The Open Door

A couple of weeks ago associational missionaries from across Georgia got together for their annual meeting at Norman Park Baptist Conference Center. Since we have 92 associations in Georgia, this is a sizable annual meeting. It is also attended by numerous employees from our Convention staff as we discuss ways that we can work more effectively together and multiply our ability to have a spiritual impact upon our state.

Our Georgia associational missionaries are great men. They are devoted to their ministries and aggressive in their strategic plans to plant churches, evangelize, and encourage believers in the area of their association. Some are located in resort and vacation areas of our state and include in their plans special strategies for reaching folks in a resort environment. It is the desire of our state convention to come alongside our associations in a partnership relationship to work for greater effectiveness and success in ministry.

One way that we do this up close and personal is through the ministry of our Ministry Resource Consultants. These nine men serve in various regions of our state with the specific assignment of working closely with our associations and churches to help facilitate the ministry objectives to which the Lord has directed them. The MRC regional ministry of our Convention has been in existence now for a little over ten years and is continuing to grow in strength as more and more churches and associations are being directly impacted by their ministry.

As with all of our Convention staff, our MRCs are in place, not to do the work, or direct the work of churches and associations, but to facilitate these ministries. The Ministry Resource Consultants’ presence among our associations is one more very important way that the Convention staff is saying, “We are here to bless your vision and ministry any way that we can.”

We understand that healthy associations are vital to a healthy convention. The converse is also true. We are in this ministry together. Clearly, we can do more cooperating together than we can do through our collective individual efforts. This cooperative effort is a defining characteristic of Southern Baptists.

We do what we do best when we do it cooperatively. I have never been all that impressed with the results of independent churches, even huge independent churches, when the results of their ministries are compared with what 44,000 cooperating Southern Baptist churches are able to accomplish.

In our structure as Southern Baptists, the associations play a very important role with regard to cooperation. For the Southern Baptist church, cooperation begins at home through the Cooperative Program and through support of and involvement with the local association. My sincere desire is that every Georgia Baptist pastor would see the association as the first place where he can express his cooperative spirit beyond his local congregation.

As a pastor, I enjoyed my relationship with the association because it afforded me the opportunity for fellowship with other pastors and other churches. When I served as pastor in Kentucky, I was visiting at the hospital one day when a friend, who happened to be pastor of an independent Bible church, approached me.

He asked what his church would have to do to become a member of the Kentucky Baptist Convention and the Southern Baptist Convention. The first thing I said was, “Why do you ask? Are you thinking about no longer being an independent?” He said, “As a matter of fact I am. It gets really lonely being an independent. It would be a blessing to be able to enjoy fellowship with other pastors and churches, and I like the way you Southern Baptists cooperate together.” That pastor did bring his church into the Kentucky and the Southern Baptist conventions.

It is a privilege to be a Southern Baptist and to enjoy our structure of connectedness that includes the local church, the local association, the state convention, and the Southern Baptist Convention.