SAN ANTONIO (ABP) — The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship is launching a new category of mission service that will allow churches directly to fund specific missionaries who work through the Fellowship.
The program — called AsYouGo — allows missionaries to affiliate with CBF Global Missions even if they are funded by churches, have full-time employment that takes them abroad, or both. In the new arrangement, a church can completely finance a missions worker, and that worker can join in the work of other CBF Global Missions field personnel.
“We recognize the world is changing,” said Tom Ogburn, the Fellowship's associate coordinator for volunteer and partnership missions.
“AsYouGo represents a different era for us,” said Ogburn, who announced the new missions-sending mechanism during the “We Love Missions” conference at Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio. “Missions is changing. The church is back in the center of the process.”
The Fellowship currently has four categories of mission service — career field personnel, the short-term Global Service Corps program, Student.Go semester missions, and Envoys, which are affiliated with but not funded by the Fellowship. AsYouGo replaces the Envoy category, according to Ogburn.
Those who participate in AsYouGo will be called “affiliates,” and the sending churches will be called “encourager churches.” Candidates will be accepted as affiliates based on the CBF missions strategy of working among the world's most neglected people groups.
“The church will become a true participant in the sending process,” Ogburn said.
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– Lance Wallace of CBF contributed to this story.