The Table Is Wider Than You Think
For anyone who has served long enough in a church that no one writes articles about, an often unspoken suspicion tends to take root: that the big decisions belong to the big names, and that the boards, the committees, and the entities get filled by the well-connected, the ones with platforms and the right friends in the right rooms. Your church is faithful but small, your work real but local, and the machinery of the Convention, whatever it happens to be doing, seems to be doing it somewhere you will never be. It is an understandable suspicion, and on close inspection it is also an untrue one.
You can watch it come apart in the most ordinary of places. Consider a single county in the northeast corner of Florida, Nassau County, a stretch of congregations that resemble the churches found in most Southern Baptist associations and networks: led by faithful pastors and laypeople, giving their lives to the gospel where God has planted them. Nothing about the county is remarkable, which is precisely what makes it worth a closer look.
In a single span of Convention life, believers from a handful of those churches were entrusted with stewardship across the state, national, and international dimensions of Southern Baptist work. Melody Lee, a layperson at First Baptist Church of Gray Gables, was recently seated on the SBC Executive Committee, the body that acts for the Convention between its annual meetings and stewards the cooperative gifts Southern Baptists send for missions and ministry. Ryan Mason, pastor of First Baptist Church Hilliard, was elected a trustee of the International Mission Board, where he helps govern the sending of missionaries to the nations. Cody Page, pastor of First Baptist Gray Gables, most recently served on the Committee on Nominations, which reviews and recommends to the messengers the very trustees and committee members who steward the Convention’s entities. And Adam Page, pastor of Amelia Baptist Church, served on the Committee on Committees and now serves on the Florida Baptist State Board of Missions.
Among them are a layperson, two pastors of normative-size churches, and one who leads a medium-size church, none of them household names and all of them from a county most Southern Baptists will never visit; and yet they are in the room and have seats at the table.
Take a moment to slow down and see that getting people into those seats is not, in itself, the mission of the local church; it is one of the mechanisms by which a local Southern Baptist church remains a means to the mission. Every Southern Baptist entity, and every committee beneath it, exists to serve something prior to itself, whether that is sending missionaries, stewarding cooperative money, voicing the churches’ convictions, or strengthening congregations. The seat is a stewardship assignment in service of the mission, “Go and make disciples” (Matthew 28:19); it is never the mission itself.
Mason, newly elected to the IMB board, framed his own seat in just those terms. Serving as a trustee for “the mission organization I grew up learning about,” he called the role “a tremendous privilege to not only represent Southern Baptist churches across the country, but to also ensure the International Mission Board continues to faithfully steward resources entrusted to it as it advances the mission of making disciples of all nations.”
If the trustee’s seat looks outward to the nations, the layperson’s looks back toward the pew, and Lee said it better than any committee report could. Lay members “are represented on the boards of the convention,” she noted, “but that is only a reflection of the work in local churches.” She went further: “While we won’t all be employed in vocational ministry, every believer has a vital role in fulfilling the Great Commission.”
That is the truth the suspicion most significantly misses. No congregation surrenders its autonomy in order to cooperate, and no convention rules over the churches; the Executive Committee itself, for all its responsibility, does not direct the various agencies’ work. The numbers tell against the rumor of a closed circle: the Executive Committee seats 86 representatives chosen from qualified states and regions, and the committees that recommend the Convention’s trustees draw two members from every qualified state, so that no region, however prominent, can crowd out another. Autonomous local churches send their people to hold these stewardships on behalf of the whole, and the fellowship then moves as one, by the corporate sense of the Spirit’s leading; the arrangement works only because ordinary churches, local expressions of the beloved bride of Christ, are willing to offer their members to it.
Nor is that offering screened by prominence and platform, as the people who do the work readily attest. Cody Page described the nominating process as “much more rigorous than many assume,” and said the committee “spends months prayerfully evaluating candidates” whose aim, he said, “isn’t to reward insiders but to help the churches place faithful stewards in positions of trust.” Adam Page put the same conviction another way, observing that at its best the SBC “is still a genuine fellowship of churches, not just a platform for the well-connected.” For anyone who has assumed otherwise, the picture is worth holding still: the process is not rigged but rigorous, and not closed but waiting.
All of which turns the question back toward you, the reader, wherever you serve. The table is wider than the fog of your current circumstances lets you believe, and it is not reserved for the prominent; it bends toward the faithful, and toward the churches willing to send them. Your size is no disqualification and your zip code no ceiling, for somewhere in your own pews is a faithful, capable believer whom God may be preparing for a stewardship no one has yet imagined, and the only thing standing between that believer and the table may be a leader willing to believe it and to say their name out loud.
None of this, of course, is a finish line. The committees will keep meeting, the missionaries will still need support, the churches at home will still need strengthening, and the lost will still need to be reached; a seat is not an arrival but an assignment. Still, it is worth giving thanks, and worth telling, for when ordinary churches send willing servants into the shared work, something quietly beautiful comes into view: not the triumph of a place, but the health of a process built to receive whoever will serve faithfully, often without recognition. It is happening in one unremarkable county, and it can happen in yours.
Originally published at StrategicOutsider.com. Chris Reinolds, Mission Strategist, writes The Strategic Outsider, a publication for pastors, network leaders, churches, and those who serve them.