0DF0283CF83D411BB5000508B8B07E20000000050DD000076C78464656239438E5CEDC18F29D13F0050AE0EA81E0000/cliffwoodman@mac.com.

• Northern Illinois | Streator Baptist Camp, from now until March 22, between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.
• Central Illinois | The IBSA Building in Springfield, March 23-24, between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.
• Metro East Area | Bethel Baptist Church, Troy, March 25, between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.
• Southern Illinois | Williamson County Baptist Association, March 26, between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.

Some local associations are arranging collection sites where buckets can be dropped off and then taken to one of the four regional drop-off locations. For more information, contact your local director of missions.

IBSA’s Disaster Relief semi truck will collect the buckets and transport them to Florida for shipment to Haiti.

Shelby currently is in Haiti as part of an incident command team enlisted by national Disaster Relief leaders. He asked Illinois Baptists to pray for him and the team as they work with Haitian Baptists and government officials to facilitate Southern Baptist volunteer efforts. Shelby will be in Haiti until March 15.

There is still a great need for medical personnel who can volunteer a week of their time to serve. Shelby said a team from Illinois is prepared to go, and can be deployed as soon as at least one doctor is available to serve with them. Interested physicians (even those who aren’t trained in Disaster Relief) should contact Assistant Disaster Relief Coordinator Jim Weickersheimer at (217) 419-1175 or jimkipp@peoplepc.com.

The Haitian government is discouraging mission teams from coming into Port-du-Prince, due to a severe lack of housing, electricity, food and water. Southern Baptist Disaster Relief teams are an exception to this ban. Teams of Disaster Relief trained volunteers from Illinois likely will be mobilized beginning in May and will be needed throughout the year. 

The next IBSA Disaster Relief training sessions will be held May 7-8 at Carlinville Southern Baptist Church, and May 14-15 at Streator Baptist Camp. To register for training or for more information, contact Linda Darden at (217) 391-3137 or lindadarden@IBSA.org.