As part of its recently announced reorganization, the International Mission Board (IMB) reaffirmed its commitment “to serve and facilitate all cooperating Southern Baptists involved in fulfilling our Great Commission task.”
That means the IMB cannot offer one approach to missions that all cooperating Southern Baptists must use.
Instead the IMB is responsible for working with Southern Baptist churches to see how the mission board can best facilitate the involvement of every church in sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with all people everywhere.
But churches are different. They have different worship styles, different musical tastes and different emphases just to mention some of the obvious. They also have different levels of involvement in missions and evangelism.
Providing missions opportunities for all churches seems like a daunting task.
At a two-day briefing for state paper editors held Sept. 24–25, IMB President Jerry Rankin and several other executives provided an overview of the IMB’s strategy to accomplish this goal. It all begins by learning about the more than 44,000 churches of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
The IMB uses six broad categories it defines as “mind-sets” to group the churches. Those categories are:
1. The Legacy Church. These churches primarily utilize traditional Southern Baptist programs to answer their missional needs.
2. The Transitional Church. These churches have legacy SBC-roots and rely on programmatic structure to answer their missional needs but do not necessarily utilize all traditional SBC programs. In fact, they often use non-SBC programs.
3. The Purpose-Drive Church. These churches deliberately align their activities with five core purposes: membership, maturity, ministry, missions and magnification. These churches use a systematic approach to assimilate new participants. The process is described as moving unchurched attendees from “crowd” to “core.”
Oftentimes the primary worship service takes a seeker-sensitive approach.
4. The Seeker Church. These churches utilize large-group corporate services exclusively to target the unchurched. These churches see traditional programs as irrelevant and a barrier to reaching the unchurched.
5. The Emerging Church. These churches have leaders who tend to be nonlinear thinkers and have a structure that is more organic than organized. Outreach models tend to focus on “belong, then believe” versus confrontational evangelism. These churches are interested in church tradition but not in denominational tradition.
6. The Affinity Church. These churches primarily target the needs of a particular affinity group, network and/or ethnic population. Examples would include the growing number of cowboy churches or Hispanic churches.
Recent estimates place about 70 percent of SBC-related churches in the first two categories — Legacy and Transitional.
However, IMB officials believe that percentage is shrinking. The most recent estimates indicate the percentage of churches in the first two categories at 64 percent. The IMB goes further and predicts the percentage of churches that turn first to SBC resources for answers to church program and missions needs will decrease rapidly in the next few years.
Obviously the way the IMB relates to a Legacy Church must be different from the way it relates to a Purpose-Driven Church if it is to serve both.
In addition to grouping churches by mind-sets, the IMB groups churches by level of missions involvement as related to participation with the IMB. The result is that only slightly more than one out of eight SBC-related churches exceeds the criteria of basic missions support.
At the top end of the IMB’s missions involvement chain is a category called Multiplying. This category is composed of churches that encourage, enlist and equip other churches to become strategically involved in missions. Only about one in 500 SBC churches has achieved that level of involvement, according to the IMB.
Partnering and Engaging is the second-highest category. This category has churches that prayerfully and personally engage a specific unreached people group or population segment in a church-planting strategy. In this group is about one in 50 churches.
About one in 10 churches fits the criteria for the Exploring category. These churches prayerfully investigate opportunities to be on mission with God through personal involvement with a specific people group or groups.
The rest of the churches, about 87 out of 100, fall into the categories of Supporting or Limited. Supporting churches, which make up nearly half of the remaining churches, prayerfully and financially invest in missions work through giving through the Cooperative Program and to SBC missions offerings including the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions and the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions.
The IMB’s goal is to work with churches regardless of their “mind-set” and move them from Limited or Supporting to Exploring to Partnering and Engaging to Multiplying. As expressed in the reorganization statement, the IMB is not to do missions for the churches but to facilitate churches as they fulfill the Great Commission task.
These statistics do not claim to represent what all churches are doing in missions. As IMB officials stressed, they reflect only what churches are doing through the IMB, and a growing number of churches reflect a “mind-set” of using non-SBC resources in their programs and missions.
But the statistics do raise a serious question for each cooperating church about where that church is in its missions involvement. IMB figures suggest nearly 4 billion of the world’s nearly 6.8 billion people live in unreached people groups. That is more than half the population.
Carrying the gospel to people of every language, tribe and nation requires involvement of every church and every Christian believer. No matter the mind-set of the congregation, every church should ask itself where it falls in the scale of missions involvement.
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