What do you think when you hear "Southern Baptist?"

Last month Thom Rainer, president and chief executive of Lifeway Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention, conducted an informal, WAAYYYYY UNscientific survey on Twitter asking people what word came to mind they heard "Southern Baptist." Their answers had to be short. The image above represents a summary of the answers he received.

This picture is called a "wordle." It is a visual representation of the number of times a given word is used in a block of text. The larger the word the more often it is used. So, if you were to wordle the Bible, the biggest words you would see (besides "a" and "the") would be "God" and "Holy" etc. 

Anyway, I think it is very interesting that 60% of the respondents had something negative to say, 30% had something positive to say, and 10% said who-knows-what. This is very un-accurate, but helpful in a number of ways. 

The most common response (the largest word) is "legalism." That's what many of the "Twitter generation" think of my denomination. This is a generation that is relatively young and probably somewhat immature in their faith, yet their perception of us as a whole is that we are legalistic, that when we say we love God with all our hearts, all we are doing is saying it... we don't mean it. That is scary.

The good news is that the second largest word is "missions." That's good! That means that the SBC is still strongly identified with the Gospel, right? Well, the only problem with that is whether or not they mean missions the way the SBC means missions. REAL missions is about the gospel of Jesus Christ, but good luck finding 'gospel' 'Jesus' or Christ' in that little picture up there. Oh they are there, but you just about need a microscope to see them. 

So, what does the next generation of Southern Baptists think of us??? Not very much. I don't know if they are not paying attention to what we are teaching them or if they are actually paying TOO MUCH attention to what we modeling for them, but it is clear that we Southern Baptists need to do better about getting the gospel out. 

This summer we will be learning how to share our faith on Sunday nights at our church. I know that summer is a time when we usually have better things to do than go to church on Sunday nights, but this is so important... important enough to sacrifice other things for.  I pray that we will be faithful to the mission Christ gave his Church and that the SBC will experience a Great Commission Resurgence.