The Southern Baptist Convention will be meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana a few days after you receive this edition of The Index. I encourage you to keep the annual meeting of the Convention in your prayers. I suppose that every year the Southern Baptist Convention has met, since its founding in 1845, has been important, but I believe that in recent years the Convention meetings as well as the spirit that permeates the Convention throughout the year is more important than it has ever been.

A few years ago some self-avowed “experts” began to declare that the age of the denomination is over. The problem was that they believed their own predictions so much that they became promoters of the concept. Before long what developed was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is only one reason in my mind why a denomination should go out of business. If a denomination fails to assist its churches in fulfilling the mission they believe God has called them to accomplish, then it has failed its primary responsibility. It is clear that the Southern Baptist Convention and the 42 State Baptist Conventions are not in the category of those who have failed their churches. Our conventions, both national and state, are energetic, engaged with our churches, and thoroughly evangelistic and missions-involved in their work.

Frankly, if one will make the effort to be informed about all that is going on, he or she will be amazed at the amount of Kingdom work that is being done and lives that are being reached through the missions and ministries of Southern Baptists. We have so much to be thankful for. We are a remarkably blessed convention of churches that truly need to get on our knees and thank the Lord for His generosity to our churches and to our work.

What are the strengths of our denomination? Certainly several things could be mentioned. I want to mention a few.

Our strength is in our belief in and preaching and teaching of the Bible as the infallible, inerrant, incomparable, transforming Word of God. No doubt, God has blessed our faithful preaching and teaching of His holy Word.

Our strength is in our devotion to evangelism. We don’t appear statistically to be as evangelistic as we believe ourselves to be. We have been on a baptism plateau for over fifty years, and our nation is becoming more and more lost. We like to talk about evangelism more than we like to do evangelism and that has to change before we can see the revival for which we have been praying. Still, our focus upon evangelism is right and remains a strength of our denomination.

Our strength is in our churches. We will never be stronger as a denomination than the strength of our churches. Those of us who minister through the denomination understand that “Baptist Central” is the local Baptist church and our sincerest desire is to serve our churches, our pastors, our church staffs, our congregations. Our Convention staff has a “main thing” statement we often repeat. Our responsibility is to “serve Christ by strengthening churches.” We want you to know and understand that this is our heart and our commitment.

Our strength is in our worldwide mission ministry. This includes every mission field mentioned in Acts 1:8. Southern Baptists are accomplishing, through God’s blessing, miraculous things on the mission fields around the world. Between the mission work in our churches in the United States and the work of missions across the world, we are seeing about one million baptisms per year. What a blessing to be a part of something that huge, that miraculous, that blessed!

Our strength is in our cooperation. As a denomination, we need to understand and acknowledge that without a strong Cooperative Program, our denomination would crumble and collapse like a house of cards. In my opinion, unless we have a Cooperative Program recommitment as a denomination, we are going to see in the very near future some very sad and tragic things happen including the calling home of missionaries and the shutting down of critical mission work across the world.

It is time for “all hands on deck” in Southern Baptist life from our national leadership to agency and institution presidents, to state convention leaders, to pastors, to lay people in the pew. Every church should consider its support of Southern Baptist missions through the Cooperative Program and if the percentage of that support falls below a tithe of unrestricted offerings, the church should seriously consider a greater commitment to giving through the Cooperative Program to support Southern Baptist mission work.

Some people won’t appreciate my call for that level of commitment. After all, our churches are autonomous and they can do whatever they want to do. That is absolutely true, but I can tell you that as a pastor, to my knowledge, I never had a church member complain about a sermon on tithing who was a tither. We cannot be as strong through fund raising projects, special offerings, societal appeals for support, and independent mission projects, as we are when we join hands and give generously through the Cooperative Program. It’s just not the same. Together through the Cooperative Program, we share the Gospel of Jesus Christ with greater strength and have greater impact upon a lost world.