by John Gross
As your newly appointed director of home missions and evangelism I want to thank the executive committee for their confidence in my appointment to this position. It is very humbling. But I am excited at the same time to accept their directive.
I want to start well, and so I want to take a long look at the landscape. We don’t want to act without giving some thought to how home missions and evangelism work within the framework of the Baptist Bible Fellowship organization. A good way to begin is to ask myself the questions: who are we and where are we when it comes to home missions and evangelism?
Here is what I see: We started as BBF in 1950 with 138 churches. From 1950 until 1975 we had over 3,000 churches in our national directory of which most were planted churches. Unbelievable!!
Today our BBFI Mission Director Jon Konnerup tells me we have over 4,000 churches in our database supporting at least one of our missionaries or at least one BBF project of some type through the Mission Office. Understandably, they are not all fully committed to the BBF. Additionally, there are more than 400 resident students and over 1,000 online students in our three affiliate schools. Asia Baptist Bible College has 1,500 students. Our foreign BBFI missionary program has over 450 missionary families in over 100 countries with over 15,000 churches under the care of our missionaries. With the Tribune as a tool of communication, there is a tremendous advantage with Keith Bassham helping us in this area. We are a Fellowship of 65 years in experience, with trial, error, and much success in our past. The opportunities for the future are endless.
The national leadership structure within the Fellowship contains many layers of qualified leadership: presidents, vice presidents, and directors of several entities. Add to that state chairmen and leaders in other organizations who affiliate with the BBF. With each of these divisions of leadership unified and focused on our goal of training individuals and teams for home missions and evangelism, it appears to me that we have tremendous opportunities in our future.
I plan to partner closely with the newly elected Vice President of Home Missions and Evangelism Dan Greer. Together with our committee of 15 directors we are developing structure, leadership, strategies, and organizational programs that will unify our church planting efforts across the nation.
We are excited about our meetings of the future, and we will be giving more detailed plans in our September national meeting in Detroit. Please pray with us as we join together to move forward to better develop home missions and evangelism in our Fellowship. Being unified together with the Lord’s leadership and blessing, we believe we have a great future! “Now unto Him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us” (Ephesians 3:20).