October 1, 2026
ORLANDO, Fla. — Send Relief mobilized more than 60,000 volunteers last year, served more than 2.5 million people, and helped lead to more than 816,000 gospel conversations through Southern Baptist churches, missionaries, and ministry partners across the United States and around the world.
“Behind every number is a name,” International Mission Board President Paul Chitwood reminded messengers. “Behind every story is a church.”
North American Mission Board President Kevin Ezell and Chitwood gave the Send Relief presentation on Wednesday during the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting in Orlando, thanking churches for giving, going, praying, and meeting needs in Jesus’ name.
“Paul and I want to start by saying thank you,” Ezell said. “Because what you’re about to hear in the next few minutes is not about us. It’s about you. It’s about your churches. It’s about your giving. And it’s about your people.”
Send Relief is the compassion ministry partnership of the IMB and NAMB. Launched in 2020, it helps Southern Baptist churches meet physical needs and share the gospel through disaster response, hunger relief, mission trips, ministry centers, and local church partnerships.
Chitwood said the ministry brings together Southern Baptists’ missionary sending agency and their North American church planting partner to help churches do compassion ministry “at home and around the world.”
“You’ve shown up in Jesus’ name,” Chitwood said. “You have partnered with us and with one another.”
Chitwood said Send Relief work is not primarily happening in offices, but in local communities through churches, missionaries, and volunteers serving in places such as Cuba, Jamaica, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, and communities across North America.
He said lasting compassion ministry happens through people and churches already present in their communities before disaster strikes, who remain long after immediate needs are met.
“Compassion that lasts comes through people who already live there,” Chitwood stated.
Ezell said Send Relief is designed to give pastors practical ways to engage their churches in missions, whether across the street or around the world. He pointed to ministry centers in Appalachia, Boston, Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, Las Vegas, and Puerto Rico as places where churches can send teams to serve alongside local partners.
“If you’ve been wondering about where to send your next team, Send Relief is built for exactly that,” Ezell said. “We want to come alongside you and make it very simple.”
Chitwood said similar opportunities are available internationally in places where IMB missionaries are already serving, including Thailand, the Philippines, Greece, and Kenya.
“The mission trip is rarely just about a project that we do somewhere around the world,” Chitwood said. “A family receives help and hope. Volunteers receive a calling to do more, maybe to go plant their lives among the nations.”
Ezell shared the story of a team of 11 from Graffiti 2 Baptist Church in New York that served through the Send Relief Ministry Center in Puerto Rico. The team helped finish a home for a young single mother named Joslyn and her son, part of a long-term project several churches had supported for more than a year.
By the end of the week, Ezell said, Joslyn had a safe home, and two volunteers had given their lives to Christ.
“That’s a Send Relief mission trip,” Ezell said. “Eleven people, one week, one home, two souls.”
Chitwood highlighted a Send Relief team that served last September in Lima, Peru. The effort included 99 volunteers from 27 U.S. churches working alongside 11 Peruvian congregations.
Among those volunteers was Kelsie Littles, whose team from Crosswalk Church in Duluth, Ga., sanded and painted a classroom at a Peruvian church while other teams hosted vision clinics and block parties.
Chitwood said Littles initially wondered whether her team’s work was less significant than other ministry projects. Then the Peruvian pastor told them the room would be used to teach children, some of whom could grow up to become pastors, preachers, or missionaries.
“That’s the Send Relief serve tour,” Chitwood said.
Ezell said Serve Tour mobilized more than 4,000 volunteers last year who served more than 28,000 people. He described Serve Tour as a way of taking the evangelistic and compassion ministry emphasis of Crossover “on the road” to cities across North America and, through IMB partnership, around the world.
Chitwood also pointed to Send Relief’s hunger relief work, noting that more than 700 million people around the world are chronically hungry. He said Southern Baptists are responding through Send Relief and Global Hunger Relief offerings by partnering with believers already living in affected communities.
He told messengers about Grace, a pastor’s wife in northern Nigeria who joined a Send Relief project that taught women how to use soybeans to feed their families. Each woman left with 22 pounds of soybeans, five recipes, and a mission.
Grace later invited her neighbors to a training, including Muslim women. Chitwood said the project has reached 6,700 people and started two Bible studies.
“We’re friends, and we’re finding ways to share Christ with them naturally in the relationships that we build,” Grace said, according to Chitwood.
Chitwood encouraged churches to participate in Global Hunger Sunday on Aug. 23. "The dollar you give is the dollar that shows up in Nigeria, in Cuba, or in eastern Kentucky,” Chitwood said.
He also described Send Relief’s response after Hurricane Melissa struck the Caribbean last fall. In eastern Cuba, 50 Send Relief generators that had arrived just weeks before the storm were used by churches to run feeding stations, charge cell phones, and turn church buildings into hubs of compassion.
In Jamaica, Chitwood said Southern Baptists came alongside churches already serving their communities, deploying 158 disaster relief volunteers who tarped roofs and provided water filters.
“We don’t parachute in,” Chitwood said. “We stand alongside churches and missionaries who are already there on the ground, and then we stay with them.”
Ezell urged Southern Baptists to respond by praying, giving, growing, and going. He encouraged churches to give through Global Hunger Sunday, send teams on Serve Tour and ministry center trips, use Send Relief resources, and help build a culture of compassion in their congregations.
Chitwood asked messengers to pray for churches in Cuba and Jamaica still helping communities recover, for Grace and her neighbors in Nigeria, and for families still rebuilding in western North Carolina.
“Compassion is not a program,” Chitwood said. “It really comes out of our discipleship.”
Chitwood closed by thanking Southern Baptists for launching Send Relief, continuing to invest in it, and staying long after immediate attention fades.
“The story we’re writing together is a story that God is still writing,” Chitwood said, “but it is a beautiful, redeeming story.”
Share with others
