B-101: Kings and kingdoms • Can Europe be saved? • Clip and share pull-out on Baptist beliefs
Volume 108, No. 15
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Messengers to consider ‘Common Core’ page 2 Nate Adams: Lessons from pirates page 4 CP Report Card: Check your giving pages 10-12 The sports page page 6
Illinois pastor Cliff Woodman voices small church needs on new SBC advisory council By Meredith Flynn
How political is your church? page 16
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Atlanta, Ga. | In two out of three Southern Baptist congregations, fewer than 100 people gather for worship on Sunday morning. Megachurches may get more attention, but small churches are the backbone of the SBC, Frank Page has said. Still, small church pastors often feel overlooked and marginalized, left out and under-resourced. A new advisory council assembled by Page, president
of the SBC Executive Committee, exists to communicate the unique needs of these categories of churches with denominational leaders. “I will not allow the Southern Baptist Convention to forget who we are,” said Page during the first meeting of the Bivocational and Small Church Advisory Council. “Part of my goal in this is to elevate the role of the smallchurch pastor and the bivocational Continued on page 9
Platt says Gospel goes forward through ‘ordinary people’
Arnold, Mo. | His voice crackling with intensity, David Platt painted a picture of the current status of the gospel: With 7 billion people in the world, even the most liberal estimates leave 4 or 5 billion who do not know Christ. And a couple billion of those have never even heard the gospel, added the recently elected president of the Southern Baptist International Mission Board. “If that’s true in the SUFFERING MAKES SENSE – “How will we ever show the world…then we don’t have world a proper, clear picture of Jesus if everything always time to play games in the goes right for us?” said IMB President David Platt in St. Louis. church,” he told the crowd gathered at First Baptist Worshipers of all ages stood and Church in Arnold, south of St. Louis. sang before Platt came to the podium. “We don’t have time to waste our He started his message with the bleak lives on a nice, casual, comfortable, reality of billions of people who don’t cultural version of Christianity. Beknow Christ. Then, he preached better cause, number one, that’s not Christinews from the Book of Acts. Reading anity. Number two, God’s created us from the end of chapter 7 through the for something so much greater than beginning of 8, he told the audience that.” that it’s “ordinary people” through Hundreds of people gathered Oct. 6 whom the gospel is spread. for the St. Louis-area stop of the Send In a part of northern India known as North America Experience Tour. The a spiritual graveyard, Platt said, a two-hour service, facilitated by the chicken farmer and a school superinNorth American Mission Board, was tendent attended a disciple-making part of a multi-city effort leading up to training session where they were asthe national Send North America Consigned to go out into the villages and ference in August 2015. Continued on page 3
OCTOBER 20, 2014
IBSA Constitution revision needed
Springfield | Messengers to the Nov. 56 IBSA Annual Meeting will be asked to suspend the rules of the IBSA Constitution to vote on changes to the constitution itself. The request to suspend the usual two-year process is due to the immediate need for the Baptist Children’s Home and Family Services (BCHFS) to have its own bylaws in order to comply with current Illinois not-for-profit law. This need was discovered during the review of a land ownership question involving BCHFS and IBSA. In the process of reviewing that issue with legal counsel, the need for corresponding revisions to the Baptist Foundation of Illinois (BFI) bylaws and IBSA Constitution also were noted by the IBSA Constitution Committee, as were needed revisions to the articles of incorporation for all three entities. Continued on page 2
IBSA Annual Meeting & Pastors’ Conference Nov. 4-6 • Springfield Crowne Plaza www.IBSA.org/IBSA2014
Pastor salaries not keeping pace By Marty King
Nashville, Tenn. | Compensation for full-time Southern Baptist pastors has not kept pace with inflation over the past two years, while salaries for other full-time ministers and office staff increased at a rate higher than national inflation. These findings are part of the 2014 Southern Baptist Convention Compensation Study, an in-depth survey of 12,907 staff members in Southern Baptist churches. Baptist state conventions along with LifeWay Research and GuideStone Financial Resources conduct this survey every two years. All the data acquired by the study has been compiled into an online tool at www.LifeWay.com/ CompensationSurvey. Adjusting for church size, the average full-time Southern Baptist senior pastor’s compensation (salary and housing) rose 1% between 2012 and 2014. That rate of change was significantly lower than the 3.9% inflation rate for the same two-year period, according to figures supplied by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index. According to Scott McConnell, director of LifeWay Research, “While Continued on page 8