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.
Will Your Congregation Complete the Annual Church Profile?
One of the core ways your church annually expresses its membership in the Columbia Metro Baptist Association is by completing the Annual Church Profile (ACP). We are on the threshold of readiness to provide you with what you need to complete the ACP for this year. Submitting the ACP for your church as completely as possible every year allows several things to happen for your church:
- It keeps a history of statistics and patterns of ministry for your church for your planning.
- It allows your church to see how churches of similar size or location are doing to benchmark your efforts.
- It provides contact information for key staff and laypeople in your church to receive helpful information.
- It helps us as an association to measure the progress we are making through the ministry of our churches-in-association to share the unconditional love of Jesus throughout our associational fellowship area.
This year – like last year – CMBA is supplying two ways for you to complete the ACP. This first and most comprehensive is to submit your data at www.sbcworkspace.com using your username and password provided to you. The second way is to use the CMBA Easy ACP Survey. This survey is also available to your church. As we did last year, we are offering a gift card to thank the person who completes the CMBA Easy ACP Survey. This year – in partnership with the SC Baptist Convention – we will also provide a free demographic report for the community around your church location.
One of the other capacities we have is to access for you a ten to twenty-year statistical summary of your church, and we will do that at your request. During the past year, when we have provided these summaries, church leaders have asked us why some years are missing. We had to tell them it was because their church did not submit an ACP report that year. The reliability of the statistics on your church will always depend on what you provide.
Praying and Acting to Support Our Midlands Schools – Teachers and Students
The pandemic during the past 18 months has disrupted the flow of learning and life skills development of several hundred thousand students of various ages from preschoolers through those seeking advanced degrees. With the uncertainty of the Fourth Wave of COVID-19, and the desire for normalcy in family and community life, let us all pray and act in a manner that supports teachers and students.
Let’s get involved in opportunities for ministry such as the Heart4Schools ministry – https://www.scbaptist.org/heart4schools/, the prayerwalking happening today around the University of South Carolina as Welcome Week kicks off, rides to Walmart for international students – https://www.carolinabcm.org/grocery-store-driver, and international teacher events that begin in September where 17 CMBA congregations are already involved.
CMBA staff and mobilizers are engaged with each of these congregations as part of our focus on new congregational expressions. Lead and assisting congregations in our family are encouraged to pray for and support the ministry of these congregations.