November 01, 1991 by Rick Wood

Sets New Goals To Reach The Unreached

The Southern Baptist Convention--the largest US denomination with 37,000 churches and 14 million members--is refocusing its enormous missions potential and energy into frontier missions and reaching the unreached peoples by the year 2000.

Keith Parks, President of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, returned recently from a mountain retreat with a vision for powerful new foreign missions initiatives to help Southern Baptists reach the goals of their "Bold Mission Thrust" campaign.

Bold Mission Thrust is the Southern Baptist 25-year plan for sharing the message of Jesus Christ with all the people of the world by the year 2000. As part of this, Parks' 10 point "Missions 21" vision calls for an international mobilization of people of all ages and backgrounds. It is committed to challenging all Southern Baptist Churches to pray for world evangelization with the hope that at least 12,000 Southern Baptist churches will each select an unreached people group for specific prayer.

Their significant new emphasis on frontier missions stresses a refocusing of their missionary energies on "cutting-edge expansion of the Kingdom" and increasing ways to evangelize unreached people groups. They plan to do this by using nonresidential missionaries, tentmakers, partnering with other Baptist groups and networking with other Christians.

Since the Southern Baptists plan a massive worldwide evangelistic effort for the last year of this century and millenium, Parks insists that by 1995 all of the human elements composing this plan must be in place.

The ten point plan would:

1. Challenge missionaries and overseas Baptists to convene regional meetings in 1992 to find better ways to evangelize all nations and unreached peoples.
2. Call a worldwide consultation for 1995 to coordinate plans for "extensive worldwide evangelistic efforts" in 1999-2000.
3. Challenge a least 10,000 seminary and college students to begin cultural and language studies no later than 1995 and spend 1999 "overseas in world evangelization or (in) becoming tentmakers" to work and witness in nations closed to missions.
4. Challenge 5,000 lay people and church staff members planning to retire between 1995-2000 to volunteer to spend 1999 in world evangelization or in starting a second career overseas.
5. Assist Baptist seminaries, universities and state conventions to help this new kind of volunteer gain cross-cultural communications skills.
6. Unite Southern Baptist and international Baptist bodies to provide massive evangelistic training in 1997-98 to prepare for 1999-2000 as the greatest year of harvest in their history.
7. Challenge every association of Southern Baptist churches by the year 1995 "to pray forth at least two additional career missionaries, plus enough additional funding for [their] support and operational expenses."
8. Determine how many countries (beyond those where missionaries are now assigned) should have a foreign missions witness and initiate action by the year 2000.
9. Work with other evangelistic Christians to target every major people group with evangelical witness by 2000.
10. Challenge every Southern Baptist church to develop regular prayer for missionaries and world evangelization--and at least 12,000 churches to pray specifically for an unreached people group.

Southern Baptists could be "on the verge of the greatest moment ever" in the history of foreign missions, said Parks, "if God can mold us together as missionaries, trustees and staff into a spiritual unity." He also added, "My conviction is that if we are unified around a vision like this, God will still be pleased to use Southern Baptists. But we must focus on the highest priorities."

The Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board currently has around 3,900 missionaries in 121 countries.

The information in this article is from a report in the August 15th issue of Intercom by Robert O'Brien.