During his last address as the president of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Bart Barber took the majority of his time to “preach.” Tuesday morning, Barber exhorted attendees of the SBC annual meeting in Indianapolis to pursue unity and to bear with one another’s weaknesses.
Bart Barber: ‘May God Give Us the Strength’
Southern Baptist Convention delegates, who are called messengers, will elect a new president of the convention Tuesday evening, choosing from among six candidates: David Allen, Bruce Frank, Mike Keahbone, Jared Moore, Clint Pressley and Dan Spencer.
In comments to the SBC’s Executive Committee (EC) Monday morning, Barber, who is the pastor of First Baptist Church in Farmersville, Texas, said people have frequently asked if he is counting down the moments till his tenure as SBC president is over. Barber said that, on the contrary, he is deeply grateful for his time as president of the SBC.
“It’s been a great joy and honor to serve you over the past two years,” Barber said at the beginning of his speech Tuesday, where he sought to rally attendees to tackle various tasks at hand for the convention. “Roll up your sleeves, messengers…Our workload is big, but our God is bigger.”
However, the most important tasks “are not the things that you’re all wondering how the votes are going to turn out today,” Barber said. “God’s got bigger things than that.” He celebrated that last year SBC churches saw a 26% increase in baptisms even while he exhorted Southern Baptists to rise to the challenge of discipling new believers.
Among the challenges Southern Baptists are facing is the convention’s sexual abuse crisis. “Abuse prevention is an ongoing war with predators who are studying and seeking to circumvent everything that we put up in place to deter them,” Barber said. “We must remain vigilant.”
Problems that still need to be addressed in this area include making it possible for churches to warn one another about predators. Barber also said that the solutions that have already been adopted will need to be adapted in the future. He returned to the subject of missions, emphasizing how much local churches benefit from the SBC’s support and resources when these churches want to send out missionaries.
“The health of this convention is a thermometer of the health of our churches,” Barber stated. “I don’t believe there’s a problem we ever face that we can’t solve more efficiently when our churches are more healthy, because the condition of our churches percolates up into this convention.”
“One important ingredient of our health,” he continued, “is our ability to cooperate with one another.”
