This is a call for CABA church leaders to re-think their community as a mission field. Our theme for this coming year starting next month is “Community Engagement.” Engaging our communities must have new thinking that aligns with God’s call, command, and equipping to multiply disciple-making and new churches. When a new Christian is baptized, they are often “raised to walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). I’m asking our church leaders to get out of their rut. A rut has been described as a grave with the ends kicked out! We must walk in newness seeking and willing to follow the Lord’s lead.
Community engagement can improve by making church planting a priority by all CABA churches, not just the Send Network NAMB plants. Raise up church planters by specific training. I recommend No Place Left or Workers in the Harvest. These are free and available through the associational office.
CABA church leaders must become the source of witnesses and planters.
No SBC church would send an IMB missionary overseas and expect them to find church planters to help them that were located outside of the people groups among whom they were working. IMB missionaries are also expected to start more than one church simultaneously.
Yet in the Cincinnati Area, we have planters from many southern states arriving to start a church. CABA churches that used to sacrifice to start a new church now stand around and re-direct funds away from planting. We’re all delighted to see four new churches start – and sometimes more – planted every year through NAMB’s system.
There are two realities: (a) a quarter to one-third of these plants don’t survive beyond four years, and (b) lostness is so widespread that we need to be planting 400 churches, not four every year.
This means CABA church leaders must be raised up and fast-tracked into segments of our harvest fields. The key is that bi-vocational or co-vocational leaders must emerge. Just as a reminder, a co-vocational person earns a living so that they may minister. While we praise the Send Network for costly and valiant efforts, we must say that it is not enough! Don’t get me wrong. We love our planters and the sacrifices that they have made and continue to make.
Immigrant groups, multihousing, and special interest segments comprise a spectrum of people that need a viable, disciple-making engagement. An initiative that generates disciple-makers needs to be started. And it must be infused with a methodology that is wildly reproducible. Babies look like their parents because of their DNA. We need a rapid multiplication movement to be part of each CABA church’s DNA.
Community engagement should require church leaders to be intentional disciple-makers!
--Mark Snowden serves as director for the Cincinnati Area Baptist Association
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