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.)

This is not to mention the fact that, even though the NAMB claims over 5,000 missionaries, the vast majority of them are people who are supported in ministry by other means – like several state denominational employees I know that are commissioned as missionaries.  Can you really call money “missions dollars” if they are going to support middle management at the state convention?  The BGCO has 18 full time staff members who are “missionaries” commissioned by the NAMB and receiving 65% of their salaries from NAMB’s budget dollars.

Bottom line?  If my assumptions are accurate at all, just over 10 cents of every CP dollar in OK will make it to the “Mission Field” – international and domestic, things that are actually focused directly on fulfilling the Great Commission.  Ouch.

Task Force member J.D. Greear recently expressed a similar sentiment on his blog as he talked about the responsibility of the GCRT:

[Younger SBC Pastors] question whether or not giving money to the Convention is the best use of their resources. They see what they believe to be a great deal of bureaucracy, inefficiency, and activity in the Convention not related to church planting.

Whether right or wrong, most younger pastors will not give to the SBC solely out of a sense of loyalty. They want to know if the Convention will assist them in the fulfillment of the commission God has given to them as church pastors. While some of us are young, arrogant, and naïve, we also have the understanding that we must be more committed to the Great Commission than we are the Convention. If the SBC is an efficient tool in fulfilling that commission, we will use it. If it is not, most younger pastors will discard it.

Fellow Task Force member, Dr. Al Mohler, said in an interview concerning the GCRTF at the SBC in Louisville last summer that churches should hold the SBC accountable.  If the entities of the SBC are not doing what should be done, the churches should not send the money.

I’ll conclude by reminding us all that John the Baptist lost his head over the call he issued.

I pray that the members of the GCRTF will be strong enough to risk calamity and the end of their stature among the established processes, organizations and people in order to prepare the way for God to use our little SBC culture in His plan for the world’s redemption.

This is all or nothing for the SBC.  If the GCRTF isn’t able to reflect John the Baptist or if they are unwilling to lose it all to fulfill that role, then I fear their impact will be slight.

God, give them power.