Tom Ascol: The Next President of the Southern Baptist Convention?
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
I'm talking to my friend Tom aspel, ASC OL. Look it up. Tom, ask AS COL, he was the senior pastor of grace baptist church for 30 6 years. He's the president of founders ministry and the institute of public theology, candidate for president of the Southern Baptist convention. The vote is next week. So Tom askell, people need to get to Anaheim and need to vote. And I'm begging you folks. Take this seriously if you know somebody who can be there and he's thinking, oh, I don't know if I want to go. This is a big deal. This is the Southern Baptist convention. I mean, how many people are involved in Southern Baptist churches? How many people does this affect? Could you repeat that? How many people in the whole Southern Baptist convention, roughly how many are there? How many people are affected by the leadership? You're running to lead the Southern Baptist convention. Yeah, so there's 47,000 churches over 14 million members in those churches. What say it again? 40 7000 churches. 14 million members. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, we should have said this up front. This is huge. 47 thousand churches. Right. 14 million members. Yeah, let me draw it out for you. It affects far more than southern badness because our 6 seminaries educate one third of all the evangelical seminary students in America. So if you're in an evangelical church, it is likely that over the next 30 years, you're going to be directly influenced by southern Baptists or Southern Baptist trained minister who got his training at a southern institution. We also have the largest missionary sending force in the world and what happens in the SBC affects far more than the SBC. It affects other evangelical groups and churches in North America. And more than that, it affects the work of the gospel around the world, because we export what we have here. And if we're not healthy here, it's not going to be healthy wherever we export our Christianity. And that's how you