Updated Thursday, May 08, 2008

Danny Akin: SBC bloated but won't burst

By Norman Jameson

BR Editor

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) may be top heavy, bloated and unfocused but it is "premature" to write its obituary, according to Danny Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Responding to national statistics that show decreases in membership and baptisms in the nation's largest protestant body, Akin said during an interview in his Wake Forest office May 7 that numbers will likely drop further before they begin to climb.

"We have to be honest," he said. "We have inflated numbers."

SBC church rolls include "people who are dead, people who have not been there for years, and more importantly give no evidence of regeneration," Akin said.

He said churches carry people on their rolls who "do not live a life and bear the fruit of someone born again. If you haven't been to church in a decade and you don't give and don't read the Bible, you have serious issues ... you need to be ministered to," he said.

The second decline in membership totals since 1998 may reflect some cleansing of inflated church roles, he said. And the low level of baptisms will continue until Southern Baptists regain a focus on and commitment to the Great Commission mandate to "go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." (Matt. 28: 19-20a)

Inability to gain that focus comes in part because the SBC "is in a state of serious bureaucratic loggerheads," said Akin. "That may be just the fact that we're as big as we are, or as old as we are. It may be the fact we're in a world that is rapidly changing and as a big bureaucracy we're struggling to keep up with those changes. Do I think we're headed for the graveyard? No. Anyone thinking we're dead is premature."

While admitting it is just a guess, he believes counting as members only those who attend worship service at least once a month would produce a role of "contributing, bonafide Southern Baptists" closer to 10-11 million rather than the 16.3 million currently claimed.

He is a "major proponent" of passing one of the resolutions on regenerate church membership being proposed for the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting June 10-11 in Indianapolis.

"Because we are that big and because we have as many entities and because we have the trustee structure we do, any kind of change for us is difficult," he said. "Even when it's made it's going to be made slowly."

He is frustrated with the complexity of relationships between local, state and national agencies which make it difficult to move quickly to plant strategic churches. He said the Covenant for a New Century, which decreased and combined the number of national agencies, helped but, "We're still top heavy."

Akin obviously is frustrated that the high cost of maintaining infrastructure and programs at state and national levels limits funds to the national and international mission boards he feels they could use better for Great Commission purposes. And he says that as leader of a Cooperative Program supported institution.

"We've got to find a way to streamline our bureaucracy to be more efficient in fulfilling the Great Commission," he said.

He cited specifically the difficulty in "jumping through the hoops" of local associations, state conventions and the North American Mission Board for Convention funding for new church starts. Baptists should be "aggressively planting more churches in strategic areas and funding them in a way that does not hamstring church planters and keep them from doing what they need to do."

He decried the low funding levels for a new church start and declared a church planter is "dead on arrival" when he is funded at a decreasing level for three years at a starting salary of just $20,000. Baptist State Convention of North Carolina church planters start even lower, at $14,000.

"I've got news for you," he said. "You put all that together, and I'm going to be hard pressed to take care of my family for one year."

By contrast, he noted First Baptist Church of Woodstock, Ga., which has started three churches in the Las Vegas, Nev., area and funded them initially with $500,000 each. Each church now runs more than 1,000 members. Akin fears that Johnny Hunt, the church's pastor, will be misrepresented in the coming weeks as Southern Baptist Convention presidential candidate.

While the church gives just 2.2 percent, or $400,000 to the Cooperative Program, it gives $3.5 million each year to missions. The level of a church's Cooperative Program funding has received increased visibility since the surprise first ballot victory in 2006 of Frank Page over much higher profile pastors.

He said the "conservative resurgence" in the Southern Baptist Convention was "not an end in and of itself." Its ultimate aim "was the Great Commission and seeing our nation and the nations impacted with the truth of the gospel."

He said the "conservative resurgence" has kept the SBC from "being worse off than we are," and that evidence is found in tracking the record of churches affiliated with the moderate Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, which, he said, "is horrible."

"Ours is bad," he said. "Theirs is horrible."

While Akin expressed appreciation for current CBF leadership he is wary that the next generation has a different agenda that will lead CBF away from its current commitments.

Even within the SBC, "we're Balkanized right now," Akin said. "We have a lot of special interest groups within the SBC that, for whatever reason, are struggling to work with the other special interest groups in the SBC. I think we should be able to get along, even though we don't see eye to eye on every minor theological issue."

Akin believes the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 is "a theological consensus sufficient to unite brothers and sisters in Christ for passionately and energetically and sacrificially pursuing the Great Commission at home and abroad." Yet, he said, "It's not suffocatingly tight."

While the BFM 2000 is sufficient to him, "for some of us, it isn't," he said. "We have some inner family squabbles that are distracting us from focusing on the real enemy, which is satan, sin, hell and evil. Instead we're fighting among ourselves. I'm terrified that we're going to make Bill Leonard a prophet."

Leonard, dean and professor at Wake Forest University Divinity School and a former professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., famously predicted two decades ago that while the "fundamentalists" now have control of the Convention, "let's see if they can run it. " He predicted they could not because it is the nature of fundamentalism to fight, if not with outside enemies, then within their own family.

One of the contributing factors to factions in the SBC is that Adrian Rogers' death Nov. 15, 2005, created a "massive vacuum," and there is "no national consensus leader in SBC."

"If we can get focused on the Great Commission as our driving passion, I believe there is hope and a great future for our denomination. If not, we will go the way of a dinosaur and be a nice museum piece."

"Even if the Convention goes the way of the dodo bird, it won't be in my lifetime," he said. "We're just too big."