Kevin Ezell used the weekly campus worship time at Anderson University Feb. 2 to share his passion for church planting with students and to urge them to consider God’s call to plant churches when choosing a place to begin their careers.
NAMB’s Ezell spoke Feb. 9 at Anderson University.“Even if you are going to be a teacher, or a dentist, you can be a part of something much bigger than yourself,” the president of the North American Mission Board told students. “Invest yourself in an area where churches need to be planted, and work alongside someone God has called to plant a church in that city.”
He challenged the students with a text from Acts 20:24 in which Paul says, “However, I consider my life worth nothing to me, if only I may finish the race and complete the task the Lord Jesus has given me – the task of testifying to the Gospel of God’s grace.” The verse, he reminded students, applies to all Christians, regardless of their vocation.
After campus worship, many students paused at computers placed in the lobby of the Henderson Auditorium to file their contact information and likely destination for work after graduation into a database so that they could be matched up with church planters in those cities. Anderson University students have been at the forefront of Southern Baptist Convention church planting for several years as a launch point for the Transplant initiative. Dozens of AU students have been a part of new church plants from the East Coast to New Orleans.
Afterward, at a luncheon with area pastors, university officials and ministry graduate students, Ezell talked frankly about the strategy being developed at NAMB to revamp and reorganize the way missions are done. He told the group that in the past five months he has delved into an organization he called inefficient in some ways and ineffective in others.
“It was reported that we had 1,500 church plants last year, and that’s simply not true,” he said, suggesting that the actual number was far less, and promised that at this year’s SBC annual meeting, the report would include the actual number of real new churches. He said that some of the alleged new churches in previous reports were actually existing churches that were dwindling and had become missions of larger, more stable churches.
“The fact is that less than 4 percent of Southern Baptist churches are involved in planting new churches,” he said. “Our short-range goal is to get that number up to 10 and grow from there.”
NAMB has already trimmed much of its staff to make it leaner and more responsive to the need for new churches, he said.
“We have downsized,” he said, “not because of the economy, but because of stewardship. We’ve got to get more of the resources to those who need it. We’ve got to do a better job of supporting church planters in target areas.”
Some of the pastors expressed concern about whether funds currently going to such initiatives as campus ministry might be redirected, causing campus work to suffer or be eliminated. Ezell said those decisions have not been made and would only be made with input from each state convention.
“We haven’t gotten down to that yet,” he admitted. “I can tell you that we have to protect the flow of new ministers to accomplish all of this, and that comes from our universities.”
In characterizing what the new shape of NAMB might look like as it places more emphasis on placing Baptist churches in major cities where few churches exist, Ezell said, “The new scorecard will not be how many churches were planted in your state, but how many churches your state planted.”
– Anderson University Communications.