During the interview Baker pursued a line of questioning that brought forth Dr. Dockery’s great knowledge of Baptist history.  Not only was Baptist history examined in an interesting way, relevant commentary was given in light of who we have been as Southern Baptists.  Highlighted in the exchange were stories of the early days of our convention, the purpose for which we joined ourselves together on a large scale and the missions heart of our forefathers.  The interview continued to track the development of our national polity and the ways we sought to work together, ultimately culminating in the development of the Cooperative Program.

Baker moved the discussion along to the present day and queried Dockery about the current state of the convention in light of the Great Commission Resurgence and the ensuing Task Force that he serves.  Dockery discusses much of the context of the Task Force indirectly as he works through the thorny issues of state convention CP distribution.  Dockery fairly describes the rationale for the various distribution levels that currently exist today by relating the levels to the early days of the CP discussion and the needs that existed and continue to exist for state conventions in the SBC.

As I have already commended this interview to you I want to do so again; it is good and I think it will help the vast majority of Southern Baptists understand their history more clearly.

Part of my job as a DOM is to work with pastors on an almost daily basis.  There is more to my ministry than that, but I would rank my relationship with the pastors of NWBA and outside the association at the top of my ministry priority list.  I visit regularly with pastors both inside my association and across our state, and often the topic of conversation, at least since the convention in Louisville, has been the GCR and the Task Force convened by President Johnny Hunt.  In all the conversations with pastors that I have had I cannot think of one time, truly, not one time when a pastor asked directly or indirectly one of the two following questions:  “Are we doing what we organized ourselves to do in 1845?” or “Are we cooperating together today according to the vision of the CP as created in 1925?”

Now please do not misunderstand, I do not believe that either of these matters are small or unimportant.  I stressed above the importance of Dr. Dockery’s historical assessment of the SBC.  What I am pointing out is the very current reality that who we were in 1845 or even 1925 is not a pressing concern for most pastors or their churches.  It has been said that the past is prologue and with this I would agree.  We have also heard that the person who does not know his history is destined to make the same mistakes.  Agreed.  One strategy for determining how we make decisions today about our future heavily emphasizes who were have been and the direction that leaders in our past have charted as a kind of organizational compass to guide our future.  This is not a bad strategy, but in my estimation it is out of step with the pastors that I talk to on a regular basis.

These pastors seem more concerned with determining our future based on two primary principles, Scripture and cooperation,  that I will illustrate through two questions. 1) What does Scripture call the church to be and do in the name of Christ, His gospel and the Kingdom? and 2) What sort of cooperation will help us move toward the future work that we desire to accomplish in Christ’s name and for His glory.  Please note that this second mode of determining how we move forward as a convention of churches is not truly in contradiction to the former.  This mode simply looks to an alternative starting point for the discussion and moves out from there.  One assumes the broad history of the SBC as a people, movement, convention, and denominational powerhouse and the other looks more simply to Scripture, theology, ecclesiology, culture and the reality on the ground in their churches and their personal networks of affinity.

My purpose is primarily to understand where different voices in our convention are starting as they look to the future and our shared life together in cooperation.  One group looks back for a kind of conformity and integrity to who we have been and the best parts of our history.  Another looks more narrowly at the present culture, Scripture and their experiences in Evangelicalism and seeks a way forward that is nimble and quick to respond to a rapidly changing world.  I would advocate a merging of these two perspectives.  We ought to start with our present situation, our best understanding of Scripture and the movement of the Spirit in our midst and begin to explore how we would live out faith and serve Christ effectively in the coming years.  With this as our primary line of reasoning we should regularly look to our past to learn our best lessons and glean the truth that the Lord has revealed to His people over the years.

In summary I want to hear from our past, but I believe that is the wrong place to start.  Most leaders I talk to are not asking where have we been.  They are asking where should we go.  They are not asking “Is my church doing what the churches who began the CP in the early parts of the 20^th century were doing?”  Rather, they are looking high and low for ways to be effective today in a world that will not wait for them to catch up and is not asking their permission to change.  They are seeking ways to embody the eternal, unchanging truths of Christ and His Word in a world that has largely ignored our best efforts to share Christ.

We have no movement on our hands here at the present point.  I, like so many others, voted heartily for the GCR in Louisville.  Like so many others, I cheered Pres. Johnny Hunt as he preached at the convention.  I was struck by the sober reality painted by David Platt in the Pastor’s Conference.  I was hopeful that a movement was underway.   That is not to say that we do not have some good words working through the convention.  Much of the rationale for the preliminary report given by Ronnie Floyd to the Executive Committee was great.  Consider his call for a renewed emphasis on the local church and a recognition that the church is the true “headquarters” of our denomination.  Wow, truly great words spoken by a great pastor and leader.  The recommendations?  They seem to be primarily concerned with the top level of cooperative life in the SBC.  Some have said this is simply because the GCRTF can’t change anything else.  We would do well to remember that they do not have the authority to change the SBC; only God can do that through willing hearts of faith.  We need a movement of God.

Denominational tinkering makes not a movement.  I was one who hoped the strong words of Danny Akin in his axiom sermon would start a movement in the SBC toward gospel-centered, Christ-exalting ministry.  I had hopes to see a movement toward participating truly in the Great Commission by living out the Great Commandment.  I had hopes that leaders would rise up and point our convention of churches toward Christ, His commands and His commission with great humility and great zeal.  I still hold some hope…but it is fading.

Most of the firepower in the preliminary report has been aimed at “releasing” NAMB, as if there was lying dormant some latent power in this agency.  Don’t get me wrong—NAMB does many good things, but we have no clear idea who will lead NAMB.  There is also much talk that we might not need NAMB and a real lack of clarity about how the proposed changes at NAMB demonstrate that the denominational headquarters of the SBC is in the local church.  This is not a movement.

There is little doubt that whatever the GCRTF brings forward will pass in Orlando.  Some will take exception with that statement, but I have not met one person who has followed the GCR conversation who actually thinks the recommendations won’t pass.  The problem is not whether what is brought forward will pass.  It will.  The real questions are:  1) How can we implement the recommendations in the current institutional environment of the SBC? and 2) How will these changes specifically lead the churches of the SBC toward the gospel movement that God is already at work supplying to some?

IF this is the best that we can do as a denomination, I will accept it and move forward with my brothers and sisters in Christ, in great hope that God will do mighty things through His people.   I do have a pressing question, though.  What will the leaders of the GCRTF do to demonstrate that these changes will in fact move us toward a resurgence of the Great Commission, a movement based in the gospel and carried out by transformed people? How, in particular, will the churches, seminaries and organizations represented by the leaders of the GCR model for us the means of a gospel movement through these and future recommendations?  I would ask the presidents of two seminaries, “What specifically will be different in your strategic plan as key partners in training pastors and leaders in light of the recommendations?”   To the pastors I would ask, “How will the church that God has entrusted to your shepherding care model for the cooperating churches of the SBC a gospel movement specifically by participating in the recommendations?”  To the other leaders I would ask, “What will be different for you and the church you attend in light of the vote in Orlando?

I ask the questions for a very simple reason:  I want you to be leading voices for gospel-centered churches in the SBC.  I have the privilege of working with 20 Southern Baptist churches in my association.  If you show me how you can be more gospel-centered, Christ-exalting and missional in light of these recommendations, I will join up and serve alongside you for the glory of God.  This is a critical time in our life as a convention of churches GCRTF, please show us your hearts for the gospel and the specific work that we cooperate together to do.  Provide clear calls to mission that other churches can join alongside.   I still want to believe that the GCR is far more than a call to manage the denomination; I want to believe in the movement that might have been, is not yet, but still can be with God’s help and grace.

My friend and fellow missioscaper Alan Cross wrote up a piece the other day that I wanted to interact with.  I have great respect for Alan, though I have only met him personally two times, one of which I think he cannot remember.  I have read Alan’s blog for a good bit now and was able to attend a series of meetings with him last year where he presented a talk on decentralized efforts in ministry.  The thing that encourages me so much about Alan is the fact that he is not one who commends ideas to others that he himself does not follow with great passion.  In my conversation with Alan I was inspired by the work that the church he pastors engages in on the sub-continent of India.  Get in touch with Alan’s blog and read away about their mighty deeds for the sake of the gospel of Jesus.

“People give to what they can relate to and participate in. They don’t give to institutions anymore. They give to movement and something tangible. They give to something that they can see.”

Critical Issues Concerning Southern Baptist Structure

With three key presidential vacancies at hand, pardon my analogy from paganism when I suggest that the planets may have aligned for sweeping changes in Southern Baptist Convention structure. Whether this will prove a blessing or a curse is a question. Bureaucratic structures are tenacious under assault. Just consider the repeated attempts at federal tax reform, resulting in an IRS more bloated and a tax code more confused, complex and convoluted than ever before. There is no guarantee that a new denominational structure will be an improvement over what we have now. If recent reorganizations are any indication I’m not optimistic. Would anyone seriously suggest that the Executive Committee has better preserved Baptist history than the old Historical Commission once did? With the debatable exception of disaster relief, has NAMB improved on any of those tasks once the responsibilities of the Brotherhood and Radio and Television Commissions?

Ask any church consultant what happens when two churches merge. In most cases within less than five years the combined congregations will shrink to the size of the larger of the two churches prior to the merger. Mergers of any kind—be it churches or corporations—are hard to pull off. Efficiency does not necessarily equal effectiveness. Yet some suggest that it’s time to merge the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board into one all-encompassing mission agency. At first glance it’s an appealing concept.

The Southern Baptist Convention first organized in 1845, primarily for the purpose of giving birth to two mission agencies, known then as the Foreign Mission Board and the Domestic Mission Board. After a series of name changes and reorganizations we ended up in 1997 with the current North American Mission Board, to serve the needs of the United States and its territories, along with Canada, and the International Mission Board to serve the mission needs of the rest of the world.

In 1845 it was perfectly logical to divide up the denomination’s missionary task into the two big categories of foreign and domestic. Those were the days when a clipper ship leaving the East Coast of the United States would take half a year or more to reach Shanghai. Missionaries boarding those ships said goodbye to family members on the dock not expecting to meet them again this side of heaven. In most of the world in those days people group locations corresponded reasonably well with national boundaries or if not, the people group was typically contained within a contiguous region that included one or two adjacent nation states. In few cases were people groups widely scattered across the globe. (The main exceptions were those European peoples, such as the Irish, who were immigrating to the United States and Canada.) Most people on the planet were born, lived, and died within a few miles of the same cross-reference of latitude and longitude. Most people still lived in rural and small town settings. The few larger cities that did exist were fairly homogeneous in makeup.

In 1845 there were still significant areas of Africa, Asia, and South America that were unknown and unvisited by any American or European explorer. The challenges for missionaries in those days tended to focus on daunting logistical barriers. Crossing oceans, rivers, mountains, and deserts; confronting often hostile native populations who spoke languages unknown to the missionary or his or her sending agency; disease, hunger, snake bite, and isolation; the list goes on and on. IMB Strategy Facilitator for the Western Amazon Valley of Brazil, Victor Nickerson, once told me about his study of the early missionaries to the Amazon. When he examined the historical records he discovered one quality that more than any other determined the success or failure of their work: a natural resistance to malaria. Most of those early missionaries died within two years of their arrival.

Today in many profound ways we live in a radically different world. The world is now more urban than rural. Populations are growing and constantly shifting. A few years ago IMB adopted a people group-based strategy around which to organize its missionary efforts. We stopped talking about sending a missionary to reach Djibouti. We now speak of sending missionaries to reach the Somalis or the Oromo or the Afar people. But the problem is that people groups today represent moving targets. A generation ago missiologists coined the term 10-40 Window as a convenient way to talk about the most unreached region on earth. But population migration has made the term less useful than it was twenty years ago. We once spoke of the Window as defining the people groups within the region between 10˚ north and 40˚ north latitude across Africa and Asia. Today significant pockets of the Window live in London, Paris, Frankfurt, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and in thousands of other cities, towns and rural locations. The 10-40 Window, like the people groups associated with it, has torn lose from its geographical mooring. We must redesign our strategies to conform to these new realities.

So while once the work of the two mission boards could be neatly compartmentalized, a changing global scene has now hopelessly entangled their missionary tasks.

Nonetheless until recent years there has been very little deliberate contact between these agencies. While both are charged with expanding the Kingdom of God under the Southern Baptist banner, they have done so using distinctive approaches and with very different corporate cultures. There isn’t even uniformity in definitions and terminology. At IMB CPM means church planting movement. At NAMB it means church planting missionary. Our boards don’t even speak the same language.

The differences between our domestic and international mission agencies run far deeper than the geography of the regions they serve. The corporate cultures of the two boards are as different as those of Apple Computer and the Marine Corp. Short of firing everybody from the vice presidents all the way down to the secretaries and starting over with a blank slate (Who can forget that seamless transition from HMB to NAMB and its resultant body count?) such a merger cannot help but be incredibly messy and stressful.

Just consider the difference in how salaries are structured. At IMB salaries are determined by two factors: tenure of the missionary with the agency and an adjustment to reflect the local cost of living. Consequently if your spiritual gifts equip you to be an effective church planter you have no economic incentive to seek transfer to an administrative role in some regional office—a job for which you may not be gifted. At NAMB and in virtually all state convention offices, salaries are determined in a hierarchical structure similar to that found in the secular corporate world. Church planters are typically at the bottom. Strategists rank higher. State convention salaries run higher on average than those of associational workers. And as for any cost of living adjustments, often missionary salaries in high cost of living areas such as the big cities of the Northeast and the West Coast are actually lower than their counterparts in old convention areas such as Mississippi and Alabama where the cost of living is greatly reduced. It is not surprising that such a system would encourage people to move from regions of great spiritual need but where compensation for ministers is stingy to areas of the country with a much stronger gospel presence but where the pay is better. In the same way field missionaries sometimes seek promotion to better-paying administrative roles for which they may be ill-suited, often leaving a ministry that they love and in which they were very effective. In our unthinking adoption of a secular corporate model of compensation, we have inadvertently proclaimed that the spiritual gift of administration is more valuable than that of evangelism. But in my 37 years in Southern Baptist ministry I have yet to hear anyone admit this.

Complicating this different approach to determining salaries is the fact that IMB missionaries work exclusively for IMB. NAMB missionaries, with only a handful of exceptions, are jointly commissioned and funded by NAMB and one of 42 different state conventions or with the conventions of Canada or the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. These joint funding arrangements are determined by 44 different cooperative agreements.

The two boards embrace profoundly different operational philosophies. This reflects the enormous differences in the nature of their respective tasks. IMB has a monolithic structure that relates to other Baptist groups around the world much the same way that a megachurch in Texas relates to some association in Minnesota in order to co-sponsor a new work in the Northwoods. No matter how gracious their manners or benevolent their intent, they will tend to overwhelm their Minnesota partners—and in the end they will control the decision-making process.

While NAMB exercises considerable power in dealing with the weak and cash-strapped conventions of the north, it must also work with some old line conventions possessing far more resources than NAMB, conventions that send more money to NAMB through the Cooperative Program and the Annie Armstrong Offering than NAMB will ever return.

Risking a very unbiblical metaphor, the role of the state conventions is the joker in the deck that complicates any hypothetical merger of IMB and NAMB. They are autonomous bodies that cannot be ignored nor can they be dictated to by any SBC board, agency, or study group. The only way to circumvent them would be to adopt a radically different approach to missions in the United States, abandoning the concept of joint funding and making all domestic missionaries the direct employees of NAMB or of some new global mission board. Such a move would almost certainly spark a civil war in the Southern Baptist Convention resulting in a catastrophic drop in CP giving.

If we were designing a new denomination in 2009 would we approach it differently than we did in 1845? Assuredly. But we have not the luxury of simply ignoring 164 years of Southern Baptist mission history. We are, at least to some extent, the prisoners of our own past. So while I agree that to do nothing but continue as we are is a long-term strategy for decline into irrelevance we must move forward with all the care of a man traversing a minefield. I believe that rather than approaching this “Great Commission Resurgence” with sweeping changes that could easily cost the denomination more in lost good will and trust than any gains won in organizational efficiency, we ought to focus on the most egregious flaws in the current system and address them one by one. I suggest starting with the following items:

• Some structure or system must be devised that results in ongoing, meaningful communication between IMB and NAMB at multiple levels from the presidents all the way to the field missionaries. The people group strategy of IMB must become truly global. When a Somali man moves from Mogadishu to Toronto to Minneapolis to London to Seattle (and in the case of a Somali that is not as unreasonable a hypothetical scenario as you might think) it is absurd that he not remain the focus of the same strategy coordinator whose team is seeking to reach all Somalis everywhere.
• We must develop missionary recruitment and training strategies that work across existing agency boundaries. We need an expanding pool of cross-cultural missionaries. The cultural skills required of a native Minnesotan trying to reach Somalis in Minneapolis are far greater than those of American leading an English-speaking congregation in Aberdeen, Scotland. Some years ago the US military began requiring joint command training for all their senior officers. Before promotion to general officer rank, all army, navy, marine and air force officers must serve a tour where they work side by side with officers from other military branches. Such cross-training would be invaluable for missionaries both foreign and domestic, especially for those serving in the great global cities of the earth.
• Domestically we must address the disparate salaries of missionaries doing similar work for dramatically different levels of compensation. We have never attempted to seriously address the economic factor in our miserable track record in evangelizing high cost-of-living urban areas such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc. It is not uncommon for a Director of Missions for a small city in the South to make tens of thousands of dollars more than his counterpart in a city like San Francisco. The home that the Southern DOM bought for $150,000 could not be touched for ten times that much in the Mission District of San Francisco. Yet the IMB missionary who works in Tokyo or London or Moscow does get at least a partial cost of living adjustment.
• The current makeup of the SBC’s Great Commission Council, a creation of the last major SBC reorganization, is heavily skewed in favor of the interests of theological education at the expense of missions. Six seminary presidents and two mission board presidents all have equal votes. Yet when you consider the SBC budget nearly 75% of Cooperative Program funding goes to IMB and NAMB—not to the seminaries. This lopsided influence of seminary presidents on the council is bad for missions. Combine IMB and NAMB and you go from 6-to-2 to 6-to-1 in favor of seminaries over mission boards. If this body—whose work and very existence is a mystery to most Southern Baptists—is to continue functioning, this imbalance needs to be corrected.
• Any merging of mission boards must be done in a way that protects and preserves the priority of reaching the new convention regions of the United States. Winning Albany, New York will never have the same romantic appeal that winning China or India has. Gary, Indiana has little cachet when competing for the imaginations (and mission gifts) of Southern Baptists with places like Nairobi or Rio de Janeiro. I am not suggestion that these various priorities are equally important. But I am saying that we risk hard-won gains in the U.S. outside the South if we suddenly abandon what we have started.
• Finally, we need to fundamentally reexamine how we as Southern Baptists do missions education. We are failing at this critical task. I believe that the poor job that we are doing in educating our people about missions, from our youngest children through our senior adults, also underlies the weakness of much of our stewardship education. We need to gather the best and brightest from NAMB, IMB, WMU, LifeWay, state convention leadership, as well as a representative group of pastors and lay leaders to rethink how we teach missions.

God bless the men and women of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force. They may end up shaping the next chapter of Southern Baptist history. I hope they appreciate the fragile treasure that they hold.

Glen A. Land, State Missions Director
Minnesota-Wisconsin Baptist Convention

If you would like to contact Glen you can find him at land@mwbc.org.

Do Hard Things
Leaders must be willing to say and do hard things, things that defy the status quo, upset the system and seek the good that is shining in the future, not the past.  Leaders have to be those able to rise to the difficult task of choice.  Leaders have to be those who will choose between “this” or “that” all the while knowing that vested interests will call any choice for change an abandonment of our most sacred efforts to follow Christ.  The call to lead can be lonely, it can cause conflict and it likely will be misunderstood.

Tasked For Leadership
Leadership is precisely what we have asked the GCR Task Force to give the SBC.  We have given them the heavy task of recommendation.  We have set them aside for a purpose that comes with great authority.  We have not convened a group simply to ignore their recommendations, rather we have given the GCRT a de facto authority which says, “We will take seriously what you have to say about our cooperative life and will use your recommendations to help shape the future of our churches’ efforts to cooperate together.  With that said…

To The Slaughterhouse
If we were on the GCR Task Force we would go to the slaughterhouse.  Even as I type these words I know that some will object.  I did. The first time that phrase was put in front of me I quickly looked for a work around, a way out, an easier option to say what needs to be said.  Leaders lead.  If we were placed on the task force we would not have the luxury of the “easy”.  We would travel to the place where programs go to die, budgets get cut, denominational staff are sent back to the church to take up their work of serving Christ and whole entities are phased out.  We would have to go to that place we call the slaughterhouse and spend time there.  Though not easy, we would have to learn by heart the way of subtraction before we engaged the art of addition.  We would go to the slaughterhouse precisely because we have been called to the task of assisting in reshaping a denomination that has clearly lost its way.  We do not call people BACK to the task of the Great Commission of Christ our Lord if we are already engaging it in faithfulness and fidelity.  This is no time of minor tweaks, small adjustments, re-organization, or reallocation.  This is a time for seismic change to set a course for a future of local church centered, cooperatively effective mission in the name of Christ.  By going to the slaughterhouse we mean one thing uniquely: “Everything that makes it out of the GCRT recommendation process only does so because it can prove its vitality and usefulness in a 21st century effort to take the Gospel of Christ to the nations (including our own)”.

No Sacred Cows
As the GCRT we would operate from the perspective that only those efforts of ministry that will enable us to be an effective group of cooperating churches IN THE FUTURE should make it out alive.  Everything else is handed off, given up, outsourced or simply laid on the chopping block and…well you know the sound that makes.  We would look long and hard at our shared life and see where we were duplicating efforts to no greater effectiveness and then, regardless of whether our friend worked there, someone I knew graduated from there, somebody I heard of once used a product from there…regardless, it would have to go.  The ideas that led us to ineffectiveness will not lead us forward into a resurgence of Great Commission zeal.  Thinking that allowed duplication of effort, poor stewardship of resources and overall status quo processes must be examined and understood for what they are, a hindrance to our collective efforts to proclaim the gospel.

Back To The Beginning
As the GCRT we would, like Inigo Montoya after he lost Vizzini and Fezzik, go back to the beginning.  We must commit ourselves to examine every part of our shared life from the perspective that Christ has given the Great Commission to the church and she has no ability ask another to do it in her stead.  Though we can cooperate together, organize and work to enhance and improve effective process, we cannot at a denominational level do what only the church of our Lord is called as a part of her vocation to do. With the Great Commission being squarely located in the hands of the laypeople in the local church, along with their leadership, we would begin the hard work of being the Deciders.  Without first thinking about our org. chart, we would begin to work through the tough choices of evaluating a massive bureaucracy that has presided over declining numbers for years.  Inevitably it will lead to changes in jobs and direction but that cannot, must not drive thinking in this all important effort to bring about a resurgence of Great Commission fervor.

As the GCRT we would establish from the outset that it would not be acceptable to see duplication of effort and resources in the convention.  No longer would we say that duplication is inevitable in large organizations with many levels of cooperation.  Waste, outdated, ineffective ministry would no longer receive a blind eye.  We would align our recommendations not with power, structure, or loyalty, but with the axioms that serve as the backdrop of the task force and a commitment to stand before the Lord ready to give an account for resources that he vested in us.

The Chopping Block and the Change to Come
For many simply the thought of GCRT recommendations will stir fear and trembling.  Just the other day I was discussing with a fellow ’scaper’ (my term for those who blog here at www.missioscapes.com) about the reality that changes will begin to appear, almost Harry Potter style, simply in an effort to get out ahead of the perceived recommendations of the Task Force.  With no power to actually ‘do’ anything, the Task Force will exert tremendous influence on our shared life simply by the potential reality that might obtain by the stroke of their collective pen.  Long before Orlando I believe we will see the shape of our convention change based on the perception of change coming down the proverbial pike.  It cannot be the case that marginal changes remove from those areas of ministry where we are not effecting change and are only maintaining the status quo the real need for the axe to fall.

We have to be a people in the SBC who readily expect change to come out of the GCR.  Will institutions that people love be done away with?  Maybe.  Will national efforts nobly dreamed but shoddily implemented and planned be dropped without so much of a second thought?  I sure hope so.  Some might say in response, “What about the years of ministry investment from those who have gone before us?” to which we would respond, “It is only fitting that we make changes fit for our future in the same way that they made changes fit for theirs.”  Past directives were never meant to become future shackles that bind the children.  Rather we must with great courage move out into the world in which live and answer questions that are being asked today and tomorrow so that we can faithfully take the Gospel to the world and watch with amazement as Christ changes hearts and continues the New Creation that began with His powerful resurrection.

I hope that like U2 in need of a new direction back in 1989, our convention can “dream it all up again” and come back better than ever.