Welch to call for renewed evangelism; endorses one million baptisms in one year

DAYTONA BEACH (FBW)—Bobby Welch believes he knows what ails Southern Baptists and desires to lead the Southern Baptist Convention to a time of renewed focus and commitment to evangelism that will fix a “malaise” which afflicts the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.

“Here’s the headline on me: This Convention does not have one problem that soul winning will not solve. You put that in big, capital letters, quotes, three exclamation points and underline it in red,” the 61-year-old pastor of First Baptist Church, Daytona Beach, said in an extensive interview with Florida Baptist Witness three weeks before he stands for election as president of the Southern Baptist Convention.

If elected during the SBC annual meeting next week in Indianapolis, he promised “to give the greatest effort that I have ever given to anything in my life to … unify this Convention for the sake of souls.”

Although there is no other declared presidential candidate, Welch was careful to make clear that he does not take for granted his election to the denomination’s highest post. Still, in the three-hour interview May 23, for the first time he disclosed his plans for a 25-day bus tour of every state in America as a means of hearing the concerns and dreams of Southern Baptists for their denomination.

The bus tour will be one component of Welch’s effort to confirm his analysis of what ails Southern Baptists in preparation for a major simultaneous evangelistic effort he expects to launch at the 2005 annual meeting in Nashville that will reinvigorate the SBC with a spirit of soul winning resulting, he hopes, in one million baptisms.

Perhaps with the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in mind, Welch said of the new effort, “I want to see Southern Baptists furnished with the frame that will get them to the finish line quickly, but allow them to bring [their own] body style, the paint job, the engine, the transmission and the gas. If they don’t want to race, then whoever does will.”

Citing a drop in the number of baptisms during 2003 and unacceptable incremental gains in membership as evidence of the problem among Southern Baptists, Welch said, “I believe this Convention has really been attacked by the Devil in about six critical areas that we’ve got to break-out from.” He said most pastors and lay leaders could “unify in purpose quickly” on the areas of concern in a coordinated, simultaneous effort that will result in reversing the troubling statistics.

The areas of concern included evangelism training, soul winning, baptisms, stewardship, Vacation Bible School and starting new units.

• Evangelism training. The co-founder of the FAITH evangelistic Sunday School strategy used in thousands of Southern Baptist churches nationwide, Welch said his presidency would not be marked by advocacy of FAITH alone. Expressing no preference for the particular program churches use, he said emphatically, “The deal is to do it.”

Welch said that although “there must be a thousand ways this is being practiced” it is not being done by every church and “we’re certainly not doing it at the same time.”

• Witnessing to and winning the lost. Welch said, “My belief is that you win if you witness and you lose if you don’t.” Even though every person will not accept Christ, “You win when you witness.”

He said it’s not enough to simply have evangelism training; Christians must also practice soul winning. Southern Baptists “have to get lostness, the look of lostness of their unsaved” family members on their minds. Rather than solely focusing on foreign missions across the world, “We need to bring lostness closer to home.”

• Baptisms. With 377,357 baptisms in SBC churches last year—a drop of 4.44 percent from 2002—Welch is calling for a goal of a million baptisms in one year, noting that if it is accomplished once it could be a “routine” annual reality.

“If you baptize a million in two years you’d have to break all the records. If you baptize a million in one year you would move to a level of transformation that we would never go back again to where we used to be. If you baptize a million in a year you do something that this Convention desperately needs.”

Welch added, “I believe that if we unify on purpose—and that being evangelism—that we have the ability then to move us from this malaise that we’re caught in now of floundering and struggling with the hope of incremental improvement in things that are very essential to our life. … We’ve got to get off these decimal points. Decimal points are good for nothing but death spiritually.”

Welch endorsed the million baptisms goal of the “What Now?” joint emphasis on personal revival and national spiritual awakening announced recently by four SBC entities, as well as some state conventions.

• Stewardship. A consistent leader in support of the Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists’ unified missions funding effort, First Baptist Church gives at least 15 percent of its undesignated gifts to the Cooperative Program. Welch said that he believes his church’s commitment to the Cooperative Program should be an encouragement to other churches which, like the Daytona Beach congregation, has many demands on its funds, but remains committed to support the denomination’s missions programs.

“Every budget year there are things that we need to do more of and that we wish we could, but we’ve never flinched on that and I don’t see where we’ve ever suffered from it, and I believe we’re blessed because of it,” said Welch, who will celebrate his 30th anniversary at the church in August.

“I believe that there are people out here who need to refocus on the joy, the victory and the blessing of being in the center of God’s blessing through stewardship,” he said. “And that needs to happen at the individual level, that needs to happen at the church level and that needs to happen at the cooperative level.”

• Vacation Bible School. Welch intends to call for all Southern Baptists, including adults, to be enrolled in Vacation Bible School for the next two years.

Asserting that Southern Baptists are “failing miserably now in a runaway way to reach our kids for the Lord,” Welch said that Vacation Bible School is the “absolute best way to reinvigorate us for our passion for reaching young people.”

Welch said that a benefit of giving attention to VBS would be to provide an avenue for Southern Baptists to “make some thoughtful, biblical statements about infant baptism—baptizing too young or waiting too long” to baptize children.

He also said that because VBS is fueled primarily by the efforts of lay people, any church, including small congregations and those without pastors or new pastors, can immediately get involved in a renewed effort on VBS.

• Starting new units. Welch believes that Southern Baptists should highlight starting new units—Sunday School classes and new churches—as a vital evangelistic strategy.

Linking the effort with the renewed focus on VBS, Welch said that too infrequently starting children’s Sunday School classes is considered as a viable part of new units.

However, a successful VBS should lead to new units in children’s areas “which is very, very important,” he said, noting that most Christians make a profession of faith before the age of 18.

Welch emphasized that there could be other areas of focus about which consensus could be found, but said that he believed the six he identified would find wide agreement in Southern Baptist life, expressing hope that the SBC could unify with “each church, each pastor and the people, and each entity of the Convention is going to embrace these six things and we’re going to try to come together over a twelve month period … and we’re going to try to do our best in these areas.”

By focusing on these areas collectively during a specific period of time, the effort will have the effect of creating mass, Welch said, which will generate “spiritual synergy” absent from Southern Baptists because of their polity and independent spirit.

“This would have the potential of creating mass and generating spiritual synergy and those are the sort of things that are essential for a transformational, forward movement—to really go to a place we’ve never been before and then we never come back to where we used to be,” Welch said.

“That’s what we need right now, and the way to get there—the only way to get there—is God working through some unified purpose.”