Yogi Berra in his playing days

Something tells me that Yogi Berra may not be following the Great Commission Resurgence discussion in Southern Baptist life these days but one of his oft quoted malapropisms is certainly an appropriate one for the current conversation –  “It’s deja vu all over again.”  Because of the strong involvement and encouragement of young leaders in this important conversation, many may think that the ideas being expressed and the rhetoric being used is fresh and new. A look at Baptist history surrounding the adoption of the Cooperative Program, however, shows that the current discussion is really the continuation of one that is now more than 90 years old.

I say ”more than 90″ because you can easily take the current conversation as far back as 1913 when the Southern Baptist Convention appointed an “Efficiency Committee” to take a look at how Southern Baptists were going about their work. The committee, which was the Great Commission Task Force of its day, reported back to the Convention in 1914 with recommendations on cooperation among the SBC’s three boards — Foreign, Home and Sunday School — and with the state conventions.  The committee also addressed the issues of the collection and division of funds and, in its final report in 1915, even dealt with the question of combining the Home and Foreign Boards. (The committee said this was a bad idea at that time, by the way.)

You might say that Southern Baptists just keep repeating themselves in revisiting the same issues and feel that is a bad thing.  I would make the argument, though, that rather than the length of this discussion being a discouraging sign, it is actually an encouraging one. I say this for two reasons. First, just because something was discussed nearly a century ago doesn’t mean we shouldn’t discuss it now. Circumstances, organizations and generations change and conclusions that made sense at an earlier time may not make sense today. Second, and more importantly, the history is showing that we keep having this conversation because Southern Baptists really love and are committed to missions. I am proud of that continuity. The fact that the reason we want to keep revisiting the way we do things is because we keep wanting to see if there are better ways to obey Jesus’ command to take the gospel everywhere. That’s a very good thing.

It is amazing, however, how similar the discussion then — and especially in the mid 1920s when the Cooperative Program was just getting going — is to the discussion today. I’m going to use the next few posts to revisit this history from a Kentucky context and after seeing some of the quotes from Baptist leaders of the past, I think you’ll agree that the similarities are almost eeriee…kind of like this has all happened before.