Posted on Oct 2, 2006 | by Erin Roach

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--A new church year began Oct. 1, and with that came the official close of the “‘Everyone Can!’ Kingdom Challenge” for evangelism set forth by Bobby Welch, immediate past president of the Southern Baptist Convention. Welch had urged individuals, churches and associations to join forces to witness to, win and baptize 1 million people during one church year.

Whether the numerical goal was reached won’t be known until spring when baptism statistics are released through the Annual Church Profile report administered by LifeWay Christian Resources, but Welch cited some results brought on by Everyone Can that are already evident.

“I believe that it’s been proven now to pastors and to individuals and to associations and to states that if we put an emphasis on something, more people are going to do it,” Welch told Baptist Press. “If we emphasize New Testament evangelism and discipleship, then people are going to do more of it.”

Welch said many people have told him about “church-changing and life-changing commitments to renew their quest for reaching lost people and carrying out the Great Commission.” Part of that is understanding the “I’m It” slogan Welch introduced at the annual meeting in Nashville, Tenn., in 2005.

“‘I’m It’ has reminded people that this is a personal commitment you can’t get away from,” Welch, who recently retired as pastor of First Baptist Church in Daytona Beach, Fla., said. “You cannot assign it to somebody else. You cannot act as if it’s not your job. ‘I’m It’ means it’s personal to me and I’ve got to do it.”

At the same time, the “Everyone Can” title has reminded pastors that leading people to Jesus is not totally up to them, he added. Pastors have told Welch that the campaign has been liberating for them because they can emphasize to their congregations the fact that everyone ought to be involved in personal evangelism.

Frank Page, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, told Baptist Press he believes Everyone Can brought a “measurable increased awareness of the need for soul-winning and increased baptisms,” and he believes Southern Baptists across the convention got the message Welch sent out.

“I hear people talking about it all over the nation,” Page said.

To keep the momentum going, Page said he plans to keep talking about evangelism by asking Southern Baptists to pray for God’s Holy Spirit to energize churches toward evangelism.

Though it’s too soon to release details, Page said he is working with the North American Mission Board and LifeWay to develop a nationwide strategy to capitalize on what Welch has brought to the convention’s attention.

“We’re going to move beyond the call to an implementation strategy,” Page said, adding that the strategy will be unveiled before the 2007 annual meeting in San Antonio. “I think it’s a natural continuation of the Everyone Can emphasis, and I’m quite excited.”

Welch announced the Everyone Can initiative shortly after he became president of the SBC in June 2004. That fall, he embarked on a 25-day bus tour that took him to Southern Baptist churches in all 50 states and Canada in order to emphasize the urgent need for evangelism and to hear concerns expressed straight from faithful Southern Baptists.

Along the way, Welch asked church members to sign commitment cards bearing his “Six Points of Challenge”: training and equipping for witnessing and discipleship; witnessing to and winning non-Christians; baptizing new converts; emphasizing stewardship; leading Vacation Bible Schools to focus on evangelism; and starting new Sunday School classes and/or planting churches.

The bus tour started in Daytona Beach, with Welch making his way up the East Coast to New England, where he became the first sitting SBC president to visit Maine. One of his stops in the state was at Frosty’s Donut Shop in Brunswick, where he had coffee and donuts with the owners who were longtime Southern Baptists and who used their shop as a witnessing tool by providing 10 racks of Gospel tracts as reading material for patrons.

Alaska and Hawaii were the last stops on the tour, and as he did in other states, Welch helped church members improve their personal evangelism skills by leading them in witnessing door to door. Then he reflected on what he had learned along the way.

“Critics have told me, ‘Door-to-door visitation or street witnessing will not work in this part of the country or that part of the country. It’s too confrontational. It’s too intrusive,’” Welch told Baptist Press at the time.

“But you know what? Every one of the people I have spoken to on this trip have reacted almost the same way,” he said. “People all over this country are open to a winsome presentation of the Gospel. If you show kindness, genuine care, naturalness and don’t get all worked up when you talk to them, people everywhere will listen to you.”

During the bus tour, Welch asked God for a chance to share the Gospel in every state. In Virginia, Welch and his traveling crew paused at a truck stop for hamburgers just before midnight, and he sensed an opportunity.

Two truckers and a waitress were sitting on a bench outside, and Welch approached them, gave his testimony and presented the plan of salvation through his FAITH evangelism strategy acronym, and all three prayed to receive Christ. Across the nation, Welch planted, cultivated and harvested for the Kingdom in Wal-Mart parking lots and on small-town streets.

In Nashville during the 2005 SBC annual meeting, Welch officially launched the Everyone Can challenge through a closing ceremony complete with fireworks, balloons and shouts of commitment to soul-winning.

“Southern Baptists, honest, now, before God, who do you think could witness to and win and then, bless God, get 'em down to the church and baptize them? Who do you think could do that?” Welch asked in Nashville.

“Everyone can -- and I'm it!” the crowd responded.

Last fall, Welch introduced an idea for outdoor baptism rallies hosted by Baptist associations as a way to promote unity among churches and raise their visibility in communities while holding high the ordinance of baptism as a public profession of faith in Jesus.

Associations across the country responded enthusiastically, including two associations in west Tennessee that hosted a baptism rally at a state park and drew nearly 400 people this summer. Throughout the Everyone Can emphasis, Baptist Press found pastors and directors of missions who took Welch’s mandate seriously and reported renewed inspiration toward evangelism and baptisms.

“One of the tremendous benefits of the ‘Everyone Can’ campaign was its laser-like focus on the Bible and Baptist basics of witnessing to people, winning people and baptizing people,” Morris H. Chapman, president of the SBC Executive Committee, said. “God has reminded us afresh of our priority in proclaiming the Gospel -- not just from our pulpits, but on the job, in the classroom, around the neighborhood and everywhere we meet people who need Jesus.

“Bobby Welch has succeeded in bringing the ‘personal’ back into personal evangelism with his ‘I’m It’ emphasis and setting an ambitious but reachable goal of 1 million baptisms,” Chapman added. “My fervent prayer is that Southern Baptists will continue to be inspired by this vision and build on these efforts to reach every person for Christ with the glorious Gospel.”

The Everyone Can initiative, Welch said, brought some much-needed direction to the SBC. While the emphasis was on reaching 1 million people, the focus was on getting individuals, pastors and churches to jump higher to reach the bar, he said.

“Beyond that, I think something we can know that has happened is regardless of what the number turns out to be in baptisms, we will know that it could have never been at that level had we not had the sort of emphasis we did,” Welch said. “So if it ends not doing as well as most of us hoped, we can know it would have done a lot worse had we not put this two-year emphasis on.”

It can’t be known what effect Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of three state conventions had on the campaign, Welch noted, but it’s clear the rest of the SBC needed to pick up the slack this past year more than ever.

“Regardless of how it comes out, I think that it is absolutely clear that had we not had this two-year push on, especially for this last year for a million baptisms, we would not have ended up as well as we have done,” Welch said. “We know that we’ve got many, many churches who are making far, far greater efforts at reaching people and baptizing. We know we’ve got associations that are doing more than they’ve ever done before.

“All of that has got to be helpful,” he added. “It cannot be a deterrent to reaching people. We needed this regardless. If we do a whole lot better, then we thank God because we needed to do a lot better -- we’ve got a lot of catching up to do. If we don’t do as well as we hoped, then that proves that we doubly needed it now, and we need it even more so in the future.”

As the convention looks to the days ahead, Welch said there’s a need to take advantage of the momentum gained from Everyone Can so that Southern Baptists can push on to the next level.

“What we have to do in my view is capture and cultivate and accelerate the obvious, and the obvious is, If you will get out there and emphasize this and practice this and encourage our people to do it, the DNA of our people will respond to that,” Welch told BP. “That’s in us. We are a Great Commission, world mission, evangelism, discipleship denomination. That is who we are at our core. That is our scriptural DNA. If you fan that fire any, it will flare up every time.”

Welch said he believes that “these days are the days of our greatest opportunity without a doubt. But it seems like we are adrift upon a sea of discontentment and disassociation. I mean by that that the convention is starving for unity of purpose, and I believe that New Testament, Great Commission evangelism and discipleship will change our convention and the world more quickly than anything else imaginable.”

Welch noted an “overwhelmingly desperate need” for leadership to surface at all levels of the convention, especially among pastors and people in the local church -– leadership that is “hot-hearted, focused, determined and willing to exert themselves with extraordinary drive to emphasize evangelism and discipleship. If some will rise at all levels to do this at all costs, then we will indeed by the Spirit of God recapture the wind of the Spirit in our sails for the sake of world evangelism and robbing hell and filling up heaven.

“But it all clearly lies at the door of leadership today for a unity of purpose,” Welch added. “Too many are finding too many things to divide us. Leadership must find the place that we’re to unite on and there is none more important or biblical than evangelism and discipleship.”
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