FRANKLIN — The next 10 weeks will have a significant impact in the work of Tennessee Baptists for the next 10 years.
Next month, TBMB Board of Directors will gather for their semiannual meeting and one of the items on their agenda will be to review a report on the Acts 2:17 Initiative. The Board will also consider a recommendation from the Budget Committee that will reflect the needed investment in the plan from Convention churches.’
If the report is affirmed by the board, it will then be presented to TBC messengers in November at the 2024 Summit.
Randy C. Davis, president and executive director of the TBMB, has said he believes the Acts 2:17 Initiative “could become the most consequential process in the Tennessee Baptist Convention’s history. ”
The initiative will potentially serve as a roadmap for the Tennessee Baptist Convention’s path in the years ahead. The structure of the initiative was developed through a grassroots campaign that included hearing directly from Tennessee Baptists through a series of listening sessions, surveys, workgroups and other forums.
Randy C. Davis
“The intent of the Acts 2:17 Initiative has been to provide every Tennessee Baptist an opportunity to speak into seeking God’s preferable future for Tennessee Baptists,” said Davis.
In addition to potentially voting on the future of the TBC, messengers at Summit will also be celebrating the past: The annual meeting will be a time of honoring the 150th anniversary of the convention.
Davis said the intersection of the two events — looking back while also looking ahead — will provide a unique and ordained setting.
“We stand at the threshold of a historic moment, and our 150th anniversary gives us the perfect opportunity to replicate the courage of those who have gone before us to find out if God is ready to do a ‘new thing,’ as Isaiah 43:19 says, through Tennessee Baptists,” Davis recently wrote in an editorial for the Baptist and Reflector.
Last November, messengers to the TBC’s annual meeting overwhelmingly endorsed the Acts 2:17 Initiative by voting to approve the overarching structure of the proposed plan. This included the Vision and Priority Statements developed by the Acts 2:17 Task Force, chaired by Jay Hardwick, TBC president and senior pastor of Forest Hills Baptist Church.
Hardwick
Hardwick said the Task Force “drafted a vision that would focus the energy, efforts and resources of the network of Tennessee Baptist churches, Tennessee Baptist Mission Board and the institutions fostered by the Convention into the immediate and extended future of the Convention fol-lowing the 150th anniversary of the TBC in 2024.”
The Acts 2:17 Initiative was launched at the 2022 annual meeting at Bellevue Baptist Church in Cordova, where Ryan Keaton, emerging generations specialist for the TBMB, first presented the proposed project.
The 2022 Summit also featured the first listening sessions, in which messengers were “given the floor” in small-group settings to talk about the challenges, priorities and visions for their individual churches.
The listening sessions were then extended across the state, with more than 30 of the sessions taking place in the early part of 2023. The sessions culminated with a survey of TBC churches — conducted by Lifeway Research on behalf of the Acts 2:17 Initiative Committee — based on the issues that were raised in the sessions.
All told, more than 1,000 Tennessee Baptists were involved with the listening sessions across the state, and more than 500 responded to the survey.
“After hours and hours spent praying and pouring over what we heard and wrestling through the implications, I am thrilled to say that God is giving us a shared vision for the future of our cooperative work in and from Tennessee,” Davis said.
Davis noted that the principle driving the process is to “discover opportunities the Lord has for Tennessee Baptists to seize needs they can meet, and problems they can solve while ‘acting with excellence unto the Lord’ throughout the process and with the vision that is birthed.”
In the days that followed the 2023 Summit, the Acts 2:17 Vision Team was formed, along with workgroups for the project. The workgroups began their duties in January of 2024, and were structured according to priority statements that were grouped into four categories: Fueling Church Collaboration, Catalyzing Spiritual Maturity, Transforming Family Impact and Confronting Mental Health.
After the task force and workgroups completed their assignments, a steering team was appointed and began focusing on more specific aspects of the Initiative.
Davis said he is excited about the future of the Tennessee Baptist Convention. In a recent editorial, he said: “This is our opportunity to reset and reengage our mission field called Tennessee for the good of people and for the glory of God. I strongly encourage you to participate and to commit to passionately pray as we seek God’s preferable future.” B&R
