The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) recently released a
report that shows declines in baptisms, church attendance, and the number of
affiliated associations through which the SBC operates. Since the SBC’s annual
convention is only weeks away, it is certainly the case that even now sermons
are being edited and keynote addresses are being revised to present these
less-than-rosy findings to the congregated messengers.
As someone who was raised comfortably within the boundaries
of SBC life (my father and grandfather were both SBC pastors and involved in
state-level convention work), this report is troubling. Regardless of the
political or social mess that the SBC has waded through in the last 35 years
such a report is no occasion for gloating or mockery. All Baptists must
remember that these numbers represent people, not theology or politics.
As someone who has moved away from the center of SBC life
into the BGCT first and now the CBF, I am developing something of an
insider/outsider perspective on the report. I remember the Annual Church Survey
that was delivered to my church each year and the questions that is asked. How
many baptisms? How many professions of faith? How many in Sunday School? How
many? How many?
Those reports eventually became for me something of an
embarrassment. I lost the conviction that the numbers of those baptized or the
quantity of those praying the “sinner’s prayer” was truly the mark of a
ministry. Unfortunately, those numbers are translated into words about the
success of a ministry or of a church, much like the way a congregation’s
budgeted percentage given to the Cooperative Program is used to “prove” loyalty
and faithfulness.
I understand the impulse to quantify and rank these things,
though. We minister in an atmosphere of the Spirit; such a place is difficult
to organize and nearly impossible to quantify. The ground-level work that we do
involves the transformation of people’s hearts through the power of the Holy
Spirit actualized through the proclamation of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. This
is the first-level work that we do, and it is of primary importance. But how
does one measure a transformed heart? How do you quantify a progressive depth
of faith and discipleship?
Therefore we quantify and categorize the second-level work
that we do, things like tithes and Sunday School attendance. These things lend
themselves naturally to the accounting arts, and are therefore things that we
feel we can measure and rank. Baptism is trickier, though. Our Baptist churches
are re-baptizing people at an alarming rate, rendering the quantity of our
baptisms and the theology that motivates them almost irrelevant.
Herein lies the trap. By emphasizing these second-level
quantifications we adopt and live into the language of business. We begin to
speak of “growth” and “marketing” in our conversations about making successful
churches and ministries. We attend conferences and seminars on being more
“effective” and on the development of mission statements and vision statements.
Because the world of Spirit is so difficult to explain and publicize, we
inhabit the world of business, which is a world that views the numbers of the
aforementioned report to be bad news indeed. McEntyre comments, “We have
appropriated the language of investment and profit to describe endeavors that
ought rightly to remain distinct and free from market considerations.
Self-interest and increase pervade…churches’ evangelical campaigns.”[1]
Saying further, “We lose at great cost common expressions that remind us that
some things cannot be bought and sold. Some times, places, relationships, and
words should not be subjected to the terms of economic transaction. At least
the discourse of the church should reflect this.”[2]
It is this language of economy that has supplanted the language
of the Spirit in many cases. When bureaucracy becomes so self-interested that
it cannot tell the difference between the work of the Gospel and the number of
people baptized something has gone wrong.
But the bureaucracy is not the Church. The quantification of
our baptisms or giving or attendance is not the Word of God. No, these are
things that are of the domain of the accountant. At the heart of this and every
other report are the people. These are people who are actively living the
Gospel, learning to be disciples, dealing with the world every day. They are
not numbers, and they are not trends. They are the Spirit-enabled people of God
worshipping together in congregations seeking after God in their community.
They need relationships, they need resources, and they need the glad hand of
fellowship much more than they need an Annual Church Report to tell them how
good they’re doing at being made into the image of Christ.
We are not a business. We are not a corporation. We are a
cooperative: we cooperate with the Spirit of God who has graciously allowed us
to participate in God’s redemptive work for the world. Let us be careful in
word and in thought that we do not give away that mighty work to reports of the
bureaucracy. Let us be “people of careful speech.”[3]
Let us carefully navigate between the Scylla of being business-savvy by the
world’s accounting and the Charybdis of ecclesial isolationism and irrelevance.
The work is too precious and the people too important to fail.
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