“Lousy Trade”
by Rev. W. Allen Thomason,
Pastor of the Chesterfield Baptist Church in Chesterfield, SC

You have probably heard the account of the Native Americans selling the island of Manhattan to the white man for a string of shells and beads. Now that was a bad trade. I think there is another bad trade that is being offered to us. It’s a trade that’s so bad it makes the Manhattan Island swap look like the time you traded your Phil Neikro baseball card for your buddy’s Twinkie in elementary school. The scary part is that it looks like we are being taken for suckers in a lousy trade with no less than eternal consequences.

Do you remember when you heard this for the first time: “Even if it is just one soul that is saved, it’s worth it?” We have always heard it and can’t remember a time when we didn’t hear it or say it ourselves. All of us as Baptists have heard this and recited it like it was our mantra. “Even if just one soul is saved, all our efforts are worth it.” It has always been there. “If just one is saved…”

This underscores two important elements of our Baptist theology: first, the importance of getting the gospel to those who have not heard it, and second, the priority of missions above all our other combined efforts. Nothing is more important than getting the gospel to those who have not heard. We cannot know the value of our efforts to bring the gospel to the lost, because the value is eternal in nature. We can’t grasp the full affect of what one saved soul might become in God’s scheme of things.

You and I know Jesus Christ because someone else told us, because someone else told them, etc. Take out that one person, that one link in the chain, and the rest of the chain falls apart, including us.

That is exactly what happens when someone fails to share the gospel with someone else. “Even if only one soul is saved…” is sound theology that takes the realities of Heaven and Hell very seriously, makes ministry worth it to those of us who do it, and it is as sound a doctrine as you can find in all the mainline Protestant denominations.

It’s nice to have big numbers to justify a missions effort and expense. In our culture big numbers translate to big success. But if we forget that the soul of just one person is worth it all, then we lose our theological foundation for what we do and why we do it. There simply is no conceivable understanding of a place, situation or scenario where not sending the gospel of Christ is an acceptable option.

So when did we lose track of that? Maybe you have heard, maybe not, but the International Mission Board (IMB) is pulling some of its missionaries off the mission field. It’s not for their protection. It’s not the choice of the missionaries. It is because these particular missionaries will not sign the Baptist Faith and Message 2000 (BFM2000) or a document of affirmation of the BFM2000. They are being fired because they will not sign a creed. Baptists have always been non-creedal people saying, “We will have no creed but the Bible.”

No man made document can take the place of the Bible. But somehow, the leaders of our denomination have placed the BFM2000 above the Bible in order of authority. How can the leaders of the SBC take missionaries off the field? Isn’t this backwards? Isn’t this throwing the “missions vehicle” into reverse?

Evidentially, making the employees of the SBC accountable to the BFM2000 is more important to the leaders of the SBC than getting the gospel of Christ to people that have never heard it. No SBC leader can be taken seriously if he says, “Just one soul is worth it all.” That’s contradictory to their actions. It flies in the face of what they have done.

“Come on, preacher,” you might be thinking. “President Rankin of the IMB says that over 99% of the missionaries are ‘OK’ with the BFM2000.” Even if his figures are correct, anything less than 100% is a failure in terms of the Kingdom of God.

Nothing justifies using the BFM2000 to pull missionaries off the field. Why is that one particular soul that was once so valuable and worth all our effort now so easily dismissed by the IMB president as insignificant where the BFM2000 is concerned?

Each and every missionary pulled off the field means that someone somewhere won’t be coming to Christ that otherwise would. Pulling Chris and Karen Harbin out of Brazil, where they have worked with Gaucho people for seven years, will mean that fewer Gaucho people come to Christ. So please, don’t talk to me about the need to hold the missionaries accountable to the new BFM2000 unless you’re ready to explain to me why it’s worth keeping someone from knowing Jesus. Explain that to me and then we can talk.

The BFM2000 in exchange for souls? Is that really a trade we are willing to make?

April 2003