TUPELO, Miss. (BP) – Nearly 11,000 messengers made the trip to the Indiana Convention Center last month for the 2024 SBC Annual Meeting and Pastors’ Conference. The event included almost 200 ancillary events and gatherings, and the total crowd included not just messengers but also more than 3,000 guests, not to mention 2,740 exhibitors.
Messengers hailed from all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico, representing 3,988 churches. Twelve of those were from First Baptist Church in Tupelo.
Before this year, First Baptist typically only sent a couple of messengers, Pastor Matt Powell said, though based on the church’s size and its Cooperative Program giving, it could send up to 12.
“Typically, it’s my wife and me,” Powell said. “Historically, if someone went, it was the pastor.”
This year, they maxed out their full allotment, sending 12 messengers plus spouses and families, for a group of 25.
Powell said hot topics in the SBC spurred an interest among his congregation about the meeting. Members expressed a desire to sponsor a full contingent of messengers. When he initially mentioned taking a group, around 40 people were interested.
“We’ve never had any kind of organized effort to take people to the convention,” Powell said. “Outside of my children, the youngest person we took was 14, and the eldest person we took was 88. And it was everybody in between and they loved it.”
The church chartered a bus for the trip to Indianapolis. Part of their agenda included visiting Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.
“People showed gratitude because they had no idea they were part of this,” Powell said. “And another very powerful moment was the commissioning of the IMB missionaries. So on the way back, people are asking questions, like, ‘How much money are we giving to the Cooperative Program?’ so we got to have that conversation. People got to see firsthand what the Cooperative Program actually does, and it was just so powerful for them.
“We roll our eyes sometimes when we think, oh, another business meeting,” Powell continued. “But all our members were, like, ‘I was impressed by how orderly everything was.’ Even when you had people who sharply disagreed, everything was orderly. We sat through the entire thing. We didn’t miss a thing.”
Some from First Tupelo’s group read the news analyses from secular sources. “They were able to say, well, that’s a misrepresentation. One of our members, an attorney, mentioned to me, ‘Matt, I’ve read every year on Fox or CNN or some newspaper somewhere about what happened. I was there. It really is something.’ There was a gratitude for being part of the SBC.”
Powell said when he became pastor at First Baptist in 2016, he began holding training services in the church fellowship hall on Sunday nights.
“Each semester, classes are offered, and one of those eight-week classes is going to be the Southern Baptist Convention, the Mississippi Baptist Convention, and the Cooperative Program,” he said.
“We’re going to make that a requirement in order to complete the program on Sunday night. Everybody has to go through that one time,” Powell said. “In 2016, we’d have about 50 on Sunday nights. Now on Sunday nights during the semesters, I don’t know what the average would be, but early in the semester we have over 500.”
