After a year of introspection and dialog in meetings and in media, and after 2 ½ hours of debate on the convention floor Southern Baptists June 15 adopted the recommendations of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force. Southern Seminary President Al Mohler, a task force member, said passage meant the SBC was “heading toward hope.”

Hope implies expectancy and such an air certainly lightened the footsteps of many at the annual meeting in Orlando. An “expectant” attitude carries enormous potential in any person, or group of persons, that bear it. Every preacher yearns for an expectant congregation. If passage of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force report does nothing else, it infuses the SBC with a sense of expectancy.

Reality can rub the gloss off expectant attitudes and it will likely do no less in the months to come. One reality for Baptists is that the GCR task force recommendations go not to the entities such as the International Mission Board that is to receive more money and have geographical barriers removed from its ministry; nor to the North American Mission Board which is “liberated” from so-called restrictive cooperative agreements with Baptist state conventions so it can plan a national evangelism strategy; nor to state conventions which are being asked to do more with less. No, the recommendations go first to the SBC Executive Committee, which demonstrated during its meetings in Orlando that it is in disarray.

One SBC Executive Committee responsibility is to recommend allocations of the Cooperative Program.

Will an Executive Committee that barely elected the nominee of its own search committee as its new president — criticizing him both because he was on the GCR task force and because he vocally held the task force to follow Convention polity — submit a budget next year in Phoenix that is one-third smaller for itself as the task force recommends? Will an Executive Committee that barely elected a chairman and deadlocked on a vice chairman be able to agree on the far more meaningful and difficult work of presenting a budget that reflects “the will of the messengers” as expressed by the GCR vote?

Though it took a couple long days early in their process for the task force to understand it clearly, their recommendations can be only that — recommendations.

They have no force of law, or of administrative mandate. But they do wield the force of overwhelming affirmation by the messengers gathered in Orlando — who by definition were the Southern Baptist Convention during the time of the meeting. The Executive Committee operates as the SBC between annual meetings.

So, while passage of the GCR generated expectations, several things are working in SBC life to temper those expectations. First among them is the dysfunction of the Executive Committee. Second is an acrid aura of secrecy that surrounds too many actions and belies the very spirit of the GCR recommendations.

While the task force recommends that we commit to truth and unity as core values, it fought hard to bury in secrecy for 15 years the record of its deliberations. Mohler argued that if the convention required the task force to release the recordings of its deliberations the only effect would be to guarantee no future task force would record its deliberations.

To that I ask, “What could Christians who supposedly prayed together constantly and came to love each other like brothers and sisters possibly be saying to and asking of each other that they wouldn’t want their Baptist brethren to know?”

Earlier, despite the passionate plea of Kentucky member Stephen Wilson for openness, the Executive Committee went into executive session to question the nominee of its own search committee for the top SBC administrative position.

Yes, it was a “personnel” matter but it would have been very instructive for all Baptists to have access to the kinds of questioning Frank Page endured during the 90 minutes behind closed doors. It would have illuminated the virus infecting this fractious, powerful committee and sunshine is a great antiseptic.

A third element of this disturbing trend toward secrecy came a week earlier when LifeWay Christian Resources dismissed 26 employees with no announcement.

LifeWay produces the materials many Baptist churches use to teach the Bible.

Its professional employees are the colleagues and classmates of Baptists all over the nation and a significant flush of employees of that volume merits a statement from LifeWay.

Ordinarily, election of a new president merits the main SBC week headline, but the GCR made this an unusual year.

Baptist messengers just can’t seem to help themselves and they elected yet another president to lead them who has shown little interest in the functions of the Southern Baptist Convention until suddenly he’s the titular head.

Election of Bryant Wright — in the first runoff ballot required since 1982 — is a potential calamity. I hasten to say Bryant Wright is a fine man, outstanding pastor and local church leader. He evidences humility, deep convictions, love for Jesus and commitment to the Great Commission.

With the help of Baptist church planting funds and local sponsorship, he started Johnson Ferry Baptist Church 28 years ago.

It has grown to more than 7,000, starts other churches and members last year personally ministered in 27 nations.

But Wright is wrong about the Cooperative Program that undergirds both North Carolina Baptist and Southern Baptist ministry. He intentionally has lowered his church’s contributions, although they remain large by North Carolina standards.

Worse, he said in a press conference that it was a “matter of stewardship” to direct mission funds away from the Cooperative Program in favor of direct gifts to the International Mission Board.

Baptist missions and ministry is more than the International Mission Board, and the primary funding channel for it all is gifts from churches through the Cooperative Program.

When the SBC president feels it is poor stewardship to fund the mission channel that supports the work he supposedly now leads, it is hard to believe the SBC is indeed heading toward hope.

In a move that belies both the spirit and words of its own recommendations for “making our values transparent” the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force has announced it will lock up the record of its deliberations for 15 years.

The task force announced its intention one week before its recommendations were to be considered by messengers at the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Orlando. It came as word was leaking out just how nebulous the task force’s “unanimous” agreement on their recommendations was. It came as we further learned of the need for task force members to be educated about the autonomous nature of Baptist state conventions before they realized their recommendations could be only that – recommendations and not mandates.

And, it came without reference to the fact that SBC President Johnny Hunt originally promised that all meetings of the task force would be open to at least one representative of Southern Baptists’ press, such as a newspaper editor or someone from Baptist Press. Instead, all meetings were closed.

To their credit, at various task force meetings a Baptist Press representative and reporters from Georgia, Alabama or Arkansas Baptist newspapers sat patiently in the hall, waiting to be thrown a bone, or at least get some quotes for a story about what happened during the meeting.

Instead, you were treated to a “press release” usually from Task Force Chairman Ronnie Floyd, who informed us that everyone was working hard, making progress, learning to appreciate each other and praying together a lot.

Now, we will not have access to their deliberations for 15 years. Will there be anyone left to care?

In secreting away their records, Floyd told Baptist Press his group is following the pattern set by the Southern Baptist Convention’s Peace Committee, whose report the Convention adopted in 1987. But members of the Peace Committee, operating during the most contentious period in Southern Baptist life in this generation, were debating enormous issues.

Arguing theological and political issues frankly and transparently in a contentious, suspicious environment could have been deleterious to professional life for the pastors and professors on the committee, were their comments made public.

The Great Commission Resurgence Task Force operates in an environment entirely unlike that of the Peace Committee era.

There are no “compromise” members appointed to the task force to meet quotas. They were all named by Hunt. They’re on the same team. At least one member was once on the staff of another member. Their goal was simple.

“The GCRTF voted to follow the precedent set by the SBC Peace Committee and have the sessions recorded,” Floyd said in an e-mail to Baptist Press Executive Editor Will Hall. “As with the Peace Committee, the recordings will be deposited at the SBC Historical Library and Archives, where they will be maintained until opened to researchers. The GCRTF will determine those number of years just as the Peace Committee did.” Are the references of precedent by the Peace Committee valid? Has the task force operated like the Peace Committee?

Dan Martin, who was news editor for Baptist Press during that period, attended and recorded every meeting of the Peace Committee. He wrote a legitimate news story for distribution to Southern Baptists after every meeting. And he participated as the scribe for the final report.

Martin said the effect of sealing deliberations for 10 years meant by the time the records were available for reflection, research and report no one cared. Is that the goal of the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force in this action?

Their second of seven recommendations is to make our values transparent. One of the values it lists is trust: “We tell each other the truth in love and do what we say we will do.”

Even before the committee presents its report, it demonstrates lack of trust in those it is asking to embrace it. Martin said there are only two reasons to seal records from more immediate availability: 1. “You’re ashamed of what you said,” or 2. “You don’t want to have to live by what you said.”

Task Force members say they are following the lead of the 1987 Peace Committee. The task force hasn’t followed the lead of the Peace Committee since it held its first closed meeting.

The task force is making harder its job of selling Southern Baptists on its vision by having operated behind the curtain and then emerging with a document they are to embrace, or risk being labeled as “against the Great Commission.”

The greatest merit of the task force report is that it signals recognition of a decelerating Convention and offers a “ready, shoot, aim” attempt to turn the tide.

But there is natural resistance to embrace a vision constructed behind closed doors — even if it is the best thing since sliced manna.

The task force has worked hard and their work has changed the conversation in Southern Baptist life. It has elevated the Great Commission and educated Southern Baptists about aspects of their common work that were not familiar. Whether their recommendations are received well by messengers to the SBC is unknown at the time of this writing.

If the task force had not released a preliminary report it never would have been able to listen, respond and change in ways that make the final report more palatable to some who resisted the earlier version.

But this action to seal the records of their labors so contradicts the spirit they’ve espoused that it endangers the ultimate acceptability of the entire report.