The Priority of Prayer in the Association

After fifteen years of serving as pastor of three churches, I stepped into an area of ministry that God confirmed as His clear direction - that of leading a prayer mobilization ministry in the Charlotte region. Six years of that work opened my eyes to real needs in churches and communities, and prepared me for what the Lord had in store next - serving as anassociational director of missions. I had known since my first year of seminary that I was called to serve in associational missions, but the way God led me there helped me to see the importance of prayer when one serves in that area of Kingdom work.

Southern Baptists are at a crossroads in North America, and we have come to that awareness partly because of studies that show a vast majority of churches are either plateaued or declining. What must be done to reverse decline, to revitalize churches, to move congregations toward a position of growth and strength? We can work on mechanics and logistics, on strategic plans and values clarification, but all of this must flow from a realization of our desperate need of God and a reviving move of His Spirit in the churches. Our problem is, first and foremost, a spiritual one. We must focus on building and maintaining dedicated relationships with Father God in Jesus' name and by the power of the Spirit. The road to revival leads directly through the place of prayer.

As associational leaders, we cannot assume that our pastors are praying together, or that they are practicing prayer on their own - we need to encourage and equip them to pray individually and corporately. We also need to be praying for them, standing in the intercessory gap for the pastors and the churches on a regular basis.

At a state-wide prayer team meeting recently, Pastor Michael Barrett mentioned that every Sunday morning he looks forward to getting an email from a friend who prays for him and several other pastors each week. His excitement over this support gave me the idea of emailing the pastors of our association each Sunday morning with a Scripture-based prayer for that day.The response to this intercession has been amazing - many pastors are responding with thanks, and with specific requests to be lifted up. This work of prayer is building stronger relationships between myself and the pastors, and is modeling the kind of partnership in prayer that wedesperately need in the church and in the culture.

It was in January, 2009 when I took a group of pastors away for a two day leadership summit. They knew that the first day would have a prayer focus, but they did not know how much time would be spent in prayer. After our orientation, the first hour-long session was a season of prayer together. Afterward one of the pastors asked how long we had prayed. When I told himit had been exactly one hour, he was surprised and called his wife to tell her about it. During our evaluation at the end of the retreat, the prayer time came up in discussion. Two of the six pastors present had never spent an hour in prayer with other pastors. One indicated his hesitation at the idea of doing so, but then emotionally described the blessing he experiencedas we sought the Lord together.

The associational missionary has a unique opportunity to be a prayer advocate for pastors and churches. One of my greatest burdens is to see churches become healthy, growing, and multiplying, making disciples in Jesus' name. To get to that place, we must be people of prayer.
Because of the wide-open Kingdom possibilities before us, the enemy of our souls will do all he can to discourage this prayer activity. Jesus placed a high priority on the oneness of the fellowship when He prayed in John 17, so we should not be surprised when the forces of evil look to dissuade us from uniting in prayer. A sober awareness of the truths presented in Ephesians6:10-18 regarding the spiritual struggles we face is absolutely necessary.
The road to revival leads directly through the place of prayer. May we lead the way in our associations, interceding for our pastors and churches, and calling them all to "seek the Lord until He comes and showers righteousness on us" (Hosea 10:12).

Praying for Pastors on Sunday

Jesus said, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work. ” Do you not say, ‘Four months more and then the harvest? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest! (John 4:34-35).

Lord of the harvest, I lift our pastors to you today, servants of Yours who need sustenance and strength for the day’s work. Nourish their souls, God, as they do Your will this day. Help and protect them as they serve in the harvest fields, guide their hands, encourage their hearts, give passion and patience for the work ahead. Thank You for providing all that is needed so that this day souls will be saved and lives will be changed, all to Your glory in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Praying for Pastors on Sunday

As we get ready for another Sunday, I share from the overflow of my time with the First Baptist Matthews family on Saturday evening as their annual Missions Celebration began, with Jerry Rankin of the International Mission Board preaching. His text was 1 Chronicles 16:8-10, 23-25.

We are Great Commission people because God wants us and all the nations of the earth to worship Him. He is worthy of all praise, glory, honor, and worship, and it is our task to tell His glorious good news so that the nations will lift up the name of Jesus in heartfelt worship.

Glorious God, as your servants prepare to lead Your people in worship this Lord’s day, help us all to “give thanks to the Lord, call upon Your name; make known Your deeds among the peoples. Help us to sing to You, and to speak of all Your wonders, to tell of Your glory among the nations, Your wonderful deeds among all the peoples” (1 Chron. 16:8-10, 23-24). Remind us, Lord, that there are people in our sanctuaries and people around the world who cannot sing Your praises because they do not know You and Your saving grace personally. Give us a holy burden for those near and far who are apart from You, and use Your servants as we preach, sing and pray, to call Your people to a new level of Great Commission obedience, dependent on Your absolute power and yielded to Your loving authority. May the nations rejoice, Father, because we were faithful to the call on this Sunday morning. In Jesus’ precious and worthy name, Amen!

John 10:10 Prayer for Pastors

As I pray for you today, I’m thinking about an email I got from a pastor friend who just had a new grandchild born this week. The picture in the email shows the baby girl being held for the first time by her smiling grandmother. Being the father of two girls, I understand the thrill of that new life, but I will wait a while before I experience the real thrill of being a grandparent.

New life is an amazing thing – in the birth of a child God reminds us of the beauty and miracle of the new life we know in Jesus, a birthing that may just take place in your church today! So, that is my prayer for you this Sunday morning:

Lord Jesus, You said that You came that we may have life, and have it abundantly. I pray that Your presence would so fill the places where Your people meet this Sunday that Your life will permeate the rooms and call those with no life to Yourself. Help Your servants, the preachers of Your Word today, Lord, to be empowered by the Spirit to speak boldly and lovingly of the life You make possible when we turn to You in faith. Protect Your servants also, and help them to stand in Your strength, covered with Your armor, speaking Your message to the congregation and to everyone they meet. This day, may many new children be born again into Your family.

Thank You, today, Jesus, for the new life we have in You. Help us to live it, demonstrate it, and tell others about it by Your power at work in us. All for Your glory and for the good of Your church, Amen!

A Good Deed to Jesus in Worship

In Matthew 26:6-16, Jesus said of Mary’s sacrificial offering of worship through the alabaster vial, “She has done a good deed to Me.” That is my prayer for pastors and worship leaders on Sunday morning, that we, through our worship, preaching, and ministering will do a good deed to Jesus, offer up a fragrant offering to Him through our trust and obedience.

Thank You, Lord, for the high and holy privilege of ministry as a worship leader, as a preacher of Your Word. Guide your pastors across our association of churches and beyond, Jesus, to be faithful to the task on this Lord’s day, protected by Your staying power, and prepared through the Spirit’s work to be messengers of hope, truth, and love to those we care for on Sunday. We depend on You, Father, for a fresh measure of grace so that we can be all that You desire, and so that disciples can be born and made, all to Your glory, Lord Christ. Amen!

Why Call For a Great Commission Resurgence?

31 August 2009 by David S. Dockery, Baptist and Reflector

At this year’s annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), the messengers overwhelmingly approved a proposal by a 95 percent vote to establish a Great Commission Resurgence (GCR) committee. This group has been charged with finding ways to help the SBC strengthen the work of global missions and church planting across North America, while looking for ways to enhance the faithfulness and effectiveness of Convention structures and entities. Some have raised questions about the purpose of this initiative.

Baptist and Reflector Editor Lonnie Wilkey has asked me to try to briefly explain why this call has been issued for a Great Commission Resurgence. While trying to summarize some of the issues and questions that must be addressed, I will not at this time try to predict the proposals that might come from the GCR committee in their presentation to the convention in Orlando in 2010.

Understanding the SBC at this time
Southern Baptists are at a critical juncture in our history. For the past 165 years, the history of the Southern Baptist Convention has been dotted with tension, concerns, and at times outright heresy. In recent years, those tensions have seemed magnified. For the third straight year we have seen a statistical decline in our work, which is symptomatic of deeper spiritual problems and ecclesiological challenges.

The past 30 years have been characterized by a very public controversy. While many good things have developed over the past three decades including the recovery of the gospel and a renewed commitment to the truthfulness of Scripture, the programmatic uniformity and cultural homogeneity that held us together for so many years has almost entirely evaporated. The controversy over first order doctrinal issues has seemingly degenerated into ongoing infighting over secondary and tertiary matters, resulting in a fragmented and even balkanized convention. As one person so astutely put it, the problems facing the SBC of 2009 seem much more “Corinthian” than “Chalcedonian.”

The intactness in many aspects of Southern Baptist life has started to unravel because of years of ongoing controversy, the rapid changes in our culture, the challenges to our theological commitments, the growth of multiple Bible translations, the impact of parachurch groups, the expanding diversity of music and varied worship patterns. We recognize that in many ways we all live in a post-denominational day when denominational loyalty is on the decline.

We pray that somehow our shared work in our churches, in associations, in benevolence agencies, in educational entities and in our missions organizations can be strengthened by the proposals that will come forth from this committee. We can only hope that God’s Spirit might bring about a new enablement for the work of ministry in our churches, as well as all of the various entities throughout the various aspects of our convention life.

Charting a future in light of our heritage as Southern Baptists
We have been blessed as Southern Baptists by a wonderful heritage that has been characterized by faithfulness to Holy Scripture. For years, Southern Baptists have been called “A People of the Book.” We have also inherited a commitment to missions and evangelism and a spirit of cooperation in our shared work that has been duplicated in few other Christian movements over the past century. Thus we are beneficiaries who receive nurturing truth and wisdom from God’s faithfulness that has been passed on to us from previous generations.

We have, however, made the mistake of assuming that certain programs and strategies are the only way that these commitments to missions and evangelism can be carried out. We have substituted a cultural homogeneity for genuine biblical fellowship, and a programmatic uniformity for intentional and strategic engagement of the culture and world around us. We now take for granted things that possibly or probably need to be questioned or re-examined.

Paul’s words in 1 Thessalonians 5:21 seem helpful to me in that regard as a guide for us at this important moment in SBC life: “Test everything. Hold on to the good.” It would be naive for us to think that the answers to the current challenges we face in the SBC are simple or that we are the only ones facing such challenges. We can thus learn from others, even as we hope others can learn from us, and ultimately I trust that we will all test our various traditions and approaches by the authority of Holy Scripture.

The need for collaborative cooperation
We need a convention characterized not only by a confessional and convictional faith, but by a collaborative and compassionate sense of cooperation. The recovery of a convictional confessionalism has kept Southern Baptists from going the way of so many mainline denominations who have become untethered to Scripture and have lost their way. Yet, in so many ways, the call of this hour for Southern Baptists is the need to regain a spirit of collaborative cooperation.

I know that some wonder if we can find a way to cooperate together — after all, our differences often appear to be great. For as we have already mentioned, no longer can a cultural homogeneity or a programmatic pragmatism be the foundation of our cooperation. One of the things, however, that will get the attention of the world and authenticate our confession will be the way that we love one another, the way that we celebrate our ethnic and geographical diversity and the way that we serve and worship together in harmony.

Changes across the SBC landscape
We must also sadly acknowledge that over the course of the past six decades or so, Southern Baptists have allowed our priorities to gradually shift from Christian faithfulness and spiritual maturity to numerical growth and programmatic efficiency. Not that a concern for numerical growth or efficiency is wrong in any way at all. The shift in priorities was probably quite unintentional at first, but slowly, almost unconsciously, a greater disparity has developed between our reported total membership and the actual number of active and participating members in our churches.

Churches are not plateaued in membership and declining in baptisms only because of people who no longer attend. We need to think afresh about what it means to be a covenant member of a Baptist congregation.

We need to think about the importance of faithfulness and maturation of church members. Helping people understand the gospel, helping guide them to faith in Christ and leading them to become church members is paramount, but helping them understand the biblical expectations of faithful Christ-followers in covenant with one another is also extremely important.

I hope that in the days to come that Southern Baptists will ask:

• What does the New Testament say about regeneration, baptism, Christian commitment and church membership?
• What does our Baptist heritage say about church membership?
• Have we allowed numerical growth and efficiency concerns, perhaps unknowingly and unconsciously, to become higher priorities for us than questions of faithfulness to the New Testament and to our Baptist heritage?

The Need for Great Commission Resurgence

The convention messengers at the 2009 annual meeting voiced the need for a Great Commission Resurgence with a renewed emphasis on North American church planting and global missions. Such a call involves not just committing ourselves to missions and evangelism, as important as that is.

We will need to commit ourselves foremost to the gospel, to the message of missions and evangelism, the message that is found only in Jesus Christ and His atoning death for sinners.

We must address the matter of unity and collaboration in the midst of our growing fragmentation. We need to recover the biblical emphasis from John 17 and Ephesians 4, as well as the historic confessions about the church as one, holy, universal and apostolic.

We must address matters of cooperation and partnership. The Cooperative Program has been an important funding process for Southern Baptists since 1925. The call to cooperate in 2009 differs from the Southern Baptist world of 1925, but we must reclaim that spirit for our day.

Moving into the second decade of the 21st century, Southern Baptists also need a new spirit of mutual respect and humility to serve together with those with whom we have differences of conviction/opinion/preference. It is possible to hold hands with brothers and sisters who disagree on secondary and tertiary matters of theology and practice, and still work together toward a common good to extend the work of Southern Baptists around the world and advance the kingdom of God.

We need God’s Spirit to bring about a new spirit among us, one that calls for humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance with one another in love and a diligence to preserve the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Ephesians 4:2-3).

We need to expand our horizons with a renewed dedication to ethnic diversity and racial reconciliation, looking forward to a day in which a great multitude from every nation and all tribes, people groups and tongues shall stand before the Lamb (Revelation 7:9).

Southern Baptists must work to build and establish a much-needed consensus around the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is time for us to move from controversy and confusion toward a renewed commitment to cooperation. In such a spirit of consensus and partnership, we will need to ask questions about structure and programs:

• How do associations, state convention entities, and national convention entities relate to one another?
• How do churches relate to these various entities?
• How can these entities be funded effectively with the least amount of duplication possible?

Finally, 21st century Southern Baptists need not only to affirm the Bible’s truthfulness and the saving power of the gospel, but we need to evidence our concern for these matters by careful biblical interpretation, serious theological reflection, faithful churchmanship, proclamation, worship, repentance and prayer.

We must trust God to bring a fresh wind of renewal to Southern Baptist theology, evangelism, missions, worship, education and service. We can then relate to one another in love and humility, bringing about true fellowship and biblical community not only in our orthodoxy, but in our orthopraxy before a watching world.

To those ends we will pray that God will allow us to see a new generation of Great Commandment and Great Commission churches who will both exemplify and proclaim the good news of the gospel to a needy world.

(NOTE — Dockery serves as the president of Union University, and is also a member of the Great Commission Task Force appointed June 24 by SBC President Johnny Hunt during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Lousiville, Ky. He is the author of Southern Baptist Consensus and Renewal: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Proposal and Southern Baptist Identity: An Evangelical Denomination Faces the Future.)

The Whole Message of Life...

This Sunday morning, remember what happened in Acts 5. The apostles were imprisoned for telling of Jesus. But during the night “an angel of the Lord opened the gates of the prison, and taking them out he said, ‘Go, stand and speak to the people in the temple the whole message of this Life.’ Upon hearing this, they entered into the temple about daybreak and began to teach” (Acts 5:19-21 NAS).

Father God, You are the Author of this message of life. You chose us from before the foundation of the world to receive through Jesus Christ every spiritual blessing. Through Him we are made holy and blameless in Your sight. Through Him we are adopted into Your family. Through Him our sins are forgiven and our lives are redeemed. And in the fullness of time You will bring all things in heaven and earth together under Him.

Lord, help us today to speak to people the whole message of this Life Jesus alone makes possible. Help the pastors of our city and beyond to be true to Your Word in bringing the full counsel of God to each situation where You allow us to minister this Lord’s Day. Help us to walk and serve in the freedom that You give through the power of the Gospel of Jesus. Let it be so, Father, in His name. Amen!