United in Going: The Unifying Power of International Missions

Skip and Kim Meyer* walk with their family to research ways to gain entry to a remote area for ministry among the South Asians. * Names changed for security | Image Courtesy of IMB

BY DAVID ROACH

When Silverdale Baptist Church began partnering with the International Mission Board to assist and encourage workers in Sub-Saharan Africa, the effects extended well beyond the African continent.

The partnership began in 1998, when the Chattanooga, Tennessee, congregation averaged nine hundred in worship. Within six years, that doubled to 1,800. Today, the church averages 4,000 and has sent out more than thirty-five members to serve as missionaries across the globe. Pastor Tony Walliser credits international missions as a catalyst for unity and growth.

“At the point we made missions a priority of our church, we saw God bless every other area of our church,” Walliser said.

He thinks an SBC-wide refocus on international missions could have a similar effect on the Convention as a whole. Walliser is not alone in that assessment. Churches across the SBC that have seen their health and unity increased through an international missions focus say the Convention too can experience missions-driven unity.

To facilitate a refocus on missions, the IMB has developed five targets to engage unreached people and places over the next five years: • Send an additional five hundred fully-funded missionaries, bringing the total to 4,200. • Mobilize five hundred global missionary partners to join IMB teams overseas— workers from other nations funded by overseas churches, networks of churches, and Baptist conventions. • Engage seventy-five global cities with comprehensive evangelistic strategies. • Increase Lottie Moon Christmas Offering receipts six percent annually ($10 million per year), the amount required to fund a net gain of five hundred missionaries. • Mobilize seventy-five percent of Southern

Baptist churches to support the Lottie Moon

Christmas Offering by 2025, up from less than half that give through Lottie Moon currently.

Not only do the five targets have potential to unite Southern Baptists, IMB President Paul Chitwood said, unity is required if the targets are to be achieved.

“These five targets are about fulfilling the Great Commission,” Chitwood said. “And no single church or even an entire association or state convention is going to be able to meet these Godsized goals. Hitting these targets will take all of us working together. That’s what cooperative missions is all about.”

With the global targets established, the question is whether enough churches will embrace them to spark renewed unity in going.

One church in Missouri is doing its part by partnering with a South Asian city to help a church there develop a comprehensive evangelistic strategy.

Through a longstanding relationship with an IMB worker, the church learned of a large Muslim pilgrimage that occurs in their adopted city annually. A local Baptist church across the street from the pilgrimage site was a natural global partner, so the Missouri congregation began travelling there to conduct evangelism training and develop strategy. Though travel was slowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, pastor Henry Jones* said a global focus has sparked local missions as well.

“The people who go come back incredibly motivated to do more evangelistic work in our own area,” Jones said.

He’s among the growing cohort of pastors who see international missions as the apex of Southern Baptist cooperation.

“The high point” of each SBC Annual Meeting is the IMB commissioning service, Jones said. “It moves the voices that are upset” to “the fringe, because the bulk of us love just coming together to hear what we are able to accomplish together internationally.”

With the five global targets, opportunity abounds for churches to turn their focus to the nations. For each target, the IMB needs churches to help. • To help send more missionaries, churches can develop missionary-sending pipelines and focus their international missions giving through the IMB. • To mobilize global missionary partners, churches can connect their existing overseas partners with the IMB. “Many US churches have longstanding relationships overseas that can help push the mission forward to unreached peoples and places,” Chitwood said. • To help engage cities, “churches with experience in urban ministry [can] adopt a global city where they can work alongside our city teams,” Chitwood said. • To increase Lottie Moon receipts, every church can give a little more. If every

Southern Baptist increased their Lottie Moon offering by $0.63 per year, that would yield an extra $10 million annually. • To mobilize more churches to give through the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering, the IMB needs “advocates,” Chitwood said, “people and churches who share the news of what

My prayer is that Southern Baptists will not allow the controversial issues of our day to distract us from the fact that more than three thousand people groups have yet to be engaged with the Gospel and 155,473 people die lost around the world every single day.”

Paul Chitwood, president

International Mission Board

God is doing through the IMB and invite others to join in that work.” Churches and pastors can help the IMB connect with nongiving congregations by providing information on those churches via info@imb.org.

“My prayer is that Southern Baptists will not allow the controversial issues of our day to distract us from the fact that more than three thousand people groups have yet to be engaged with the Gospel and 155,473 people die lost around the world every single day,” Chitwood said. “May those two realities motivate us to work through our differences and remain committed to working together for the sake of those who, without hearing the Good News that we’ve been entrusted to share, will spend eternity in hell.”

That’s the kind of unified focus missions has brought to Harp’s Crossing Baptist Church in Fayetteville, Georgia. Since adopting a Southeast Asian people group in 1995, the congregation has “grown steadily” and unified around reaching people at home and abroad, pastor Dennis Watson said.

Ten years into its missions partnership with the IMB, Harp’s Crossing built a new 1,200-seat worship center. The estimated cost of $2.9 million became $6 million by the time the project was complete, but Harp’s Crossing moved into the facility debt free thanks to the culture of generosity that had been cultivated.

Watson believes an international missions refocus across the SBC would yield a similar athome benefit.

“Our folks [at Harp’s Crossing] are pulling together with a vision and seeing why we’re here,” Watson said. In the same vein, “our Convention would benefit from a very clear understanding and focus on what we’re trying to do” across the world.

*Name changed for security

DAVID ROACH is a writer and senior pastor of Shiloh Baptist Church in Saraland, Alabama.