KevinPurcell.org

Frank Page is the President of the Southern Baptist Convention. He will conclude his second term this year. And he has encouraged small church pastors to nominate a candidate. I’ve been saying this for years, but it takes someone like him to get attention. Check out this article to read what he said and where he said it.

Why do we need a small church President?

1. The vast majority of churches in the SBC are small. I pastor a church that averages about 120 in worship each week. That makes my church in the top 20 percent in size in the SBC and the top 10 in North Carolina. But when you hear about church life at the convention or from the convention’s institutions all you hear about is the mult-staff church with more than four or five hundred people. They don’t understand us and you can tell by the way they suggest we do things. If we applied all that they instruct most of us would not last long.
2. Small churches are not an affliction on the SBC but the engine that keeps her going. And it is about time that our efforts and work were appreciated and lauded instead of made to feel like we have failed in some way.
3. There are a very large number of pastors who lead small churches that are doing far better than the mega churches in our denomination. They baptize 300 people but have 10,000 in attendance at their weekend services. That is a 3 percent rate. In other it takes 100 people to baptize 3 in a year’s time. But there are some small churches that have no more than 100 and baptize 10 or 20 people. That means that in those churches it takes 33 people to baptize 3. A couple of years ago a pastor was nominated whose church gave tens of thousands of dollars to the Cooperative Program. But it amounted to less than a few percent. By comparison many churches with less than $50,000 budgets and bi-vocational pastors are giving 5-10 percent of their budget to the Cooperative Program.
4. I tire of going to the SBC and being told how to vote and then being made to feel like I am not a true conservative if I don’t vote the way the big guys want me to. Thankfully Frank Page helped break that trend. But electing a pastor from a small church would take this a step further.

Now in case you might think I’m campaigning, if nominated I won’t run and if elected I won’t serve. But I pray someone in a church like mine will, so long as he serves a church like the ones described above.