News analysis: Generation gap creates dilemma for SBC

The story is at http://www.abpnews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4182&Itemid=53

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) -- The 2009 Southern Baptist Convention marked the 30th anniversary of the launch of a theological/political movement aimed at stopping the nation's second-largest faith group from drifting into liberalism and inevitable decline.

This Creation Museum skeleton of a mastodon featured prominently at the Southern Baptist Convention may have been an ironic symbol for younger attendees wondering if the SBC is becoming extinct.

Three decades later, Southern Baptists are baptizing fewer new converts than in the 1970s. Total church membership is starting to drop, and a recent study warned that years of precipitous decline may lie ahead.
Meanwhile, the old guard that led the "conservative resurgence" is moving off the scene, followed by a generation behind them that needs some convincing that the SBC is the best vehicle for their investment of their churches' mission dollars and energy.

SBC President Johnny Hunt succeeded his first year in office in rallying younger Baptists. They came to Louisville in unusually large numbers to support Hunt's Great Commission Task Force, which they hope will find ways to make the convention more responsive and relevant to their goals for ministry.

Rather than stepping into pulpits of traditional Southern Baptist churches, some of these young ministers want to start new churches that appeal more directly to the interests of their generation. That involves outreach innovations, like a church in St. Louis that invites people once a month to gather at a local pub to talk about theology.

That may appeal to Christians with spiked hair and body piercings, but it doesn't sit well with many traditional Baptists, especially those of the Greatest Generation who were raised in an era when Baptists didn't dance, drink or go to the movies on Sunday.

Roger Moran, a Missouri layman who served the conservative resurgence faithfully in ideological battles with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and before that the Baptist Joint Committee, brought 4,000 copies of a 47-page pamphlet warning messengers of perils of the "emergent" or "emerging" church, but he handed out only a few hundred before convention officials asked him to stop.

 

Christianity will not rise or fall based on what the SBC does. I believe if it does fall that people will quickly realize what is truly important and it is not the annuity board. I once heard a Baptist historian say that if it were not for the annuity board there would not be so many problems in the SBC.