pray for our missionaries, and pray for our board that oversees them

If it's close to December it must be time for us to talk about our global missions offering. Over the past few years our church has ramped up our missions emphasis considerably- resulting in new partnerships in places like Showback Jordan and Montipur India and Vancouver Canada. Council Road is truly a global church- ending each calendar year with a crescendoing of missions giving that vaults us into the next years missions opportunities and providing our missions boards with much needed resources to push back darkness in some of the most remote, unevangelized places on the planet.

This is not just a time for us to support missions causes but to also pray for our missionaries and I would add to that, pray for our IMB mission board. Having served on this board for the past four years, I have had a front row seat not just to the incredible work in harvest fields around the globe, but also to the spiritual battle that often takes place in the board itself. When one considers that this is the largest missions sending organization BY FAR in the world, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out the kind of spiritual fireworks that inevitably results. (Be warned- mixed metaphors ahead).

Without getting too far into the sordid details of the inner workings of the board, I would simply say that I believe the enemy would like nothing more to tie us up into knots over senseless issues that are not worthy of even one planck of our time. Like the ancient mythology of the Iliad, the enemy would like to throw the apple of discord into our missional activity.

In my opinion it is extremely important that our board maintain the proper perspective in our relationship to the local church. For those who need a quick Baptist primer, the SBC (Southern Baptist Convention) is not a "denomination" per se, we are instead a convention made up of cooperating churches around our missions emphasis and primary doctrinal statement, the 2000 Baptist Faith and Mission, believing that together we can do much more effectively what we might try to do separately. The International Mission Board (IMB) is effective precisely because of this kind of cooperation. In this model, the board is a servant to the church, it is not the missions arm of some hierarchical diocese reigning from above, telling the local church how to believe.

As long as that balance is maintained, the channeled force of that cooperation is extremely effective- resulting in the unleashing of church movements and strategic Kingdom growth around the world.

When that balance tilts one way or another, it puts a lot of stress on the organization at just about every level- and threatens the ground that has been gained and hard work that is being done.

As of late the board has been dealing with a clash of philosophies that has caused if not a tilt, at least a strong sway. On the one hand you have the philosophy that says, "We have to keep all these missionaries and administrators and missiologists doctrinally pure". Of course, the issue then becomes, "Exactly which version of 'doctrinal purity' do you mean?"

Believe me, we Baptists have a lot of versions- we are not called "dissenters" for nothin!

The other philosophy says, "The very meaning of cooperation is that you have a wide tent of doctrinal standards staked around our strong belief in the integrity and infallibility of scripture as expressed in the Baptist Faith and Message, therefore we may not always agree on the non-essentials, but we have cooperation around the essentials." Of course, the problem here becomes all of those non-essential doctrinal beliefs that are not mentioned in BFM 2000 but which some large numbers of Baptists don't have a stomach for. "What about private prayer language for instance?" "What about people who are baptized by the "wrong" church as another example?" they will say.

So what you have here is the classic battle between the SBC equivalent of Spartans on one hand who want to further solidify the parameters of cooperation versus the equivalent of Trojans on the other who want to aggressively advance the gospel under the banner of the Great Commission and who resent any attempt to chip away at the cooperating fringe. The extremities on each side of this conundrum are so far from the cooperating center that they cannot exist in the same circle. They are not just two competing philosophies, they are two irreconcilable world-views. The two groups have no way of speaking the same language because they are working off of two completely different operating systems.

What is needed is leadership with the gift of tongues. And I don't mean the kind the IMB has banned. I mean the kind of leadership that allows for an understanding and appreciation of both languages and philosophies. I mean the statesmanship that can speak from the perspective of both Troy and Sparta. I mean the kind of wisdom that allows people to disagree without constantly tangling up in public floggings and pronouncements and censures. I mean the kind of wisdom that understands the difference between a local church and the organization that serves the church.

That is what I am praying for this Christmas season and I ask you to pray for as well. Pray that in this tenuous season of philosophical dissent, that real statesmen of the SBC would step into the middle of the fray and articulate the strong solid center and remind all of us that the Great Commission of our Lord is much more important than the silly political maneuvering of the idealistic fringe. The missionaries we all know and have grown to love and the young men and women from our church family who are being called out of our church and into the white harvest field are too important and their calling too important for us as a convention to fall prey to the enemies ploy.

Truly the enemy is on the defense- as progress for the gospel is being made in unprecedented ways around the world. I truly see what we are going through as a spiritual battle, and therefore call on all of us to cinch up our spiritual armor and pray.