Prospective SBC president plans 25-day bus tour to meet ‘grassroots’ Baptists

Photo by James A. Smith Sr.

Bobby Welch, pastor, prays with visitors to First Baptist Church, Daytona Beach, after a morning service.

DAYTONA BEACH (FBW)—Although he has not yet been elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bobby Welch has already been busily planning a 25-day bus tour to visit every state in America, as well as one city in Canada, to “further extend the Convention” and to hear the ideas of “grassroots” Southern Baptists.

In a May 23 wide-ranging interview with Florida Baptist Witness, Welch disclosed for the first time his plans for the tour, which will not be 25 consecutive days and will include plane trips to Alaska and Hawaii. He hopes to visit 51 churches from late August to early October as a means to confirm his analysis of six areas in SBC life in need of rejuvenation. The tour will be interrupted in September for denominational meetings in Nashville and a previously planned crusade in Tennessee.

While Welch is the only declared candidate for the highest office of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination, he was reluctant to talk about the bus tour, noting that he does not take for granted his election. And while he has identified six areas of possible focus, Welch said that “these are just ideas I have now and what I’m looking for is to see if they are verified, confirmed and affirmed by the rest of us.”

The listening tour, Welch hopes, will result in a coordinated effort of renewed commitment to evangelism and plans for simultaneous evangelistic efforts to be launched at the 2005 SBC annual meeting in Nashville.

Welch has identified six critical areas in SBC life that has been “attacked by the Devil”: evangelism training, soul winning, baptisms, stewardship, Vacation Bible School and starting new units.

With the bus tour as a centerpiece, he said, “I would attempt to do an all-out effort in the first months to encourage, urge, stir our Convention with a call to a unity of purpose for evangelism.” Calling it the only theme for his prospective presidency, he said, “This Convention does not have one problem that soul winning will not solve.”

Photo by James A. Smith Sr.

Welch hopes his 25-day bus tour this fall will “verify” his plans to move Southern Baptists to a “transformational” era.

Focusing his visits on a variety of types of congregations representing the racial, ethnic, geographic and numerical diversity of Southern Baptist life, Welch said, “I’m going to go to what I hope is a patchwork of this mosaic of Southern Baptist Convention life.”

In addition to churches, he hopes to meet every president, executive director, evangelism director, Sunday School director and newspaper editor of every state Baptist convention. Although he recognizes schedules will be difficult to coordinate and some leaders may not be able to do it, he hopes that the state Southern Baptist leaders will meet him along the way and ride the bus with him for a period of time.

Welch settled on the bus tour as the most effective way of meeting and hearing from grassroots Southern Baptists, noting that “when you roll up on a bus, they know you’ve been on the road. … I think it says to them that I’m trying to do the best I can to extend this Convention toward you at some effort on my part.”

The reason the tour must be limited to little more than one calendar month is “I don’t have all that much time, I want to get it done, I need to get it done and get on to the next phase,” he said, adding that waiting until the fall meeting of the SBC Executive Committee and certainly his first annual meeting as president is too late for Southern Baptists to hear from their president.

The bus—which Welch was careful to note would be the “Convention bus, it’s not the Bobby Welch bus”—will be covered with the logos of each SBC entity and the slogan, “Do all you can with all you got where you are—now.”

“The whole idea is we’re going to bring back evidence as surely as Joshua and Caleb did from every state in this Convention that there are people out there who are ready to go,” Welch said. “And we’re going to have to come to the conclusion, are we going to slouch on by the Promise Land toward the wilderness wandering or are we going to turn in and win this country for Christ.”