Church planter and pastor Cameron Triggs became familiar with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) while serving under such SBC stalwarts as H.B. Charles and J.D. Greear.
Three years after planting Grace Alive in Orlando through the North American Mission Board’s Send Network, Triggs encountered at the 2022 SBC annual meeting “Navigating the SBC,” a new resource from the SBC Executive Committee (EC).
“I think it’s a great apologetic for pastors to use on why we cooperate with the Southern Baptist Convention,” Triggs told Baptist Press (BP), “and I also think it simplifies the complexity for your typical lay member to understand the great landscape of what the Southern Baptist Convention is.”
Triggs describes Navigating the SBC as a great resource to help church planters and lay members learn how the SBC advances the Kingdom.
“It’s been a great resource for us, and we’ve been utilizing it to give to other church planters to learn about the SBC and to help our members as well to learn about the SBC and the many various capacities that it helps to advance the Kingdom,” Triggs told BP.
“I was quite aware of it,” he said of the SBC’s structure, protocol and heartbeat. “I think what (Navigating the SBC) helped do was to systematize the complexity. And it also made it very simple to actually share the teaching of what the SBC is as well.
“In explanation, I think it’s hard to get all those intricacies across to different people, because there are so many different entities. I also think the resource itself provides a visual guide that I think is helpful for many people to understand in a shorter process.”
SBC EC executive Charles Grant, who compiled Navigating the SBC as a collaborative work to help mobilize the SBC’s ethnic diversity in cooperative ministry, has found the resource attractive to the full spectrum of SBC life.
“What was the clincher, that I needed to do this for everyone, not just the ethnic groups, was when I got feedback from an associational missionary who said there’s a need to train pastors (of all ethnicities) in our association,” said Grant, SBC EC executive director of African American relations and mobilization.
“I believe there is evidence of it being received well on various levels, from pastors all the way to the state conventions,” Grant said, “and even more recently, new EC members as a part of their orientation.”
Navigating the SBC, originally launched at the 2022 SBC annual meeting, continues to garner positive feedback from pastors and leaders utilizing the resource in training and in personal edification, Grant said.
Available online at sbc.net, the 32-page publication expounds on navigating the SBC foundationally, structurally, cooperatively, beneficially and practically.
“Southern Baptist churches, Great Commission Baptist churches, must also learn to effectively navigate the SBC so we can achieve greater participation, representation, articulation and celebration from every nation, tribe, people and tongue in our Convention,” Grant wrote in the publication’s introduction. “As a result, the SBC will realize a closer alignment to that perfect image in heaven – a people of every nation, tribe, people, and language standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”
Navigating the SBC is designed to help pastors and church members better understand the value the SBC brings to Great Commission work.
“Overall, the end game is so everyone, from the entire multiethnicity of the SBC, will be able to have a voice and engage the structure on equal footing,” Grant told BP.
Triggs, who planted Grace Alive in 2017, previously served three years in student ministry at Shiloh Metropolitan Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Fla., and completed a nine-month church planting internship at The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, N.C.
Triggs expresses gratitude for the SBC.
“I appreciate the camaraderie and encouragement that they have within the system, and also I’m grateful for an opportunity to be able to give back, because it’s not just about us reaping the benefits,” he said. “It also gives us a platform to continue to plant more churches as well.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE – Diana Chandler is Baptist Press’ senior writer.)
