"Change the SBC Convention Meeting"

By: OKpreacher

This year I am planning on going to the Southern Baptist Convention in North Carolina. I have been a pastor for over eight years and a Southern Baptist for over twenty-five years. This is my first trip to the annual meeting. The reason is the churches I have pastored in the past couldn't afford to send me to the Convention meeting and as a pastor I didn't have the funds to go on my own. Last year I watched much of the convention online, but I didn't get to participate.

So I started thinking to myself and decided to write this post to challenge our thinking. If churches can have multiple sites and still have one worship service, then why can't our convention have one meeting, but in several different locations? I know I would be more likely to go the convention meeting if it was closer and I imagine that most people would as well.

My proposal is that we still have the convention in one main city, but then each state has two or three churches that will host a live feed to the meeting. Of course each person at the extension site must be a messenger sent from their church. Each extension site would be hooked up live to the main meeting. In my thinking this would take care of the distance problem. Instead of the annual convention impacting one city, the messengers could evangelize and impact hundreds of cities.

I realize that there are obstacles to overcome with this idea. How do you take a vote with people in multiple sites? How do you give a messenger at an extension site the opportunity to speak to the people at the main site? I'm sure there are other things that I haven't thought of, but I believe that we have the ability to overcome all these obstacles.

Let's use the technology that we have available and try to include as many messengers as possible. If we stick with only one location, the most we will probably see is ten to twenty thousand attend the convention, but with multiple sites we could see tens or even hundreds of thousands of messengers participate in the annual convention. So let’s change the SBC convention meeting from one site to multiple sites.