More Than Medicine
More Than Medicine
Southern Baptist Churches and Global Missions: Inside the SBC's Structure with Dr. Michael Cloer
Discover the inner workings of Southern Baptist churches with our esteemed guest, Dr. Michael Cloer, as we explore their unique structure and mission in this enlightening episode of "More Than Medicine." Understand how these churches operate as a voluntary network, emphasizing local autonomy while fostering a strong cooperative spirit to fulfill the Great Commission. Learn about the important roles played by the International Mission Board and the North American Mission Board, which collectively support thousands of missionaries around the globe. We also provide an insider's look at the Southern Baptist Convention's annual gathering in Indianapolis, renowned as the world's largest business meeting, where representatives make pivotal decisions to shape their mission and ministry efforts.
Our conversation takes a deeper turn as we examine the critical doctrinal beliefs that set Southern Baptists apart, particularly their unwavering commitment to the authority of the Bible. Reflecting on the liberal shifts of the 1960s and 1970s that divided many mainline denominations, we contrast this with the Southern Baptists' firm stance in the early 1980s to uphold biblical authority, which continues to influence their practices today. We also discuss the organizational challenges faced by the United Methodist Church due to its more liberal trajectory, resulting in a mass exodus of members. This episode underscores the Southern Baptists' focus on gospel centrality, doctrinal fidelity, and missional urgency, emphasizing their relentless commitment to spreading the message of Jesus Christ to those who have yet to hear it. Don't miss this compelling discussion with Dr. Michael Cloer for a deeper understanding of the Southern Baptist Convention and its global mission.
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Welcome to More Than Medicine, where Jesus is more than enough for the ills that plague our culture and our country. Hosted by author and physician, dr Robert Jackson, and his wife Carlotta and daughter Hannah Miller. So listen up, because the doctor is in.
Speaker 2:Welcome to More Than Medicine. I'm your host, dr Robert Jackson, bringing to you biblical insights and stories from the country doctors' rusty, dusty scrapbook. Well, I'm delighted today to have once again my good friend, dr Michael Clore, in the studio with me, and today we're going to be discussing some of the recent issues and events that occurred at the Southern Baptist Convention up in Indianapolis. Dr Clore, welcome to More Than Medicine.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Dr Jackson, for allowing me this privilege. I'm anxious to talk about the Lord Jesus again.
Speaker 2:Well, I am too, my brother. Well now, first of all, Michael, I know that a lot of my listeners don't really know what it means to be a Southern Baptist church and why Southern Baptist churches cooperate and they call themselves cooperating Southern Baptists. So, before we even talk about the issues of the convention, help my listeners understand what does it mean to be a Southern Baptist church and why do they call themselves cooperating Baptist churches?
Speaker 3:That's a good question. Southern Baptist churches are different from any other group of churches because we're not a part of a denomination and I hope we can explain that in a moment. Denominations are legal organizations that control the churches underneath it. Southern Baptist is a convention of churches, convention of churches. In other words, we're a voluntary network of local churches that voluntarily cooperate, work together. We share a common vision, we share common beliefs and we share a common mission. And we common beliefs and we share a common mission and we voluntarily cooperate together. In other words, nobody can tell us you must do this or else, because they don't own a local church.
Speaker 2:I got you.
Speaker 3:I got you and each individual.
Speaker 2:Baptist church is autonomous. Is that fair to say?
Speaker 3:Autonomous is correct. United Methodist Church has a headquarters. It's a denomination. Denominations are a hierarchy, there's nothing wrong with that. But they have a universal body or an international body, and then they have a national body, and then they have a state body, and then they have regional and local bodies, and one has authority over the other, owns the other.
Speaker 2:I got you.
Speaker 3:Whether it's Presbyterian or Methodist. The Southern Baptist Convention, our headquarters, is the local church. Got you Churches, plant churches. Churches send missionaries. Churches own their property. Churches plant churches. Churches send missionaries. Churches own their property. Churches call their pastors. So it's local church autonomy.
Speaker 2:I got you. I got you Now, but the churches do cooperate.
Speaker 3:Oh, we voluntarily cooperate because we know we can do so much more together than we can do by ourselves. You know we can do so much more together than we can do by ourselves. All the scriptures that refer to the people of God always give an analogy of something that's together. There's many members that are together. We're the body of Christ. He doesn't call us the finger or the toe, but the body. So there's many members, but they have to work together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. So all the individual Southern Baptist churches work together and they cooperate. To do what?
Speaker 3:The whole purpose of cooperating together is to carry out the Great Commission. That's our focus getting the gospel to every available person by every available means, at every available time.
Speaker 2:I got you. I got you. Now the Southern Baptist churches cooperate to do missions and there is what we call an international mission board. We used to call it the foreign mission board, but now it's the international mission board. How many missionaries do Southern Baptist support?
Speaker 3:The largest sending agency on the earth is the International Mission Board and right now we have 3,700 fully supported missionaries fully funded by that. All these churches 49,000 plus Southern Baptist churches from around the United States voluntarily send money whatever they decide to send in, and we support these missionaries 3,700 around the world plus our North American Mission Board. What the International Mission Board is around the world? North American Mission Board is in North America, which includes Canada and Puerto Rico.
Speaker 2:I got you, I got you, I got you. Well, that's a pretty huge undertaking. There's a lot of part-time missionaries too, right?
Speaker 3:Oh, yes, I'm talking about fully funded missionaries, but there's just as many partially funded missionaries as there are fully funded, both national and international.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I understand that, all right. Well, let's talk about the convention then. So the convention? When I say the convention, I mean the Met in Indianapolis this last two weeks ago. What was all that about, and who goes to the convention, and what were the issues that were discussed?
Speaker 3:Yeah, the Southern Baptist Convention is really an annual business meeting. It's the world's largest business meeting. You see, this year there were nearly 12,000 of us meeting together in a hall and one person has just as much. If they're a registered messenger from a church, Every church is allowed a certain number of messengers, regardless of its size, and those messengers represent that church. Remember, it's a convention of churches and we meet together once a year to carry on business as a convention. That represents the convention.
Speaker 3:But remember, local Southern Baptist churches voluntarily cooperate. There's three big entities. There's the national entity called Southern Baptist Convention, Then there's state entities. There's 37 different state entities. I say 37 because Southern Baptists are in every state, of course, but some of these states combine together. The Baptist State Convention of New York is really New York, New Jersey and southern part of Connecticut. But churches can voluntarily associate with that state convention and locally they can voluntarily associate with an association of churches. Where I am in Wilmington, there are 70 churches in our Cape Fear Association. And did you know, Dr Jackson, you can voluntarily associate with one and not another. You could be a part of the Southern Baptist Convention and not be a part of your state convention or local association. It's a voluntary cooperation, I understand. So in Indianapolis we met together as this national body, the Southern Baptist Convention, and I was amazed after the convention reading some of the headlines from the newspapers and even some religious papers. Who would have headlines? And I thought, well, was I at that convention?
Speaker 3:Or at another one Because they put one particular thing out and tried to make it sensational.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:I call it headline hysteria yeah yeah, Sensational yeah yeah, yeah, I call it headline hysteria. Yeah, yeah, this year the main, the big, the most important thing of the whole process a two-day business meeting was. We started it off commissioning 83 fully funded missionaries to go around the world.
Speaker 2:Wow, amazing, amazing, amazing.
Speaker 3:In one service, 83 missionaries, and of that number, two-thirds of them we never saw their faces because they're going into places that have such scrutiny and high security that, in order to protect the security of our missionaries and mission partners, we had to conceal their identity.
Speaker 2:Wow, wow, yeah, amazing.
Speaker 3:Most of the unreached people on earth are unreached for a reason they're hard to reach. They're either in a difficult place, politically or geographically. That makes it difficult to get the gospel to them, because many of them are in nations where missionaries are simply not allowed. You cannot go as a missionary. You can go as a plumber. You can go as an electrician. You can go as a missionary, you can go as a plumber, you can go as an electrician, you can go in other capacities, and so praise the Lord that Southern Baptists have continued to send people around the world in these hard-to-reach, difficult places. That was the most important thing of the convention.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that was the highlight right there.
Speaker 3:That was the highlight, and I never read about that in any national paper.
Speaker 2:That's because national papers aren't interested in reaching the world for Jesus Christ. No, no, they're only interested in controversy, Controversial things, sensational matters.
Speaker 3:One headline was Southern Baptists Fail to Exclude Women Pastors. Man, that makes you want to read that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:It is sensational, but it's misleading and, of course, it's totally false.
Speaker 3:Yeah yeah, we didn't vote. We didn't fail to exclude women pastors. One of the things that keeps us together as a convention is our doctrinal fidelity. We believe that the final authority is the word of God. Exactly that's the reason we became a convention of churches. Here's one thing that we believe together have a doctrinal statement, because we're a confessional people and not a creedal people. Denominational people usually have a creed that they all must sign, that they agree to, and this creed they say week after week or however. So it's their creed, it's what binds them. We're more confessional people in that we do not have a doctrinal statement to sign. We do have a doctrinal belief that we adhere to. It's not about a mental assertion, it's about a lifestyle, a relationship, and ours is called the Baptist Faith and Message, which basically says we believe every word in the Bible is true. The Bible is the final authority for what we believe and how we behave, our sole guide of faith and practice.
Speaker 3:That's it. It's our standard of belief. That's right. And in that statement it says men and women are both gifted for service in the church, but the office of pastor elder is limited to men as qualified by Scripture. That's what we believe. That's never changed. We've always believed that. But we were in a process to take it beyond just a statement of faith and make it a part of our Constitution. And so in order to do that, you have to bring it up two years in a row and two-thirds of the people have to vote. We did last year. This year, almost 62% of us voted in favor of it, but you had to have 66%.
Speaker 2:I got you.
Speaker 3:So that amendment failed. However, we've always believed that God thank God for the women in our church and for the leadership of women in so many areas of our church. What would we be without women? Thank God for them. But we're just saying the office of a pastor, an elder, is limited to men. That's qualified in Scripture.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know many women in my church that want to be the pastor.
Speaker 3:Why would you want to put that on a precious sister? No, no. So that's another thing that separates us. I think one of the main things that separates us is our doctrinal belief is that the Bible is the final authority. That's where all the other denominations went astray. I remember in the 1960s and the 1970s when every major mainline denomination was having struggles with the issue of liberalism, the belief that maybe the Bible is not true. I remember going to a college where professors would talk to me and say you don't really believe the first 11 chapters of the Bible are true. You don't believe that Adam was a literal person, do you? I bet you still believe in this story about a man being swallowed by a whale or a big fish.
Speaker 1:Yes, I do.
Speaker 3:I believe all of that because it's in the Bible. But in the 70s so many institutions didn't order Post-World War II, many of our universities, including religious universities, wanted to be more attractive to European thought and so they allowed some European thought to come into our colleges and universities and weaseled among that was the liberal thought. It's liberal, not progressive. No, it's liberal. Yeah, you read that word today, and they won't say liberal, they'll say progressive. It's not progressive. Progressive is going forward. They're going back all the way to the fall of man. That's not progressive. That's not progressive. Progressive is going forward. They're going back all the way to the fall of man. That's not progressive, that's regressive, that's regressive.
Speaker 3:The very first question, the very first statement ever quoted of the devil in the scriptures is Yea, did God say to question the word of God? That's right and that's what liberals do. And every major denomination in the 70s or 80s began to split because of the issue of the authority of the Bible. There was that conservative group and then there was a liberal, a larger group, those who didn't believe the Bible. And that happened in every denomination except Southern Baptists and Southern Baptists. We made a decision in the early 80s we are not going to go down that path. Our universities, our colleges, our seminaries are going to teach that the Bible is the Word of God. Exactly that's what made us different.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and I remember those days and I remember there were pitched battles over that whole issue of the authority and infallibility of the Word of God.
Speaker 3:That's exactly right. The United Methodist is a denomination, for example, they have national headquarters and they own those. Now, their structure? I don't know everything about their structure. I do know there's a general conference who passes down the law to the council of bishops, who passes it down to a judicial council, regional, right down to the local level. But local churches do not own their building, they do not call their pastors. Everything is passed down from above, and so is their belief system.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's why it's sad. The United Methodist Church has held on to this liberal belief system and it's cost them so severely. Did you know? In the past 24 months they've lost over 25% of all of their churches and their members.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I've been hearing that and, seeing it, they're disintegrating because of questioning the Word of God. If you don't believe the Bible is the final authority, then you can accept transgenderism, you can accept radical feminism. You can accept transgenderism. You can accept radical feminism. You can accept LGBTQ. You can accept all of these unscriptural beliefs. And because of that, the denomination has accepted homosexual clergy. None of them are gay. That word gay is not true. They're not gay, they're not happy, or fulfilled.
Speaker 3:You can be a homosexual and be a pastor of a UMC church. Now they approve same-sex marriages and because of that, those who really believe the Word of God have found themselves without a church.
Speaker 2:That's right, and they are abandoning the United Methodist Church in droves.
Speaker 3:In droves the local churches. Many of them have said we will not go that way. But wait a minute. They don't call their pastors and they don't own their property. That's right. So in 2023, the United Methodist Church allowed churches a brief period of time where they could what they called it disfellowship or disaffiliate from the national body, but they had to pay for that building. They had to go. It was a great expense and so most of them could not. Here's people I know, precious brothers and sisters, that, oh, they don't want to be a part of that, but they have no say in it whatsoever.
Speaker 2:And they didn't have financial resources to buy the building that they had attended all their lives.
Speaker 3:Exactly right. So now they're left out of the open, thank God. Every local church, every local church makes its own decision, calls its own pastor, owns its own property, and the whole purpose is so we can cooperate together to fulfill what Jesus told us to do before he left.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's exactly right To go and make disciples of all the nations.
Speaker 3:I think the three things that hold Southern Baptists together today are gospel centrality, doctrinal fidelity and missional urgency.
Speaker 2:I like that, that's true.
Speaker 3:Gospel centrality, I mean nothing. Nothing is more important to us than giving the gospel to people who do not know Jesus Christ.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:Every person needs the opportunity to hear the good news that you don't have to be separated from him forever. There is a way for you to come back together with God, and that is only through Jesus Christ alone, through faith alone. Gospel centrality, that's what moves us and that's held together by a doctrinal fidelity that we must believe that the Bible is the final authority, that every word in the Bible is true and therefore we accept it as true. Whether I like it or not, it's what God says is true.
Speaker 3:And then that missional urgency. Oh man, we are still. 4.6 billion people around this world have not heard the gospel of Jesus Christ. Over 3.5 billion people have never, ever heard of Jesus. We've got to get the gospel of Jesus Christ. Over three and a half billion people have never, ever heard of Jesus. We've got to get the gospel to them as soon as possible. That's the urgency of it. Every day, 174,000 people go into an eternity without Jesus Christ every day. That's why, arguing over space or little issues that really are peripheral matters, gospel centrality is what matters. Okay, I didn't mean to preach, but that's—.
Speaker 2:Well, brother, you're singing my song. That's my heartbeat, you know, that's it. I get so perturbed over little issues that people get upset about when I know what you just said is true. Yes, that people get upset about when I know what you just said is true 174,000 people go into eternity without Christ every day. And I know Christian people are upset because the pews are too hard or the preacher preached too long. That's right. That's right. And my heart is breaking over the fact that people I know in India, people I know in Mexico, have gone today into a Christless eternity. And yet folks here in America are upset because the preacher preached past 12 o'clock, or the pews are too hard or the temperature's just not right.
Speaker 2:And I'm just like, give me a break, guys Give me a break, and so I understand that missional urgency. Go ahead, brother, go ahead.
Speaker 3:Dr Jackson, regardless of what people read in the headlines. I was there. I've been going to Southern Baptist Convention since 1979. And I can tell you, I think, four words. Our executive committee president said it the best, and these four words really characterize Southern Baptist Commission. Somebody asks you hey, what's going on in the Southern Baptist Commission? Tell them four words the mission matters most. That's right. That's exactly right. The mission matters. These are the things. It's not that they don't matter, but it's what matters most is the mission. Yeah, exactly hey. Southern Baptist Convention will not last in eternity. No convention, no denomination. No, it's not going to last. The kingdom of our Lord and of His Son, jesus Christ, that kingdom is an everlasting kingdom. That's what we need to be hitching our wagons to. It will last forever, it will. So not only going there ourself, but telling other people and trying to bring them to the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2:All right, now our time is running out, michael, and I want to ask you one last question, but we're not going to discuss it today, because I'm going to devote an entire podcast to this issue, probably in a week or two. But the convention voted something about in vitro fertilization. What was that about? And just keep it brief.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it was a resolution which is non-binding at all.
Speaker 3:Yeah it was a resolution, which is non-binding at all. All it did was condemn any use of IVF technology that would destroy a human life. We want to be consistent with the Word of God, believing that all life begins at the moment of conception. Therefore, any process that would destroy any kind of a human life in order to do good, you do bad. You will be cautious about that. The resolution simply said we were asking our people to advocate for the government to restrain actions that are inconsistent with the value of every human being being important.
Speaker 2:I hear you Well and I'm going to discuss that in a future podcast, because there are benefits and goods that accrue to my patients with in vitro fertilization and it's not that the convention or myself, as a pro-life physician, would condemn in vitro fertilization convention or myself, as a pro-life physician, would condemn in vitro fertilization.
Speaker 3:Oh no.
Speaker 2:There are practices associated with IVF that are antithetical to the pro-life position and I want my listeners to understand what those practices are, such as selective reduction and such as the freezing of embryos indefinitely, and those are practices that go along with in vitro fertilization. I don't have time to explain those today, but I want my listeners to understand that I'm going to go into that in depth in a future podcast, so you will understand what are the practices associated with in vitro fertilization that are not consistent with a pro-life position. So we'll save that for another day. And, dr Clora, I want to thank you for helping us to understand a little bit about the Southern Baptist Convention, how it operates, what happened at the convention in Indianapolis, and I appreciate all of your keen insights.
Speaker 3:Thank, you, Dr Jackson, for allowing me to be a part of this. I look forward to hearing you talk about the IVF.
Speaker 2:All right. Well, thank you, brother, and God bless you, and you're listening to More Than Medicine. I'm your host, dr Robert Jackson. My guest today is Dr Michael Clore, my very, very good friend. Thank you, and the Lord bless you and we'll see you at another podcast. Good friend, thank you and the Lord bless you. We'll see you at another podcast.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to this edition of More Than Medicine. For more information about the Jackson Family Ministry, dr Jackson's books, or to schedule a speaking engagement, go to their Facebook page, instagram or their webpage at jacksonfamilyministrycom. This podcast is produced by Bob Sloan Audio Production at bobsloancom.
