“Celebrate next,” the jubilee year for Baptist associations, embodies a joyful anticipation. It reflects an expectation of what God is ready to accomplish in and through your fellowship of congregations.
Out of the convocation, convening, commission, commandment, challenge and commitment of the jubilee year, at least three strategic efforts should emerge.
These are missiological strategies, congregational multiplication strategies and a response to the great need to replace revitalizing and replanting strategies. This column addresses missiological strategies. Later columns will focus on the other two strategies.
Missiological strategies
It is possible and hopeful that missiological approaches specific to your association’s context are already part of your strategies.
These strategies result from viewing your context as an unentered missions field with unreached people groups. Open doors of opportunity and great potential for ministry to people with unmet needs exist around you.
Are there locations in your context that lack sufficient gospel ministry? Which people groups are being neglected or underserved?
To address this opportunity, your association must think in radical new ways. I will share an example from my life.
Year ago, I participated in a think tank sponsored by the North American Mission Board, then known as the Home Mission Board. Its purpose was to develop new missional strategies focused on large metropolitan areas.
We were assigned to small groups and encouraged to think outside traditional frameworks. Our group initially discussed revising and reinventing existing strategies.
I was the outlier as the youngest participant with the least experience. I proposed we launch a new denomination to effectively reach the cities, as our current denomination was unable to do so.
I pointed out people groups our denomination was neglecting as we prioritized church growth over Kingdom ministry.
Baptists were becoming upwardly mobile socioeconomically and leaving behind the lower economic classes. While we focused on growing larger congregations, individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds often need smaller congregational gatherings to feel comfortable.
We overlooked the diversity of racial, ethnic and lifestyle groups. We favored those who resembled us and were in traditional marriage and family relationships.
We continued leaving the cities for the suburbs. In doing so we failed to launch ministries and congregations in the communities we abandoned.
The gap between how we envisioned the cities and the reality of those cities was widening each year. Our perceptual and geographic distance did not motivate us to recognize unentered neighborhoods, communities and unreached people groups.
Our group formally recommended launching a new denomination. Although a new denomination was not endorsed by all the participants, it did encourage individuals to think and act differently in their respective contexts.
In what new ways should your association be thinking differently about applying the mission of God in your context?
Missiology in your context
A previous column on “discerning next” called for contextual preparation.
Building on your own contextual research is the most challenging strategy for congregations to embrace. It is a disruption of current ministry patterns. Many leaders do not see it helping their congregations grow.
However, it empowers the Kingdom of God to grow, which will ultimately lead to the growth of many congregations.
Your association needs to become an example of the following statement regarding missiology in your associational context: “God is spiritually transforming people, groups and communities in our context to be courageously Christlike and compassionate.”
When this happens in your context, it will be because you understand and fearlessly respond to the life needs and eternal spiritual needs of the full diversity of people groups in your associational context.
The ultimate questions for your family of congregations are these:
First, are you convinced of the need to shift your member congregations from a church growth or church survival mindset to a Kingdom growth mindset?
Second, which congregations are ready to make the shift to a missiological approach to effective gospel ministry in your context? Who will take the lead to “celebrate next”?
Third, not all specific opportunities can be addressed by one congregation. Have clusters of congregations emerged that would address some of the most challenging opportunities?
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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