News / Education
SBC President challenges small churches at ‘Impact 2008’
Frank Page tells group 'small churches are the future of the Southern Baptist Convention'
Page exhorted small-church pastors attending “Impact 2008” that there is no difference between them and men who pastor in megachurches. It’s a matter of perspective, Page told the group at the conference at Lewisville Baptist Church in Lewisville, N.C. In the end, the roles of SBC pastors are the same and the “human” foundation of the SBC is the small church, he said.
“God commands the church to be the church no matter the size,” said Page, pastor of the 4,300-plus member First Baptist Church of Taylors, S.C., preaching from Matthew 16:17-19 where Jesus told Peter at Caesarea Philippi that He would build the church on the rock and the forces of hell would not overpower it.
“Small church, big church, I don’t care what it is. It’s all about spiritual warfare,” he said. “We don’t live in a playground. It’s a battleground. We are supposed to be attacking the gates of hell. Every time the church is serious about doing the work of the Lord, it must engage in the Jesus ministry of attacking the evil one.”
Page said small churches are the future of the SBC. According to a 2006 LifeWay Research study presented to the conference by Les Puryear, host pastor and conference organizer, nearly 63 percent of all SBC churches have between one and 99 Sunday attendees and about 21 percent have between 100 and 199 on Sunday.
“Our convention is changing,” Page said. “There are some folks who … don’t want to see that, but it’s changing. In the next 20 years, young people will see that.
“One factor is that there are huge numbers of Southern Baptist churches that are nothing more than small groups of white people hanging on until they die. They have not only not reached out to the ethnic groups in their community, but they have not reached out to the other generations within their own ethnic groups,” Page said.
“There are small churches with small groups of black people who have not reached out to the younger generation. In the big scheme of things in the Southern Baptist Convention, huge numbers of small groups of older white people are holding on until they die. So what can happen in 20 years? They’re gone. But there are some of those churches that are calling out for help,” he said.
Page said while a lot of churches are crying out for help and yet have never done outreach, many do not want help. He said some want help but don’t want to change the way things have been done through the years. Those churches may die, he said.
Page also voiced concern about the number of seminary students who do not want to pastor traditional churches. He said most students want to be youth pastors, missionaries, church planters or counselors and that there is a serious drop in the number of students who come out and say, “I feel a call to go into a declining church or a traditional church and I want to see it turn around.”
Combining this declining number with the number of aging pastors gives a clear indication about what will happen 20 years from now in the SBC. There’s a possibility some church pastors will become bivocational where they were never bivocational or maybe “a preacher will come once every other week,” he said.
“The future is changing,” Page said. “I don’t want to be negative but most of the megachurches in the Southern Baptist Convention are declining. You don’t know that because most of the pastors won’t admit it to you. But the statistics are there.
“I don’t say that to depress you,” he said, “but the future of the Southern Baptist Convention are the small churches because one of the major demographic shifts is that people want small relationally-driven relationships. That’s what’s going to reach people in the 21st century. Small churches that are relationally driven, that will reach a generation that is not reached.”
