The Coordinating Council of the Alabama Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (ALCBF) announced a new initiative to start eight churches within Alabama by 2008. The group also announced a record budget for 2004 at its annual meeting Nov. 16 in Mobile.
Mart Gray, ALCBF state coordinator, presented the church start initiative, called Daybreak, to those attending the meeting at First Baptist Church, Mobile.
“The way to reach the unchurched is to start new churches,” Gray said. “This is a pretty big goal for an organization that hasn’t even started a church yet.”
But Gray noted that the group has already begun the work with a new church start being planned for Hoover, in the Shannon Valley area. Michial Lewis and Scott Cole are working with the church start, which plans to begin meeting in fall 2004.
Daybreak and other initiatives grew out of a year of planning and research by five action teams of the coordinating council.
Focusing on the areas of communication, leadership development/ connection, partnership missions, starting new churches and organizational structure, Gray said each team researched ALCBF’s needs in one of these areas and how to meet those needs.
Daybreak values
Mike Olive, moderator for the ALCBF coordinating council and pastor of First Baptist Church, Williams, said the Daybreak initiative is a way to “start churches that have the same kind of values that we have as ALCBF.”
Gray also announced the Initiative for Ministerial Excellence (IME), which is funded by a grant from the Lilly Foundation.
This initiative connects ALCBF ministers with their peers for growth and provides them with ministry resources.
Also announced during the annual meeting is the independent publication of ALCBF’s newsletter, The Baptist Light. The newsletter will be published quarterly and also will be available online, Gray said. This transition will help connect ALCBF churches by letting them see what others are doing, he added.
In order to fund these new initiatives the coordinating council also adopted a record budget for 2004 of $160,500 — an 18 percent increase over 2003’s $133,280 budget.
Olive said this increase comes from needing to fund ALCBF’s new initiatives.
Daybreak alone was budgeted to receive $17,500 in order to fund needs and to hire an associate coordinator for new church starts. Olive also said the costs were thoroughly researched by the action teams so the most accurate budget possible could be adopted.
He added that giving through October 2003 was at a record high of $115,256.76, with a projected total of $140,000 for the year, making the coordinating council confident the 2004 budget goal will be met.
ALCBF was founded in 1994. It now counts 35 Alabama Baptist churches among its members, according to Gray. He said the organization also receives offerings from individuals in about 200 Alabama churches. As well as using undesignated gifts from these to fund the budget, Gray said the organization was also looking at grants and asking for offerings given directly to the initiatives.
David Hull, pastor of First Baptist Church, Huntsville, encouraged ALCBF members in these new ventures during his convocation sermon.
He urged them to not only guard the founding principles they hold dear, but also to use them as tools to instill hope in the lives of people around them.
“Maybe the time has come to shift our focus of trying to guard something to trying to garden something,” he said. “The world is not crying out for our heritage, it’s crying out for hope.”
Share with others: