Evangelism. Church planting. Missions.
If there is any question about where the focus of the North American Mission Board (NAMB) lies as it enters the New Year, those questions quickly dissipate after talking with key leadership.
"We want to be about evangelism and church planting and sending missionaries who do evangelism and church planting," said Harry Lewis, NAMB’s interim executive vice president for missions. That simple statement sums up the board’s direction as it stands on the threshold of 2007 and looks toward its 10th anniversary this June.
"We spent several months in listening sessions with our state partners and we heard those three primary objectives as being the areas they would like us to focus on," Lewis said. "We are not reducing the other objectives we have had since our founding, we are just narrowing our focus."
Shortly after its launch in June 1997, the board announced six Major Ministry Objectives. It’s those objectives that have been distilled down to three — sharing Christ, starting churches and mobilizing missionaries and volunteers — that set NAMB apart from all other Southern Baptist entities. The refined objectives were approved by trustees during their Oct. 4, 2006, board meeting.
The objectives that have been removed from the top-tier focus — volunteering in missions, impacting the culture and equipping leaders — have simply been folded into other strategies that, in turn, support the remaining three primary objectives.
"We are still committed to those objectives but we believe we can do those more effectively through existing programs," Lewis explained. "This change simply sharpens our focus and helps us to stay on our primary mission."
And it’s that focus that bolsters the work of 258 employees in the board’s Atlanta-area headquarters. With a simpler mission statement, they say, they are more energized to work with churches, associations and state partners to complete the task of evangelizing North America with the gospel.
The new NAMB is being structured from the ground up in response to those listening sessions with key leaders at all levels of Southern Baptist Convention life. In addition to providing a unified, national strategy in evangelism and church planting, feedback from partners also included requests for better research and development and for help in reaching people groups.
NAMB plans to beef up those areas with an enhanced research and development strategy that will undergird all of its initiatives, with the board eventually moving toward a people group model and focusing on one group each year.
"We are increasingly looking at North America as a mission field of people groups, much like the International Mission Board (IMB) has approached its work around the world," Lewis said. "We want to focus on the world that God has brought to us.
"We are realizing that we have a North American assignment with an international impact. As we do a better job of reaching North America we will be building stronger churches. As those churches grow, God will provide the people and resources to strengthen the IMB’s ventures around the world," Lewis explained. (BP)
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