by Keith Bassham
Last spring, my wife and I bought a nearly new car, and for the first time in a long time, we drive a vehicle manufactured in the current decade. One thing that drew me to the car is all the technology. I can receive reports from all the major internal components, including the news that one or more of my tires needs inflating. I can also turn my car into a gigantic smart phone (albeit an expensive one) and get traffic reports or directions to destinations, and of course make phone calls. Once, I asked the car to generate a status report and to communicate the results to my email. Within a minute or so I received an email telling me my fuel level was low.
Obviously, I am no Luddite, but I do have a healthy distrust of overly complicated systems, and that includes the high-tech features in my car. All those screens and lights and flashy digital add-ons will not comfort me the day I put my key in the ignition and the thing does not start and take me where I need to go. The fact is, I would prefer my high school ride, a 1963 Falcon that started and went down the road (pretty fast as a matter of fact), to any 21st century techno-marvel that couldn’t get out of the driveway.
Simply stated, I appreciate things that work.
This issue of the Tribune is illustrative of how the different components of the Baptist Bible Fellowship work. In these pages, you will see local churches, pastors, missionaries, and Fellowship agencies and personnel, all working together to change large chunks of the present world, and preparing people for the world to come.
There may be some other organization out there more cool, or more jazzy, or more techno-savvy, but in the past 60 some-odd years we have demonstrated that plain men and women, motivated by the Spirit and trained in the Word of God, can work together with others within the context of a fairly simple organization to plant churches worldwide and train Christian workers. For sure there have been tweaks and missteps (sometimes the tweaks were the missteps), but the basic structures and ideals remain intact.
This was brought home to me again when I recently addressed some pastors in the Kansas BBF about our Fellowship’s history. Reading back through the documents and the organizational records, it appears our founders were asking, “How can we evangelize the most people and best preserve the results, while allowing for the widest participation possible with the leanest of organizational overhead?” Now, I cannot prove anyone actually voiced that question, but the organization they came up with, the Baptist Bible Fellowship, is surely the answer to that question, if it had been asked.
This month our Fellowship will assemble in the heart of Texas to reaffirm our commitment to the ideals of our founders, and, I hope, to seek out ways we can work together better than ever.