What Happened to the Biennial Motion at the New Orleans SBC?

To everyone who appreciates and understands the rationale for the amendments I introduced in New Orleans seeking a return to a biennial convention schedule, thank you for your encouragement, interest, prayers, and support.

If one meeting of the SBC every two years was sufficient to conduct the business of the Convention in the era of the horse and buggy, it seems a biennial meeting should be sufficient in the era of FaceBook, Twitter, and the world wide web.

Of course, we should not embrace biennial meetings simply because we can. We need a compelling reason to make such a change. Currently, there are nearly 7 billion compelling reasons to consider biennial meetings.

The Convention declared in 2010, along with the distinguished leaders who served on the Great Commission Task Force, that prioritizing the use of our resources for maximal effectiveness in fulfilling the Great Commission is deeply important to us and should impact the way we conduct the business of our Conventions and agencies.

Prioritizing access to the gospel and funding the advance of the gospel is not merely the stuff of convenient strategic planning, it is inherent to the gospel itself.

The call for biennial meetings is not an esoteric call for rethinking everything we do as Great Commission Baptists. It would actually change very little of what we do.

It would, however, give us an opportunity to invest millions - yes millions - more dollars in training pastors and missionaries and reaching our neighbors and the nations.

Any proposal that would allow us to deploy millions more in pursuing the very things we seek to accomplish through our cooperation deserves the consideration of our Convention.

Godly people can certainly disagree on implementing such a change, but we should not fear or avoid a discussion of its merits.

When the Committee on Order of Business referred my motion to the Executive Committee, they turned the motion over to the Committee that had already outlined its disagreement with biennial meetings following my motion requesting the study in 2010.

I attempted to ask for a floor debate, but the question was called very quickly in a rapid series of other motions that were, appropriately, referred to the Trustees of the agencies in question.

For motions dealing with with the governing documents of the Convention herself, the appropriate "Trustees" to consider the motion are not those of the Executive Committee but the messengers of the Convention directly.

My initial motions to amend our governing documents were in order and, as such, the default recommendation from the Committee on Order of Business should have been to the messengers, not the Executive Committee. We are still Baptists, are we not?

The problem with my motions was that they were regarded as neither wise nor or desirable by the Committee and were subsequently referred without the clear understanding of the Convention that a discussion could (and should) have taken place.

The Committee is simply supposed to determine whether motions are in order. The job of the messengers is to determine if they are wise. No where in the Constitution or Bylaws is the Executive Committee given authority to weigh these matters independently of the Convention herself.

The purview of the Executive Committee does not include protecting us from unwise decisions regarding amendments to our governing documents. The Constitution itself provides these protections by requiring an affirmative vote of a supermajority of the Convention messengers for two successive meetings in a row!

That is, rightly, a very tall order. This is all the protection we need.

I hope, next year, for an opportunity to have a family conversation regarding the wisdom or lack of wisdom in moving to biennial meetings.

If we can save and redeploy millions in the battle to reach billions without sacrificing transparency or sound business practices, the proposal deserves serious consideration by the people to whom God has entrusted this Convention - the messengers themselves.

Coming up next

In my next post, I will list and respond to the objections of the Executive Committee to biennial meetings as given in their response to a request for a financial study of the cost of Conventions in 2010.