North American Mission Board president Kevin Ezell has announced new missionary placements for several states in the northeast United States that have not had a full-time missionary fully funded by NAMB.
“Every state should have at least one full-time missionary before any state has 20,” Ezell told NAMB trustees during their May 15-16 meeting. The new missionaries will serve as church-planting catalysts.
The new missionary roles – located in Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, South New Jersey and Vermont – will be the first full-time missionaries fully funded by NAMB serving in those states.
Since coming to NAMB as president in September 2010, Ezell has championed new budget and personnel priorities for the entity and cut budgets and staff at NAMB’s offices in Alpharetta, Ga. He is shifting the funds into NAMB’s “Send North America” strategy, which is focused on church planting and evangelism efforts in North America’s largest cities and in areas where Southern Baptist churches are scarce.
Ezell shared the plans against the backdrop of a stated goal to see a net gain of 5,000 Southern Baptist congregations in the next decade. If achieved, the gain would be the largest seen by the SBC since 1900, representing a 3-percent gain in the congregation-to-population ratio for Southern Baptists. Recent decades have seen a steady drop in the ratio as the North American population has exploded, while SBC church starts have failed to keep pace and church closings have remained at an average of 880 a year in the last decade.
Ezell told trustees one of his biggest surprises after coming to NAMB was to learn of the high number of bivocational pastors serving the SBC. These pastors, he said, are key to gaining ground in North America.
Ezell said NAMB will begin encouraging bivocational pastors and church planters through a variety of means. He announced NAMB is partnering with Union University to offer bivocational pastors a 33-hour online master of arts in theological studies degree. NAMB will provide a limited number of scholarships for the program each year. – NAMB