A Family of Baptist Congregations in the Midlands of South Carolina
Our One Priority: Starting and Strengthening Churches to Serve as Vital and Vibrant Missional Communities.
Launching 2022 with Columbia Metro:
Mission Local
Let’s follow up on our focus for the season with Columbia Metro: Mission Local. Last week in this Briefing, we posed this question: Who in your congregation has the greatest passion for local missional engagement?
Then in our newsletter last week we expanded the question to these:
- Who is the leader in your church of missional engagement beyond your congregation and directs its missional programs, ministries, and activities? The pastor? A staff person? A lay leader?
If it is only the pastor, a staff person, and one lay leader, that is not good. - Is there an ongoing organization in your church of people who pray, think, support, plan, and take actions of missional engagement locally in addition to any global initiatives? How many people are in this organization? Is their work seen as a top priority emphasis of your congregation?
Even in the smallest of congregations, this must be at least three to seven people. In larger congregations, it should be three to seven percent of the average number of people engaged weekly with the congregation. - How does your church distinguish between actions of missions support such as praying, giving money, collecting, and sending commodities (gift boxes, health kits, prisoner packets, hunger ministry items), and those of missions action of reaching out and directly engaging with people who need a Christ-like, high touchministry from a caring Christian?
What percentage of what you do is missions support and what percentage of what you do is missions action? How can you increase the percentage of action so that persons in need of the Good News are personally and compassionately encountered?
At least 50 percent of local missional engagement should directly encounter the people who are the object of your mission actions. Only doing missions support satisfies, for some people, their obligation to be engaged in missions. The reality is that this is not enough to change our world. Many more people than we currently reach need to experience the love of Jesus.
A Call to Action
Seek to ask and answer these questions for your congregation during the next two weeks. If you would like to share your answers, send them to CMBA@ColumbiaMetro.org.
Our One Priority Briefing and the Our One Priority Briefing Online Gathering are made possible by the financial gifts of the member and network connection congregations of the Columbia Metro Baptist Association at www.ColumbiaMetro.org, CMBA@ColumbiaMetro.org, or 803.619.7110. To donate to CMBA go to https://www.columbiametro.org/donate/. Congregations can make their general contributions through this link. Congregations, missions groups and individuals can designate gifts to the Congregational Grant Fund, hunger ministry, disaster response, and Baptist Collegiate Ministry.