This week I want to take a brief moment to ask you to pray for our Southern Baptist Convention. As you read this Tracy and I will be in Indianapolis with 8-10,000 other Southern Baptists who will convene for the first part of the week to help provide direction for our convention through the next year. Many people ask me why I go and why I remain involved in SBC life when so many SBC pastors across our denomination are removing themselves from denominational life? I think that's a fair question and one I would like to answer for you.

First, I remain committed to being involved because our denomination, which admittedly has plenty of problems, continues to remain the most faithful at honoring biblical principles of any and all denominations that I know of, at least in my opinion. Beyond that, however, the argument could be made that denominations are not necessary. We could just go off and do our own thing. While I understand that thought and have heard it plenty of times, I continue to remain committed to SBC life because I believe that we are much stronger together than we could ever be on our own. If we were to take, for instance, our entire financial investment that we send to the Missouri Baptist Convention and Southern Baptist Convention and used it for our own personal missions efforts we would have enough to possibly support two families overseas. As it is, however, because of the genius of our Cooperative Program we are able to partner with other Southern Baptists from around the country and help support a missions force that numbers over 5,500 here in North America and adds another 5,500 missionaries around the world. The greatest reason I love our Southern Baptist Convention is because we have created such a phenomenal mechanism to fund, support and engage in missions. In my opinion this is the single greatest reason to be a Southern Baptist and to be proud of our denomination.

So this week is extremely important as we work with other Southern Baptists to sharpen our denomination and attempt to help insure that we will be faithful to scripture and successful in evangelism for years and years to come. This meeting should be a difficult one in some respects. For instance we got word last month that for the first time our denomination is in decline, numerically. As a body we need to address this issue, among others. This week is always a very, very busy one for me so I also would appreciate you praying for Tracy and I as we work all week in meetings.

I love being your pastor and I'm thankful for what God is doing among our church. Continue to be faithful this week and ask yourself how you can be more effective at helping "Reach, Teach and Unleash committed followers of Jesus Christ" this week.

I'll see you soon!