Southern Baptists always have dreamed large, and we are no different today. The new North American Mission Board’s national evangelism initiative, “God’s Plan for Sharing,” attests to our denomination’s tenacity in keeping the spread of the gospel at the top of its list of priorities for performing kingdom work.
Don KirklandImmediate past SBC president Frank Page lent his encouragement to the initiative whose goal, Page pointed out, is a “complete gospel sweep” of North America between now and 2020.
North American Mission Board president Geoff Hammond unveiled GPS during his report, underscoring its focus on the key evangelistic areas of praying, engaging, sowing and harvesting.
The evangelism initiative – developed by NAMB as it worked with state and local Southern Baptist leaders – urges Southern Baptists to pray for people without a personal relationship to Jesus, receive witness training followed by sharing the gospel with others, while celebrating what God is doing in the lives of those around us.
“God positions us every day,” Hammond said, “with opportunities for sharing our faith.” The NAMB president pointed out that GPS is a means to an end, and that end is “every believer sharing and every person hearing by 2020.”
As I said earlier, Southern Baptists have always dreamed large.
Greater than the challenge of enabling every person in North America to at least hear the good news of Jesus by 2020 will be the effort to turn every believer in Christ into a sharer of the gospel.
We can, and should, be thankful that it is possible for everyone in North America to hear about Jesus, even if not everyone tells the gospel story. Southern Baptists, joined by other evangelical Christians, have ways and means to communicate “the old, old story of Jesus and his love” in the face of failure by his followers to be his witnesses, “telling people about me everywhere – in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Believers who do not share their faith forfeit the joy experienced by all Christians who do.
I learned something important to me about witnessing many years ago. My wife and I were watching our son play in a Little League baseball game one evening. Suddenly, and with a look of dismay on her face, my wife turned to me and said, “It’s gone, the diamond in my ring is gone.”
Several friends joined me beneath the bleachers as we crawled around and, aided by a flashlight, searched for a half-carat whose value seemed to grow by the second. No luck.
The next day, my wife called me at the Courier office, suggesting, “Why don’t you go by the ball field one more time and see if you can find my diamond.”
I ventured into the same sand, this time in daylight, and within a minute or two saw the diamond, just lying there as if waiting for me to reclaim it. My joy was unmeasured as I drove to our home – only to find that my wife had run an errand and I stood in our den with a story to tell and nobody to tell it to.
No matter. I went across the street to the home of friends of ours. Their teenage daughter answered the doorbell. “Are your mom and dad home?” I asked. She told me they were not. “Okay,” I said, “then I’ll tell you.” And I did, the whole story of the lost diamond now found.
To this day I am sure that if the first neighbor I called on had not been at home, I would have gone from house to house until I found somebody, anybody, to tell my story of loss and discovery.
Good news spills out of us without any coaxing, as an almost involuntary act and without any restraint. And so it should be with the good news of Jesus Christ. When Peter and John were arrested for preaching about our Lord and ordered to stop it, they replied to the council, “We cannot stop telling about everything we have seen and heard.”
The new evangelistic initiative GPS is an opportunity, as well as a challenge, for Southern Baptists. Believers have personal stories to tell about “the love that drew salvation’s plan, the grace that brought it down to man.” So, tell it.