Let’s engage in a “what if” exercise.
What if your association did not exist? What if there were no Baptist churches in the fellowship area of your association? What if few — or no — Great Commission and great commandment churches were present?
What if you thought about your associational fellowship area as an unentered missions field with unreached people groups to which you were called by God and commissioned to develop a missional engagement strategy for this unentered and unreached area?
RELATED: Check out more from Bullard on Baptist associations and missions here.
What would that be like? What would you do first?
Churches develop myopic vision regarding the transitions happening within their churches and in the communities around them.
So do associations!
It is important for an association to take a deep dive and imagine a new vision for their missions field. The idea of a year of jubilee would mean that you engage in this way every 50 years.
I urge associations to do this more often. Do this every 21 years to be a model of leading-edge missional engagement for your churches.
Is there a model for this imagining?
Not really. But you can imagine one based on missions history.
The expansion of Southern Baptists beyond the southeastern and southwestern United States is one starting point. An expansion wave took place in the 1930s and 1940s, and then there was a big effort in the 1950s and 1960s.
Transplanted Southern Baptist families that wanted churches like the one back home launched new churches. Associations formed later, at times covering a whole state.
For example, my family moved to Philadelphia in 1965 for my father to serve as the director of an association of seven churches. The association had formed three years earlier. The first church had launched in 1958.
New churches emerged when a group of Southern Baptist families found one another and started a church. It was seven years into launching churches with Baptist transplants before seeing Philadelphia as an unentered missions field and looking for the unreached people groups was added to the strategy.
Creating a model
To create a model, imagine there are no Baptist churches — even no churches at all — in your associational area. Begin building a model through several rounds of spiritual and strategic imagining.
Before, during and after the process, continually ask God for spiritual discernment to reveal the open doors of missional opportunity.
Round one: Study the demographic trends of your context for the past 20 years. Look for information about people groups that might not show up in research reports.
If this information is not available, use people experienced in discovering various people groups. Your new missions movement needs racial, ethnic, socioeconomic and lifestyle strategies from the start.
Round two: Search for projections about the next 20 years. These include business, government, education, social, cultural and other lenses. Each context is a unique situation. Strategic templates from another context will not fit your context.
Do not just read reports produced by government, business, education or other agencies. Visit with key influencers in your context who can interpret what the information means. They can provide personal insights into the future of the context. Also, immerse yourself in the context. Get to know it at more than a surface level.
Round three: Build contextual scenarios about the next 20 years. What Great Commission and great commandment efforts will be needed? What are ministry opportunities that are unmet or undermet? What are church planting opportunities in the area? What types, sizes and styles of churches are needed?
Round four: Overlay the churches and ministries already serving the area. Also evaluate their effectiveness in connecting with various people groups. Seek commitments from existing churches to address missional opportunities.
Round five: Outline the new churches and ministries needed to address the current and emerging opportunities for Great Commission and great commandment service. Recruit existing churches to sponsor these churches and ministries.
Round six: Develop the strategy for the first seven years of the new beginning. Pull together a comprehensive strategy using existing resources. Project additional resources needed, including a plan to secure them.
Round seven: Launch the new missional engagement in response to God’s empowering vision by which you are captured. Make a commitment to partially repeat this process every seven years. Fully repeat it every 21 years.
EDITOR’S NOTE — George Bullard spent 45 years in denominational ministry. He served on the staff of three associations, was a key staff person working with associations in two state conventions and served on the association missions division staff of the former Home Mission Board of the SBC. He retired in June 2022 as director of Columbia Metro Baptist Association in South Carolina. He has led strategic planning processes in more than 100 associations and has written extensively in this area. Bullard now serves as a strategic thinking mentor for Christian leaders through his ForthTelling Innovation ministry and a correspondent for The Baptist Paper.
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