We follow Jesus' teaching that we should love our neighbor. That may mean serving meals during times of disaster, or meeting the medical challenges of HIV/AIDS, or showing compassion to those in prison, or repairing a home. It always means offering a message of forgiveness and hope only found in Jesus. He makes the difference.

It is possible that this is only a gimmick designed to show Southern Baptists in a better light, but I think it also may be a sign that there are tensions within the Southern Baptist Convention between the traditional proponents for evangelism and church growth and the newer focus on political involvement. Even though fundamentalists are in control of the SBC, this does not mean that all Southern Baptist leaders are in agreement with the explicitly political direction that has been pushed on them through their more visible leaders like Richard Land, Russell Moore and Al Mohler.

There seems to be a renewed interest in evangelism in the SBC and what this might indicate is a shift of emphasis from being an aggressive and politicized cultural warrior towards being a gentler missionary with a more spiritualized message.

John Avant, vice president for evangelism at the SBC's North American Mission Board, expresses this evangelistic spirit when he writes:

I have almost decided not to read the newspaper or watch the news during the Southern Baptist Convention. I cringe every time the headlines make us sound like a marching horde of hate-mongers. I worry that our negative publicity may make it more difficult for the churches to do evangelism once we are gone.

And it bothers me that we bring some of this on ourselves. We sometimes manage to sound as if we are at war with lost people rather than in love with them. Matthew tells us that when Jesus saw the lost world He was sick with compassion for them (9:36). We, on the other hand, just seem sick of them. Wouldn't it be something if one year all of our motions and resolutions had to do with how we will love, serve and share Good News with homosexuals, abortionists, politicians and public schools instead of how to oppose them?

Avant continues these ideas in his Baptist Press column of this week:

It continues to be the stunning truth that most Christians never share their faith and don't see this as a major problem. As a result, our churches are filled with people who think they are there to get their needs met, rather than to be launched as missionaries. More often it means that our churches just aren't filled with anyone at all. The greatest need for repentance in the church today is not for sexual sin, gossip or greed. It is for allowing people all around us to go to hell while we ignore them and spend all our time with Christians "growing deeper." We don't need to be any deeper than Jesus who loved tax collectors, sinners, adulterers and lepers and rebuked religious people who kept their distance from them.

John Avant's daughter, Christi Avant, also expresses this new positive outlook. She titles her Baptist Press essay, I am gay-friendly.