I spent a long week in Sacramento, California with the Healthy Church Group from the CSBC (California Southern Baptist Convention for all those who are not down with the lingo). It was a great week of training and networking. I also believe I got a little glimpse of the future of the Southern Baptist Convention.
One word that is being tossed around quite a bit lately is "relevance". Relevance is about meeting felt needs within a particular population group. Relevance is at the root of the currently popular question, "If your church disappeared would your community notice or care?" Relevance also plays a role in the current happenings within the Southern Baptist Convention.
I have not spent much one-on-one time around Convention people, but almost every time I do they are surprised to hear that I know nothing of SBC politics and procedure. I don't know the names of the presidents of my state convention or even our national convention. (Sure I could google them, but they most certainly do not come up in daily or even monthly conversation.) I don't attend association meals or budget/planning meetings or anything else. In fact, outside of a little line item on our yearly budget I am not sure my church is very connected to the SBC at all. When they ask, "Why?" our conversation inevitably moves to the issue of Relevance.
At first glance this seems like a case of local churches asking, "What does the convention to for me?" In reality I find that most of the people I talk to are asking the question, "What is the convention doing for the Kingdom?" Let me state here that I have been quite impressed with both the intelligence and the compassion of every Convention person I have met. These are people who care deeply about the local church and the lost. They also have brilliant ideas about how to reach the former and support the latter. What I have come to realize is that there is a great divide between what goes on at the State Conventions (and NAMB for that matter) and the local church. It does not matter how much you care and how brilliant you are if the people you are trying to reach and serve do not know about it. That is where the issue of relevance comes to play.
For decades conventions have attempted to bridge the great divide with conferences, seminars, and yearly associational meetings. If there ever was a day in which those strategies worked... it is long gone. If the State and National conventions are going to bridge the gap and become relevant to the local church then it is going to take a personal touch. That is exactly what the Healthy Church Group in California has begun doing. They transformed their traditional structure which was separate divisions for each function of the church broken up by age groups. Instead of being eight people who consulted with each other on the off chance that their specializations mixed they are now an eight-person consulting group that meets with local churches and works together to present unique solutions for church health and growth to each church. In the last five years they have consulted some 400 local churches in the California area, and now they are launching the second step of their plan... training DoM's (Director of Missions) to become consultants as well.
What they are finding is that instead of spending their time calling churches and convincing them to come to yearly training and retreats they are spending their time receiving phone calls and prioritizing which churches they can and will consult. The results that churches are receiving is creating an ever-growing demand for their services... something that many state conventions would love to say I am sure.
Perhaps the end system will look somewhat different than what is happening out in California, but I have confidence that they are on the right track. I hope we will see other states making similar changes in the years to come.
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