Jae McKee gets choked up when he talks about partnership — specifically the partnership between the state where he grew up and the state where he lives now.
“I can’t really qualify or quantify how it’s impacted me, because it’s so unbelievable,” he said.
McKee grew up in Rogersville, Alabama, as a “red-dirt farmer,” but while he was in college at the University of North Alabama, God began to work in his heart and draw him toward Alaska. He went there as a short-term missionary and, more than 30 years later, he’s still there.
“I said yes to an opportunity that I felt like God had brought into my life as a college student, and it has turned into a lifetime,” McKee said.
He now serves as director of missions and church planting for the Alaska Baptist Resource Network, and since May 2021, they’ve been in an official partnership with the Alabama Baptist State Convention.
“It has impacted me in so many ways — people, finances, prayers, building the awareness that Alaska is here,” McKee said. “It’s really transformed everything about my life.”
Scotty Goldman, director of the office of global missions for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, said that’s the idea behind the missions partnerships that Alabama Baptists have had over the years — to build up and encourage the people who are working to spread the gospel in other contexts.
“If you’re in a location away from family and friends, to have somebody who contacts you on a regular basis for encouragement or sends a team to come and work alongside you is huge,” Goldman said.
Putting feet to Acts 1:8
Reggie Quimby, who was Goldman’s predecessor, said it also impacts those who are on the “home” side of the partnership.
“It helps people get their minds around opportunities they might not be aware of,” he said. “In terms of what the Bible says about being witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the end of the earth, it helps put feet to the Great Commission and Acts 1:8.”
Quimby said it also helps churches that may not have a missions pastor or a natural inroad to North American or international missions engage with what God is doing in other places.
“It helps enlist new people and in that way helps to call out missionaries as well,” he said.
Quimby said he first became aware of the value of partnerships when he and his wife, Karen, were serving as International Mission Board missionaries in Spain from 1979 until 1989. Oklahoma Baptists established a partnership with them, visiting their city and hosting evangelistic events that bolstered their efforts there.
Partnering sacrificially
At the same time Rick Lance, then pastor of First Baptist Church Tuscaloosa, was experiencing what missions partnerships could look like from the other side.
“Alabama Baptists were involved in geographical partnerships with Nigeria, South Korea, Alaska, Wyoming and Hawaii during the ’80s and early ’90s,” he said. “These partnerships were most effective. Many Alabama Baptists made sacrificial missions trips to these areas.”
He had seen that firsthand — he was personally involved in the South Korea and Wyoming partnerships as he led his church to be a part.
“Getting to know the South Korean people was a delight for certain. I grew to appreciate their culture,” Lance said. “My participation in the Wyoming partnership helped to better understand the Western states far better. The world is different there. Being a pastor and church leader looks far different there. I am grateful for the privilege to have worked with Wyoming Baptists and the Cheyenne, Wyoming, community.”
New approach
During that time, both Quimby and Lance were growing in their understanding of what partnership could look like and what it could accomplish. In 1989, Quimby returned from the field and joined the staff of the SBOM, and in 1998, Lance joined him and became SBOM executive director.
The two were on the same page about the importance of missions.
“When Reggie arrived on staff, he was an associate and part of his responsibilities were in our geographical partnerships,” Lance said. “Later, I had the privilege of creating the office of global missions, and Reggie became the first director and the team leader for missions mobilization.”
Part of Quimby’s role was helping wrap up Alabama Baptists’ partnership in Spain in 1999 — a full-circle moment for him. From there, the vision only grew for the new office of global missions.
“It was a new direction for Alabama Baptists because it was a dedicated position to concentrate on developing volunteers and working in missions partnerships,” Quimby said.
In that position, he led the state to develop five-year partnerships with Baptists in New England and Venezuela in 2000. After that came partnerships with Ukraine and Guatemala in 2005 and Michigan in 2006 that lasted until 2012.
“During that time as we developed those partnerships, we started helping churches go on their own,” he said.
Over time, the focus shifted from SBOM-led trips to individual churches connecting with missionaries, which helped the partnerships keep going even after the statewide emphasis ended.
“We heard stories about people being impacted in such a way that after we ended the partnerships, certain churches adopted those places they had gone to and continued to go even years after the partnership was officially over,” Quimby said.
So as the last few country and state partnerships wrapped up, he began to lead Alabama Baptists toward a new type of missions partnership. Rather than the whole state focusing on one area of the world for a set amount of time, Alabama Baptist churches would partner with missionaries from Alabama, wherever they might be in the world.
The effort — called Alabama Acts 1:8 Connections — was spearheaded by the office of global missions.
Part of that effort was visiting the IMB’s training center and connecting with Alabamians before they ever deployed to the missions field, Quimby said.
“We tried to do that in the early days of their orientation so we can establish contact with their home churches, their sending churches and the churches where they grew up to help strengthen that relationship between them,” he said. “We have continued to maintain that kind of connection with our new missionaries.”
That strategy has been so fruitful that other states have seen the benefits and started modeling it, said Quimby, who retired in 2016.
Goldman, who joined the office of global missions in 2008, has carried on with that approach during his time as director, and he said he could tell story after story “where the missionary and the church said it’s just been fabulous.”
Changed perspectives
One of those is Lineville Baptist Church’s partnership with Alabama missionaries Wallace and Dee in western Europe.
Pastor Ben Curlee said his church “has come alive with the understanding of lostness in Europe.”
“For those who have been, it has changed the way they see missions,” he said.
Goldman had connected Lineville Baptist with Wallace and Dee in 2018 after the couple had asked for help recruiting prayer partners.
“We are desperate for people to come here and pray,” Wallace said. “We recognize God working here is tied with prayer.”
He said the partnership with Lineville Baptist has been a perfect fit. The church has sent teams to prayer walk and encourage them, and he feels “they truly are invested here with us.”
Goldman said that’s exactly what he hopes to see happen over and over with Alabama Baptist churches and missionaries all over the nation and world, and in Alaska, which is a little bit of a hybrid between the old style of partnership and the new because of McKee’s work with the Alaska Baptist Convention.
Taking opportunities
“The more we worked with Jae, the more we realized there was a huge need in Alaska,” Goldman said. “Through that relationship, this partnership with the entire state has kind of blossomed. We have several families in Alaska now who are serving there.”
Alabama Baptists have latched onto the opportunity, he said.
In March 2022, Pastor Chuck Conley of First Baptist Church Grant went on a vision trip to First Baptist Church Sitka, Alaska, and found out on his way home that the pastor there was resigning.
Conley was shocked, but he said God began to focus his thoughts on one thing — “How can we help?” It wasn’t long before he started to realize that the best way they could help was to come alongside the church to provide a pastor through the summer.
So they did, rotating their own staff and laypeople in from early June until mid-September.
“They have really just taken Sitka, Alaska, and they have done a tremendous job,” Goldman said.
He said he encourages churches to get involved with the state’s approximately 400 North American and international missionaries through prayer, giving and going to support their work on the field. Goldman can help provide the connection and offer resources such as safe travel training for missions teams.
“There is a partner out there for every Alabama Baptist church,” he said.
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