If we were the GCR Task Force, we would wear camel hair suits and eat bugs.  Like John the Baptist, the Task Force is charged with the task of issuing the clarion call to leave that which is and conform to that which is best. That which is no longer the religious routine but that which is the Missio Dei, the very Mission of God:  the redemption of His creation.

We understand that this is the most powerful role that the GCRTF can fulfill.  I say this not because of the prophetic image that John the Baptist casts – and let’s just admit among ourselves that all preachers fancy themselves a modern version of the second Elijah.  At least a little.

No. It is not the simple image of John that creates a powerful role for the GCRTF, but it is because they can fulfill no other role that they must become John.

Tasked with calling the bureaucracy of the SBC to a powerful move to fulfill the Great Commission, the GCRTF is the fruit of that same bureaucracy.  Calling for the various entities to move, restructure and reform is all that the GCRT can do, since the Boards of Trustees run their respective entities and do not have to conform to the reports, resolutions or votes of the convention.

So the prophetic call is what must come from the GCRTF.  There is nothing else.

And it must issue that summons with power and conviction.  It must do so with such force that the SBC heeds the call because to not do so would be tantamount to rejecting the Great Commission itself and no Christian should be able to do as much.

With wild hair and a burly countenance, the GCRTF must look the established processes, organizations and people in the eye and expose the semblance of an organization that claims to be about the business of God for all its many failures to actually be so.

More specifically, the GCRTF has to expose the deficiencies of the Cooperative Program and call the masters of the CP to realign it and the organizations it feeds to weed out redundancy, inefficiency, mismanagement and, sometimes, cronyism mixed with nepotism.

I’ll give you just a couple real life examples.

Take, for instance, this graph of the Cooperative Program Distribution of an Oklahoma Church using the CP to partner together for missions.  (I use OK, because that is where I pastor.)  This graphic was provided to us in our past annual meeting on the book of reports and is available through the BGCO website.

As you can see, for every dollar my church sends to the CP, less than 30 cents makes it to the mission boards.

Assume that half of the IMB’s budget goes to administrative costs, including of all employees’ salaries, benefits, travel expenses and then the exorbitant cost of the Trustee Board meeting 6 times a year.  (You could take that money, buy a new laptop for every member of the Board, staff the IMB with an IT team exclusively dedicated to facilitating communications among board members and still save the IMB a couple million dollars annually, I suspect.)

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