MARYVILLE, Tenn. (ABP) – The head of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s global missions operation says the movement remains committed to continue ministry with the poorest of the poor and the least evangelized while seeking to adapt new models in a rapidly changing world.
Rob Nash discusses the changing landscape of global missions in a breakout session at the Tennessee CBF annual meeting.
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“Part of what we are working to do is to bring some understanding of what God is doing in the world — some focus and structure to ‘what is,’ rather than to try and set some sort of focus and structure ‘down upon,’” Rob Nash, global missions coordinator for the Atlanta-based Fellowship, said April 9 in a breakout session at the Tennessee CBF annual meeting at Monte Vista Baptist Church in Maryville, Tenn.
Nash said about a year ago the CBF, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this summer, began to “stop and think” about its missions strategy, bringing in congregations, partner organizations, field personnel and staff. He said a number of realities emerged.
“One is that the gospel, the good news, is really moving from everywhere to everyone today,” Nash said.
“We are on the verge of seeing more Christians in China — People’s Republic of China –than there are in the United States of America,” he said, “in my estimation making China more of a Christian nation than the United States, depending on how you gauge that.”
“[That’s] something most of us never imagined, but that’s really where we are,” he said, “130 million Christians, and that’s just kind of a rough estimate, in China.
Nash said the annual gathering of Korean Baptists in the United States this year will be larger than annual meetings of the CBF or the Southern Baptist Convention or the biennial meeting of American Baptist Churches USA. While he isn’t certain, he said the same is probably true of Filipino Baptists in the U.S.
“Then there is the reality that local congregations are really at the very heart of the global mission engagement in ways that I think most of us hoped for and prayed for and anticipated in the past,” he said. “The reality is that it has happened.”
Throwing the mix into the hopper, Nash said CBF leaders came up with both a “recommitment” to ministry among what he calls “the least and the lost” and a “revolution,” a strategy designed around communities and networks that share the Fellowship’s passion and in partnership with the global church.
“What we are really seeing now is the emergence of networks of engagement that began to live and breathe on their own and really in many ways are not dependent upon any entity,” he said.
One example, Nash said, is Together for Hope, the Fellowship’s rural-poverty initiative launched 10 years ago targeting 20 of the poorest counties in the United States. While the brainchild of CBF global missions leadership, the project has its own leadership council drawn from field personnel, local leadership and mission partners.
“If CBF passed away tomorrow, Together for Hope would continue,” Nash said. “We nurture it, we support it and we facilitate it, but it really is not dependent on CBF for its existence.”
Nash said one of the great networks now underway is in Grand Goave, Haiti, where CBF has served as “kind of a pulling-together point” for ministry partners.
“You have congregations that are engaging with that network working in the Grand Goave area in construction help,” Nash said. “You have American Baptists who have come alongside us in it, the British Baptist missionary society, Australian Baptists, Mercer University, any number of partners — Fuller Center for Housing, Conscience International — who come together in this network around this focus in the Grand Goave community in Haiti with disaster response.”
Sometimes networks form around the work of field personnel, Nash said, and sometimes field personnel are called out of networks. Two churches interested in ministering to slum areas in Peru, for example, sponsored a couple appointed as self-funded CBF field personnel.
“We’re even seeing today, for example in North Africa, field personnel pull congregations together around a particular kind of ministry — child orphanage kind of ministries — field personnel are then forced to evacuate, and guess who keeps the ministry focus in that particular part of the world?” Nash said. “It becomes congregations that have come alongside these folks and continue to support the ministry, to encourage it and, in some sense, to fund it after the field personnel have left.”
“God is doing something, and like Christian folks throughout the history of time we are all trying to make sense of it and we are trying to figure out how to move in concert with it,” Nash said. “It’s a challenge.”
While the Fellowship hasn’t had funds to appoint any new fully funded missionaries for quite a while, Nash said however field personnel are funded they must share the CBF’s focus on ministry to the least and lost. Also, everyone goes through the same appointment process, ensuring there is no sacrifice of qualifications.
“It is different from what it has been before,” Nash said. “It used to be that we were working with just our teams of field personnel to determine who needed to be appointed and what kind of job services were out there. Now congregations are really part of this as well.”
“It’s messier, and it’s more challenging,” Nash said. “Community is that way, and you work it out together.”
Nash said the Fellowship is coming out of “a 20th century” way of doing missions “that has some great value to it,” but also living in a context where “21st century ways” of funding and engagement are emerging.
“What we have to do is to figure out how we pull all that together into a seamless whole,” he said.
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Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.