We have a team going to Northern India later this week to engage in a continuation of work that began there in 2004 with our first trip. We have seen amazing things take place, from raising up church planters, to developing a clean water project, to assisting a Christian hospital, to supporting children in education and in an orphanage. It has been very exciting for our church. We have also had very little overhead as we have engaged in this and almost all of the money that we have raised has gone directly to the work there.

We took up an offering yesterday for the work that we are doing in India. It was substantial – far more than has ever been given before. 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. These facts are frustrating the International Mission Board. They also frustrate the proponents of the Cooperative Program for Southern Baptists. They are used to churches just sending them money so that they can do the work and provide a vague report of all that is going on at the Annual Meeting. But, the ground is shifting and things don’t work that way anymore. If I became a huge proponent of the IMB and the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for missionaries in our church, I would get blank stares. Our people just will not give to missions offerings, institutions, or nameless, faceless organizations. The emerging Southern Baptist identity is mainly relational and theological, not methodological. The work of parachurch organizations over the past 50 years has also weakened the loyalty of people to both their local church and denomination. But, the church planter that I introduced them to last week was blessed a great deal by our church because they heard his story, saw his faith, and believed in his vision. Plus, they just wanted to bless his family.

The same thing happens when we go overseas or do something in our community. People support what they can see. If the work is to happen at all, people want to be connected to it. They are not impressed with wild claims of numbers of baptisms. They want to see people being impacted personally on a micro-level. Because of the internet, 24/7 cable news, Facebook, texting, email, cell phones, etc., people expect to be connected personally with their passion for change. If there is not personal connection, relationship, and buy in, then it is just an institutionalism that someone is getting rich off of. The real, nitty-gritty work is believed to not be getting done.

Where does this leave the CP and behemoth organizations like the IMB? It leaves them with lots of overhead, staff, plans, and dependence upon the giving patterns of a generation that is dying.  The current generation of Senior Adults came of age when institution building was all the rage. They are used to giving to institutions and continue to do so, but that is beginning to end. Their children, the Baby Boomers, gave less and ended up primarily in Megachurches or larger churches that give less to the CP and IMB than the smaller churches that they left do.  Gen X and Millenials give very little to institutions that they have no personal contact with. So, the next 10-20 years will see a massive shift take place in what Southern Baptists are able to do involving global missions unless some serious changes are made.

Changes . . .

There is still a role for foreign missionaries. But, they need to be tied more closely to the local church and work in directing and assisting the U.S. based local church in their work by working with networking churches  and connecting them with projects. Are these plans on the books? Yes. But, they are submersed beneath the constant calls for more money for the CP and IMB. Missionaries also need to be able to respond to a local church and what they are doing, if God happens to open some doors outside of the current work of the IMB. Yes, we need to send people to do missions because we cannot do it ourselves, but the local Southern Baptist church has become very disconnected from the idea of sending others beyond giving money to a general fund. This will not continue to work like it has in the past. 

I think that the changes that we have seen in the church over the past 20 years (1990-2010) are nothing compared to what is coming over the next 20 years. The past 20 years were just the rumblings of a system that is falling apart on every front. The next 20 years will see the system that has been built come crashing to the ground as the older generation that built it passes on. What will replace it? What will survive?

I think that what will replace it is already being born, although it is being scorned and disregarded, if not outright ignored. I’ll talk more about that in another post.