Now is the time to give your associational context something to talk about — but not like the song popularized by singer Bonnie Raitt that talks about romantic love.
It’s more like “Just Give Me Jesus,” the book title from the idea that Anne Graham Lotz has spoken and published on for many years concerning how the love of God can fill our lives and actions.
To talk about God’s love is the best gift you can give to people of all races, cultures, languages, educational backgrounds, occupations and socioeconomic levels.
Look ahead to the year 2027. If you spend 2025 in spiritual preparation to “discern next” in your associational context and then focus in 2026 on “celebrating next” as you prepare God-led strategies, you will be ready to spiritually transform the people in your associational context as you “launch next.”
If you followed the spiritual journey described over the past nine columns where you imagined 2033 as an improbable but possible future, you are ready for life-changing missional action and a journey where you and the people you serve will never be the same again.
A great commission
Your mandate is to be part of God’s transformation of every person — to be the hands, feet and voices guiding them to an eternal-life relationship with God through Jesus Christ — and to have a dynamic community of faith — a local congregation — where they can spiritually mature as Christians and be on mission for God in their family, work and community.
This is your commission — to go not just to easy-to-reach people but to everyone. This means focusing on Kingdom growth more than church growth.
It involves congregations moving outside their comfort zones and away from the manner in which they have always done things. It means accepting the challenge to do whatever is necessary for the love of God to reign supreme in the heart, soul, mind and strength of people and for the life patterns of Jesus to be the focus of all lives in your context.
Does it sound like an improbable — even impossible — mission? It is unless we understand that with God there are no impossibilities.
Will it happen? That is up to God and not us. But He has commissioned us to be His workers. We must serve like it will happen. It is bold but not reckless.
It is something we can imagine taking place by 2033 as your association assumes the lead role for God’s Kingdom in your context as we talked about in the first column in this series, Imagine the improbable becoming the reality through Baptist associations.
Compared to the difficult Kingdom work over the next six years through 2032, getting to this point has been easy. It now requires people and congregations who surrender their lives to making the fulfillment of the Great Commission their life focus.
In the spirit of Leviticus 25, it is six years of planting, cultivating, growing and harvesting. It is the most life-fulfilling journey in which congregations in fellowship on mission in their association could ever engage.
Action details
During the next six years, be prepared for multiple rounds of action, reflection and then updating your strategies. Strategic actions often fail when they are not seen as continually innovating journeys.
A simple yet consistent method can provide a freshness for your missional actions.
- Every 120 days, celebrate answered prayer and progress that your family of congregations is making in living into your discerned strategies.
- Joyfully thank God for His leadership, and ask Him to guide you in looking with new spiritual and strategic discernment at your current strategies.
- In typical planning and implementation processes, when something is accomplished, you check it off and declare an action completed. But not here.
- In this process you seek additional discernment. If you have already accomplished a part of your strategy, it is likely God has something greater for you to do in this area. What is it?
- You then update your strategy to help you go deeper in transforming your context.
- This way your strategy never wanes and you never fall behind. The improbable becomes possible.
God is always going before you. He is in the lead. You are following His lead so that everyone might have Jesus to talk about.
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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