Baptists sizing up Floyd

Cross Church senior pastor 1 of 3 nominees for top job

STAFF PHOTO BEN GOFF -- 05/01/14 - Dr. Ronnie Floyd, Senior Pastor of Cross Church of Northwest Arkansas, makes remarks as keynote speaker during the Bentonville Mayor's Prayer Breakfast at First Presbyterian Church in Bentonville on Thursday, May 1, 2014.
STAFF PHOTO BEN GOFF -- 05/01/14 - Dr. Ronnie Floyd, Senior Pastor of Cross Church of Northwest Arkansas, makes remarks as keynote speaker during the Bentonville Mayor's Prayer Breakfast at First Presbyterian Church in Bentonville on Thursday, May 1, 2014.

An Arkansas megachurch pastor is one of three men to be nominated as the next Southern Baptist Convention president during the denomination's annual meeting in Baltimore this week.

The Rev. Ronnie Floyd, 58, senior pastor of Cross Church in Northwest Arkansas, will be nominated for the spot by the Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. Other expected nominees are the Rev. Jared Moore, 33, pastor at New Salem Baptist Church in Hustonville, Ky., and the Rev. Dennis Kim, 64, senior pastor at Global Mission Church of Greater Washington in Silver Springs, Md.

The next president will succeed the largest Protestant denomination's first black president, the Rev. Fred Luter, pastor at Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans. Luter is finishing his second term this year and isn't eligible for re-election.

Delegates, also known as messengers, will take part in the election during the annual convention, set for Tuesday and Wednesday in Baltimore. The meeting will follow the annual Pastors' Conference, where Floyd is to speak tonight.

The election comes at a time when the denomination has recorded its seventh-straight year of membership declines and a consecutive drop in baptisms.

A recent report by LifeWay Christian Resources, an agency of the Southern Baptist Convention, showed that membership fell 0.86 percent to 15.7 million from 2012 to 2013, even though the number of Southern Baptist churches grew in that same period. The drop coincides with a more than 2 percent drop in weekly church attendance to about 5.8 million churchgoers in 2013, according to the report.

The number of baptisms also dropped by nearly 1.5 percent to about 310,368 in 2013, the report states. It's the second-consecutive drop since the number of baptisms hit the lowest point since 1948 in 2012.

According to the denomination's Annual Church Profile, 60 percent of the more than 46,000 churches in the Southern Baptist Convention reported no baptisms in children ages 12 to 17 in 2012. That same year, 80 percent recorded one or zero baptisms for young adults, between ages 18 and 29. A quarter of the denomination's churches reported zero baptisms overall in 2012.

The declines have prompted some pastors to challenge the churches to do more.

For Floyd, Southern Baptist churches need a great awakening.

"We need the hand of God to step in," he said in an interview. "As far as I'm concerned, I don't know of a church that doesn't need a personal revival and a church revival."

Revival begins with the people, he said, then moves to the church. Then, churches can start "a season of extraordinary prayer" for a great awakening and accelerate the pace of the Great Commission to spread the word of God. The Great Commission refers to Jesus' command to his followers in Matthew 28 to go and teach all the nations "baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost."

Floyd led the denomination's Great Commission Resurgence Task Force from 2009 to 2010. In 2010, messengers approved the task force's recommendations that, in part, restructured how the denomination carries out and funds missions.

In past elections, messengers have supported presidential contenders whose churches have strongly supported the denomination's Cooperative Program, which funds missions. Last year, Cross Church gave more than $700,000 through the Cooperative Program, Floyd told the Baptist Press. The church is also investing in 27 church startups this year, adding to the 101 already started by the congregation since 2000.

"We know our path," Floyd said. "Every person needs to hear the word of Jesus Christ. We have a pace problem. We need to report to duty. That's where we need to get humbled."

In Mohler's letter nominating Floyd to the presidency, Mohler said the Springdale pastor has an "unquestioned commitment to the Great Commission," along with leadership experience.

Floyd has served as the senior pastor at Cross Church since 1986, when it was known as First Baptist Church of Springdale. The church has five campuses after opening the latest branch in Neosho, Mo., on Easter Sunday.

He has pastored for about 37 years in Texas and Arkansas. He earned a bachelor's degree from Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas, and master of divinity and doctor of ministry degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, also in Texas.

The membership and baptism downtrends are a "drastic concern," Floyd said, adding that churches need to spread the Gospel to youths and young adults in ways that will be important to them.

Sometimes, he said, churches try to reach out to youths and young adults and inadvertently turn inward.

"We need to turn outward," he said. "We're not a club. We're a church."

If Floyd is elected as the next Southern Baptist Convention president, he will be the third Arkansan to hold the spot since the denomination's start in 1845, convention spokesman Roger "Sing" Oldham said.

The first Arkansan was the state's 16th governor, James Philip Eagle. Eagle served as the convention president for three years beginning in 1903. Brooks Hays, a layman, presided over the convention in 1958 and 1959. He was only one of two laymen elected to the presidency since the 1910 election.

The Rev. Dwight McKissic, senior pastor at the Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, recently stated his intentions to nominate Kim.

"Dr. Kim's heartbeat is evangelism and discipleship," McKissic said in the nomination letter. "He has devoted his life in training believers as true Disciples of Christ."

Kim has pastored at the Silver Springs church for 23 years. He earned a master of arts in theological studies with a concentration in pastoral counseling from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Boston, a master of divinity from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., and a doctor of theology in pastoral psychology from Boston University in Boston.

His church has given $93,600 to the Cooperative Program -- about 4.4 percent of the church's income last year -- along with thousands of dollars for mission work. The church invested $25,520 last year to send its short-term mission teams abroad, including to Nicaragua and Kyrgyzstan. During his tenure at the Maryland church, Kim's congregation has started five churches in Baltimore; Fairfax, Va.; Seattle; Cary, N.C.; and Bun-dang, South Korea.

He has also served on the North American Mission Board and has studied the declines in baptism.

"We need to evangelize, bring more souls to Christ," he said. "Individual, local churches should be growing in numbers and in spirituality."

Younger generations, he said, don't want to listen to long biblical stories. Kim prayed in an attempt to find a new approach to bring more people to God "with the same unchangeable truth of the Bible," and in 2012, he said, he got answers.

Kim created a pictorial tool, called Anothen, and trained more than 1,500 people on the resource, he said. Kim connected pictures to a diagram, which can be used to spread the Gospel in as little as 5 minutes, he said. They've used the resource to share the Gospel with 3,125 people, and of those, Kim said 1,078 have accepted Christ.

The Maryland pastor also said he plans to reach youths and young adults by training them at an earlier age.

For Moore, Southern Baptist Churches "more than anything" need to remain faithful.

He will receive the nomination from Bennie Smith, a deacon at his church where he has pastored for 4½ years. Moore earned a bachelor's degree in theology from Trinity College of the Bible and a master of arts in religion from Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary in Lynchburg, Va., and a master of divinity from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is currently working to earn a doctorate in systematic theology from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

"I just want to encourage people," he said. "I don't have the answers."

Moore, who is currently the second vice president of the Southern Baptist Convention, said he didn't understand the emphasis on the statistics.

"I don't want to [focus] on this arbitrary quota to be a faithful church," he said. "You need to go and tell."

Churches may not be baptizing a lot of people, he said, but they still long for revival. It's important not to discourage that, he said.

At the same time, he said churches still should examine their ministries to see how they can be more effective. Moore's church has contributed 16 percent of its undesignated receipts to support mission work through the Cooperative Program, he said.

Churches aren't giving as much to the Cooperative Program, he said, in part because it costs more to operate a church. People expect more out of churches as far as facilities, technology and music, he said, adding that he encouraged churches to find ways to give more to help spread the Gospel.

The Kentucky pastor said it isn't hard to baptize people. What is difficult is ensuring the person understands what they are doing, he said.

"They need to be able to talk about repentance and faith and sin," he said. "We've got to trust that God's word is sufficient and we've got to preach it instead of hastily baptizing people."

Moore emphasized that pastors don't need to hear that they aren't "doing good enough."

"It may be possible that some churches are doing more evangelism than they've ever done," he said. "But if a community is further away from God, it's going to be harder."

SundayMonday on 06/08/2014

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