WARNER ROBINS, Ga. — Jimmy Scroggins asked Georgia Baptists to look beyond next Sunday, next year, or even the next generation as he preached at the 204th annual meeting of the Georgia Baptist Convention on Tuesday, Nov. 10.
“Will your church matter a hundred years from now?” he asked.
Scroggins, lead pastor of Family Church in South Florida, preached from Joshua 1 and challenged churches to take the gospel into new territory, preserve what previous generations have entrusted to them, and prepare to pass it on.
“Take more ground, hold the ground that you take, and pass it on to new generations,” he said.
Convention President Steve Browning, lead pastor of First Baptist Church Alpharetta, introduced Scroggins and recalled the influence he had on Browning during his first years as a senior pastor.
Browning said he signed up for a pastoral coaching group in 2019 without knowing Scroggins would be his coach. The relationship continued for two years, including through the disruptions churches faced in 2020.
“You were a brother to me then,” Browning told him. “You taught me so much about pastoring. You made a profound impact on my life.”
Scroggins told listeners that Joshua inherited both an opportunity and a responsibility. Moses was gone, a new generation was preparing to enter the Promised Land, and Joshua had been told to move forward with courage and obedience.
The task was not simply to possess the land, Scroggins said, but to establish something that could be handed to those who came afterward.
“What are you doing with your life right now?” he asked. “What are you doing with your ministry? What is happening in your church right now that God is doing? Are you taking more ground? Or are you just sitting there?”
Scroggins told pastors and church members that the years, money, prayers, and work they invest in their churches should produce something that outlives them.
“Christians are builders,” he said. “We’re supposed to be building something that could be here a hundred years from now.”
He pointed to the Georgia Baptist Convention itself, established more than two centuries ago by Baptists who could not have imagined what their cooperation would become.
“They said, ‘We’re going to make a difference. We’re going to take some ground. We’re going to hold some ground, and we’re going to pass it on to new generations,’” Scroggins said.
The generations that followed inherited churches, ministries, institutions, and a cooperative work that began before their great-grandparents were born, he said.
“Here we are,” Scroggins said. “What are we going to do with it?”
For Scroggins, the question is personal.
He and his wife have eight children and 10 grandchildren, some of whom could live into the 2100s.
“Those kids need a place to grow up,” he said. “And wherever God takes them, they need a church where they can walk with God and raise their own kids to walk with God.”
“Somebody has to do something today that creates a way for them to have it when the time comes.”
Scroggins said a century is not as distant as it sounds. His father, born in 1945, knew his grandfather, who was born shortly after the Civil War. That same father now knows great-grandchildren who could live well into the next century.
“A hundred years is not as long as you think,” Scroggins said.
The stakes extend beyond a church member’s own descendants, he said. Future generations will continue living in the communities where Georgia Baptist churches stand, and they will need churches that preach the gospel. Churches today can also send missionaries whose work will continue long after the current generation is gone.
Scroggins connected God’s command to Joshua to take the land with Christ’s command in Matthew 28 to make disciples of all nations.
“There is ground to be taken — not physical ground on the earth, but ground to be taken in the hearts of men and women and boys and girls,” he said.
Churches should reach every kind of person, he said, and where there is no local congregation, they should work to establish one.
Scroggins also urged churches to strengthen families, invest in children, plant churches, and help congregations that need assistance.
He said stronger churches should look for opportunities to help new and struggling churches rather than viewing them as competitors.
“What if we joined forces like a real army for the Kingdom of God and were able to help each other and strengthen each other and fund each other instead of competing with each other, criticizing each other?” he asked.
The size or location of a church does not determine its value, Scroggins said.
“We need little churches, we need big churches, we need medium-sized churches, we need rural churches, city churches, suburban churches, urban churches, churches that speak different languages,” he said. “We need all the churches to reach all the different kinds of people in all the locations.”
Scroggins said churches must keep moving forward.
He borrowed a phrase from college football coach Curt Cignetti, who said he intended to “wage a tenacious war against complacency” when he took over a struggling program.
“Let’s show up at our churches every day and let’s go in there and wage a tenacious war against complacency,” Scroggins said.
Christians fight that battle, he added, as individuals.
“Let’s wage a tenacious war against complacency in our own hearts,” he said, “in our own marriages, with our own children, with our own grandkids, in our own communities, in our own churches.”
Scroggins pointed to his own congregation as an example of what one generation can leave for another.
Family Church traces its beginnings to First Baptist Church of West Palm Beach, founded in 1901 by 14 people. Those Baptists could not have known Scroggins or his family, but they established a church that would still be there more than a century later.
“They did whatever it took, and they started the church from nothing,” he said.
Generations followed who gave, prayed, acquired property, built facilities, called pastors, raised children, and kept the church going.
Scroggins became its pastor in 2008. His eight children grew up there. Some were baptized there, some sensed calls to ministry there, and three were married in its sanctuary.
Now, before Scroggins preaches on Sundays, one of his grandchildren sometimes sits with him during the music.
“Why?” Scroggins asked. “Because 125 years ago, some people who had no idea I would ever even exist made something for me, for my kids and my grandkids.”
“Everything that we do, we stand on the shoulders of giants and saints who’ve gone before us — praying and giving and sending and weeping and repenting and marrying and burying and baptizing and taking the Lord’s Supper,” he said.
“Now God’s giving it to you and giving it to me. What are we going to do with our opportunity?”
Scroggins returned to Joshua and the responsibility of the generation standing at the edge of the Promised Land.
“Future generations were at stake for Joshua,” he said. “His kids and his grandkids, and so are yours. So are mine.”
He asked Georgia Baptists to consider people a century from now looking back at churches that were faithful in 2026.
“If you win somebody’s grandson to Jesus today, that little boy will grow up, and his grands will hear about how he found Christ at your church,” Scroggins said.
“A hundred years is not as long as you think."
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