Today, I want to share with you some of my final reflections from last week’s Annual Meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention.  I have had the weekend to consider matters and reflect upon them. I hope you will endure my final thoughts on the meeting.  Perhaps you will be encouraged.

1. The election of Johnny Hunt as President is highly significant.  The Southern Baptist Convention is in great need of strong and passionate leadership. The annual statistics and low participation level at our annual meeting indicate that we are in major need for revival and reform.  Quite honestly, we are in ICU, and we need a mighty spiritual giant like Johnny Hunt to sound the alarm, rally the troops, set forth a fresh new vision, and provide all of us with hope.  Johnny has had unusual favor of God upon his ministry, and I firmly believe it will come upon his leadership as President.
2. The work of Southern Baptists globally is highly encouraging. God is working mightily around the world.  Record salvations, record baptisms, record church starts are happening globally.  Your 5,300 plus missionaries we help send overseas are on the cutting edge of all of this. We can be grateful for the visionary leadership of Dr. Jerry Rankin and his leadership team.  It is highly encouraging.  The work globally is like a fresh breeze into the life of our convention of churches.
3. I believe with the events of this week and where matters exist in our denomination, there will be a new unity emerge under the leadership of Dr. Hunt. I think God has positioned matters for this moment; therefore, we need to get ready for some great things to happen in the future. Unity must occur for revival and reform to take place.
4. The Southern Baptist Convention is in need of being reinvented for the future. In the mid-1990′s, I had the distinct privilege to be a part of a seven-member team to restructure the Southern Baptist Convention. Matters have so changed dramatically in our world today that we need to reinvent the denomination for the future.  Everything needs to be looked at again.  I mean everything.  If we take serious the commission of Jesus to win the world, we must position ourselves to be able to do that.  We can no longer get caught up in matters that distract us from the main thing. Petty denominational demands or desires need to cease. The autonomy of the local church has been our historical precedence, and quite honestly, is a hill worth dying on as a Southern Baptist. We do not need to revise history, we need to listen to it.
5. Finally, we must return this denomination to the local church. For several years, we have become more and more centered on the “system,” “the bureaucracy,” “the convention,” and its “entities.”  No, no, no, this is not the way to success or to the future.  One thing we established a decade or so ago was that this denomination is centered on the local church.  It is NOT a top-down government, where Nashville dictates agenda and direction. The heartbeat is the local church.  The world will be won through local churches, working together through a denomination that facilitates the work and vision of local churches to win the world to Christ.  My friend, we must return to the centrality of the local church. While I love and appreciate our institutions, boards, and their leaders, it is time to go back to the local church.  This is where the action is.

These are my reflections post-SBC 2008. Have a great week.  Talk to you tomorrow.