I had a stepfather who worked for a heating and air company in Greenville, South Carolina. The motto for that company was “D.I.R.T. F.T.”—meaning “Do It Right The First Time.” I would submit to you that we will have to make some hard decisions at this week’s meeting of General Synod. We are facing these hard decisions because we did not “Do It Right TheFirst Time.” We have not managed our pension plan well over the past thirty years. As a result, we now have $13,000,000 of unfunded liabilities. We have not evangelized the lost as we should. We have not planted Confessionally Reformed Churches in America and throughout the world as we should. As a result, our denomination is in a state of decline. We now boast some 22,000 members as of the end of 2019. We once recorded 35,000 members just around ten years ago. These financial and spiritual trends must be reversed before it’s too late. We have an opportunity at General Synod this week to repent and dedicate ourselves to glorifying the Lord through our denomination. Let’s do it right at this Synod.
What does faithfulness look like for our Synod in 2020? Before laying out some of the practical steps that we must take, let’s first see how we could fail to it right at this Synod. We will fail to do the right thing if we prefer to take the easy way out. Dealing with a financial crisis after a decade of declining membership is not a desirable situation. We will not get our denomination out of our spiritual and economic malaise by taking the path of least resistance. Instead, we must all dedicate ourselves to doing whatever it takes to get ourselves out of this decline.
We will fail to do the right thing if we are content with mediocrity as a denomination. I just read an article that reported the average rate of success for Southern Baptist church plants. The Southern Baptist planted 943 churches in 2010. Of those 943 churches, 757 were still in existence three years later. By my estimation, that gives Southern Baptist church plants an 80% survival rate (and their current numbers suggest this pattern has held for them through 2020). What do you think the success rate is for our ARP church plants? I would suspect it is nowhere near 80%. We must rise above mediocrity and commit ourselves to do whatsoever we do with excellence. Only by giving our best to the Lord will be glorifying Him in our labors as a denomination.
What hard choices should our Synod make? What does excellence look like for our Synod? Let me suggest the following four items for us to accomplish this week.
1. Let’s Avoid Pietistic Obfuscation and Embrace Godly Effort. Some will say we should deal with this crisis by merely waiting upon the Lord and praying. As pious as that sounds, I would submit to you that it is not Biblical. God calls on us to pray without ceasing. Yea, and amen!God also calls on us to work for the sake of the Kingdom. We should follow Paul’s example and labor harder than the rest for the sake of Christ. We are taught by the Lord to pray for our daily bread. Yet we are also commanded in the Fourth Commandment to labor six days a week for our daily bread. Let’s not leave Synod with a commitment to pray without any plan or action. Let’s leave Synod with a plan for action that we will pray for fervently over the next year.
2. Let’s Avoid Hypocrisy in our Financial Policies. If you are an elder in your church, I’m sure you’ve had to counsel parishioners who are in financial chaos. You have probably had to tell married couples in the counseling room that they have to live within their means by cutting out everything from their budget but the essentials and reallocating all available monies to pay their debts. Let’s avoid hypocrisy. Let’s live by the same rules as a Synod that we tell our people to live by in theirpersonal financial life. Let’s accept the Stewardship Committee's proposed DMF allocations and reallocate our Synod assets to pay our denomination’s one financial obligation: the retirement of our ARP pastor’s and their widows.
3. Let’s Establish a Confessional Approach to our Synod. What does our Confession of Faith have to say about our retirement woes or our agency structure? Much in every way. Westminster Confession of Faith 31.3 explains the duties of Synods and Councils. The Confession does not mention retirement plans. That’s because Scripture commands that churches should provide for their ministers, not a Synod or council. Our Synod should only undertake what God has commanded, called, and gifted our Synod to do. Of the many things the Confession says our Synod should be doing, running retirement plans and interpreting actuarial reports are not among those duties. Let’s put our Synod on a trajectory where the Synod will slowly get out of the retirement plan business by devolving the responsibility to provide for retirement to Churches and ministers. Let’s give churches whose ministers are not in the Synod’s defined benefit plan freedom to provide for their minister’s retirement as they see fit. The same goes for our agency structure. Let’s restructure our agencies so that the work of our Synod lines up with our Confession of Faith. Let’s reduce our overhead by going to a committee structure instead of a board structure. Only then will we be able todedicate more of our DMF to ministry instead of bureaucratic overhead.
4. Let’s Do What Our Actuary Advises. The Synod has retained professional actuaries to help us manage our pension funds. Our actuary has told us that we need to put $5,500,000 in the pension plan if we keep our contribution rate at 12%. Since we are not planning on raising our contribution rate, we must put in no less than what our actuary requires. $3,000,000 is not enough. We have no hope of resolving our financial crisis if we refuse to take our actuary's advice. I and others raised this point in a meeting with the Blue Ribbon Committee,and no one on the committee disagreed with our actuary's advice. Let’s meet our financial woes with full resolve to do what is needed to fix our problem. Let’s authorize at least $5,500,000 to be reallocated to stabilize our pension fund.