Rev. Bobby Welch is on a mission to win a million souls for Jesus, and he is determined to rally all 16 million members of the Southern Baptist Convention to join him.
To marshal the troops, Welch, the new president of the nation's largest Protestant denomination, is taking a 25-day road trip across the country in a bus made for a rock star.
Stopping at least once in each of the 50 states, Washington, D.C., and Canada, Welch is laying the foundation for a campaign to "Witness, Win, and Baptize One Million" between June 2005 and June 2006--the end of his first presidential term.
This weekend, the 45-foot-long bus--stars and stripes and smiling faces splashed along its sides--began the tour's Midwest leg, making stops in Decatur, Greenwood, Ind., near Indianapolis, Green Bay, and Menominee, Mich. On Monday, it is scheduled to reach Minnetonka, Minn., and Fargo, N.D.
By focusing on the import of evangelism, or preaching the gospel, Welch is touting a party line on which both moderates and conservatives in the denomination can agree.
"If you don't believe our main mission is to seek and save that which is lost, you should ask yourself why you're a Southern Baptist," Welch said, preaching to about 100 people gathered at Tabernacle Baptist Church in Decatur Friday.
"That's the lowest common denominator," he said. "Everybody should be able to do it. If they have any love of souls they should be able to come together."
The conservative leader is also counting on the evangelism campaign to reverse four years of decline in baptisms. Last year, about 10,000 of the denomination's 43,000 churches reported no baptisms--a barometer of Baptist growth.
Although Baptists do not believe the rite is necessary to be saved, they do consider it a significant step in one's public profession of faith.
"We're saved to know it. We're baptized to show it," said Rev. Wendell Lang, executive director of the Illinois Baptist State Association, where 200 of 1,100 churches reported no baptisms last year.
"The measure of success for Southern Baptists has always been numbers," said Barry Hankins, an associate professor of history and church-state studies at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. "Evangelism and mission has always been what held the denomination together, not theological particularities."
But it's theological particularities that have come to define Southern Baptists in recent decades. In the 1980s, moderate leaders were replaced by fundamentalists who emphasized Biblical infallibility on matters of gender, homosexuality and creationism.
Welch, 61, hails from the conservative camp, but believes the internal squabbles have distracted members from the church's primary goal--to bring the gospel to millions waiting to hear it.
"The church has failed those people," Welch said. "We have the spiritual muscle to do that right now. ... But we can't get the muscles working together in one accord and unity of purpose for the sake of evangelism."
To convey that message at every campaign stop, Welch delivers a canned pitch with props, starting with a 90-second video montage that includes scenes from the World Trade Center attacks interspersed with Bible verses.
Brandishing a mule harness and blinders emblazoned with the words "seek" and "save," he reminds Baptists that they must not stray from the goal.
And he invites everyone to Nashville to kick off "The Everyone Can Kingdom Challenge," the name given to the evangelism campaign.
Welch also goes out after each presentation to show folks how it's done.
Though he says any approach will do, he uses FAITH, a Sunday school evangelism strategy that he developed for his own megachurch in Daytona Beach, Fla., and now sells to congregations nationwide.
Central to that strategy is knocking on doors or approaching strangers and asking them what it takes to get to heaven.
In Decatur, Welch walked the campus of Millikin University to catch people on their way to class. A few took his tracts and kept walking. One woman said she was already a member of a church.
"I'm not asking you to join a church," he said. "Just take this. It won't hurt you."
Chris Limerinos, 21, of Downstate Collinsville, also told Welch he was a church member and that he was running late for class. Still, Welch gave him the FAITH pitch and handed him an invitation to Nashville.
"I honestly didn't feel it was genuine," Limerinos said later. "I could tell he had an agenda in his conversation with me. ... I think relationally talking to people is much better than complete strangers."
Welch does not expect everyone to take such an aggressive approach. When he encounters a devotee of a different faith who does not want to talk, he moves on, hoping for another opportunity one day to talk to them about their relationship with the Lord.
"I move forward on the idea that there are [millions] waiting on me, and I need to get to them," he said. "I have no interest in aggravating people, being overbearing or impolite. I don't see that in the life of Christ."
Riding toward a strip mall in an Indianapolis suburb Friday night, Welch was hopeful that he would meet someone open to his message.
"I have every reason to suspicion tonight that there's somebody out there moving toward us," he said.
Sipping on a fountain drink, he sauntered across the parking lot of a Meijer store and first approached an unsuspecting man waiting for a ride. A car quickly pulled up, and whisked the man away.
Undeterred, Welch walked up to Darin Klotzche, 32, as he prepared to fire up his canary yellow motor scooter. Five minutes later, both men had shared with each other how they came to know the Lord.
Welch, a Vietnam veteran, had been left for dead on the battlefield. Klotzche, a recovering alcoholic, had reached a low point in his life. At the end of the conversation, Welch grasped Klotzche's hand and, with his permission, prayed.
"Darin needs the power of the word to change his life," Welch said. "We don't go out there to the Darins. They're trapped in the circumstances of life.