Just Elected, So. Baptist Prez Decides to 'Hit the Road'
by Allie Martin
June 28, 2004
(AgapePress) - The new president of the Southern Baptist Convention is planning a 25-day bus tour to meet grassroots Baptists across the country.Dr. Bobby Welch, the newly elected president of the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, says he hopes to visit with 51 churches -- one in each state and one in Canada -- from late August to early October. He believes the bus tour, which he describes as a "listening" trip as much as a speaking trip, will be the most effective way of meeting and hearing from grassroots Southern Baptist pastors and lay people.
Welch sees the journey as an opportunity to further extend the SBC. "Southern Baptists ... are such a wonderful mosaic of diversity and individuality that so often we get stereotyped," he says, "and I want to tag all of those bases."
Saying he wants to act as a conduit between the laity and the denomination's leadership, he explains his intent to ask such questions such as: Where do you think our largest needs are? What would you have us do to help the Kingdom of God and reach people? "I want to string together that mosaic, and I want to hear from those people" he says.
Some may wonder why Welch will be taking a bus and not a more convenient form of transportation. Evidently his wife is wondering the same thing.
"My wife said, 'I can't understand why you're not flying -- and I don't understand why you're sticking to 25 days. Why don't you take 50 days to go to 50 states? And why don't you fly?'" he describes her asking.
The new SBC head says he explained to his wife that while flying is an option, of course, it lacks the effectiveness of a road tour. "[T]he truth of [the matter] is when you roll up to somebody's church in that bus and they know you've been on it for days and days and days, they realize you're making an effort to be there with them," he says. "It's not a convenience; you're making a real effort."
Welch, who is pastor of First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach, Florida, will take a short break from the tour in September for denominational meetings in Nashville and a previously planned crusade in Tennessee. And he will not be traveling by bus all the time: his trip will include plane trips to both Alaska and Hawaii.
