Being a baptist seminary student from Georgia, I get a copy of the bi-weekly copy of the Christian Index, a newspaper that the Georgia Baptist Convention puts out (I’m not sure what purpose these state papers really serve, to be honest…. they were a big deal 100 years ago). I flipped through it and was struck by the opening lines of an article about a retiring SBC mega-church pastor:
“Ginger Hall has been a member of Bellevue Baptist Church for 26 years. She’s spoken to her pastor, Adrian Rogers, and shaken his hand, exactly twice.”
There’s just a part of me that feels really funny about that whole idea. I’m not necessarily opposed to big churches, but they can reach a certain point that it gets silly. The story indicates that this particular church has 29,000 members (though, let’s be honest, if they are a typical baptist church their attendance is WAY south of that number…. which is backwards if you ask me).
How can one man be a pastor to that many people?
Who shepherds Ginger Hall? In some churches, hopefully, there would be a number of pastors/elders so there would be a better chance at a relationship somewhere in there. But at 29,000 even that sounds unlikely. Why not plant a church?
What are your thoughts?