After arriving at FBC, Russellville, KY, my pastor expressed a desire to ignore convention politics and focus on the local church. As burned out as I was on the hurtful things within the convention, I adopted this policy for my own.

I won’t give you the blow by blow of the last eleven years. It was normal ministry with ups and downs. We saw some folks accept Christ and that was so great. There were times when things just didn’t seem to work right. Looking back at those times, I see the deep marks God made on my life through them.

Suffice it to say that I stayed away from conventions unless I had to go. I worked within my Association, serving on the Youth Committee and as that committee’s chair, sometimes. I also worked with the Kentucky Baptist Youth Ministries Association in an effort to network youth workers. I was privileged to serve in several positions in that organization, including as its president.

I was happy to let those who wanted to run the convention do it without any direction from me, and with my pastor saying similar things, I went to very little of the KBC annual meetings and absolutely none of the SBC annual meetings. I even avoided SBC meetings in Nashville(I think there were two) even though they were an hour away and I could easily have just driven down.

In January of this year, I read an article in the Western Recorder, our state’s Baptist Paper that told about Wade Burleson and that the IMB had made the unprecedented move to ask the SBC to remove him. The article listed Burleson’s blog address, so I went there and began to read. The more I read, the more I was troubled. It seemed that we were beginning to isolate ourselves to, what I perceived to be, extreme degrees.

I saw the line as partially generational and partially power structure oriented. I began, at first, to write posts on Wade’s blog and then branched to Marty Duren’s blog. People began to click on my name and found my blog. My readership went from 0 to about 50 during January.

I won’t go through the whole process of my blog’s growth for you. It would probably somewhat tedious. The last week I have averaged over 1,000 hits per day.

During that time, I began to contact IMB Trustees and some other SBC folks. I wrote opinion pieces that praised some things and critiqued others.

Within me, the conviction began to build that the SBC was moving in the wrong direction and I needed to do something. In April, I was invited to a meeting in Memphis. I put it on my calendar. I wanted to DO something. January was like a spark and the four months following had fanned the flame.

The week prior to the Memphis Summit, the question began to roll around my head, “What can we actually DO?”

Many of you have read the “SBC Primer” series I did about the ins and outs of the convention process. Having studied the By-Laws and some other convention documents through that process I had come to a singular understanding.

For us to challenge for control of the convention, either one of two things was going to have to happen. Since the SBC is a bottom-up organization in every area except the Presidential appointment process, either we had to challenge the “kingmakers” for the Presidency – effectively using their own strategy against them – or we would have to ask the convention to restructure the process so that the appointment process was removed from the president.

I was against the resurgence model of Presidential election in Memphis and vocalized a plan that someone else had mentioned on the internet to move the appointment process to the states. No one tried to rally behind a candidate, but the plan I mentioned had holes in it. The state convention process is more political than some of the national processes, apparently. So we came to the crux of the matter.

We wanted to attempt neither political agenda, but we wanted some things. We wanted to co-operate with other Christians. We wanted to get rid of caucusing. We wanted to point toward the goal of reaching people to Christ – both of our own culture and its subcultures, and the cultures of those around the world.

We decided to simply put forth a Declaration that would point toward the goal and do nothing else.

With that said, in my next post (later today, probably), I will explain how the points of the Memphis Declaration are relevant to my life – since you now understand a little more about me.

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