Thank you Northwest Baptists for your faithfulness to make disciples and do missions. Not only did our churches reach more people for Christ last year, and baptize more, your generosity to support missions through the Cooperative Program, the Sylvia Wilson Northwest Mission Offering, Annie Armstrong North American Offering, World Hunger and Disaster Relief offerings all showed significant increase in 2015. The Lottie Moon International Missions Offering was slightly down in 2015, but the Lottie Moon Offering we received on January 2, 2016 put us ahead of the previous year as well, which was a 25 percent increase from the year before that. In addition, 35 new churches were launched last year. We have grown from 34 funded church plants two years ago, to 68 by the end of 2015. The total number of NWBC churches now stands at 484, up from 466 the previous year.
The new year presents us with some great opportunities, as well as a challenge. First, in March we will have one-day Story Witnessing workshops throughout our convention. These will be followed up by a three-day workshop in September (dates and locations in the Witness and on our website at http://www.nwbaptist.org). In MY316 evangelism training, we teach you how to tell your salvation story, and how to use John 3:16 to share the Gospel. In Story Witnessing you learn how to listen, ask good questions, and then tell a Bible story that relates to what the person said. It is a powerful way to share the gospel.
Another opportunity is that of serving our IMB missionaries in a huge retreat in August. We need 200 volunteers to serve in Thailand, and we need many more praying for them and supporting them. We will have 1,300 missionaries, including children. They currently have 524 children, with 8 more in adoption process, and 14 missionary wives are with child. How fun! We get to serve these missionaries and their children. Please note, a $350 deposit is due by February 15, with the total cost being $700, plus airfare and some meals. Your church has much more info about this trip. You can also email Sheila Allen at Sheila@nwbaptist.org.
The challenge we face concerns church planting funding. Because of the rapid growth we have had in new churches, the North American Mission Board (NAMB) provided us with additional funding in 2015, corresponding with extra funding that we provided. Though NAMB encouraged us to keep growing the number of our new churches, with the expectation that we would receive additional funding in 2016, things changed when the International Mission Board announced that they would were downsizing by 800 missionaries for financial reasons. For many years the IMB has been spending from reserve funds, and selling property, to keep more missionaries on the field. They can no longer do this. Baptists across the country, and indeed the world, are grieved as hundreds of missionaries return from the field. NAMB has determined to help the IMB by giving them $4 million dollars in 2016. Largely because of this, we were told in late November that additional dollars beyond our basic funding agreement would not be available in 2016. If other state conventions underspend their budgets, we could receive additional funding, but we won’t know this until April.
It is important for you to know this because it affects the funding that our church planters receive. Please pray for our church planters. Please support them as you can. We are grateful for the support that we receive from NAMB and other partners, but this is a reminder that Southern Baptists are an interconnected system of 46,000 churches, associations, conventions, seminaries, and mission agencies. When one part of the system suffers, we all do. In the Northwest we receive a great deal of support from our SBC family, including NAMB and the IMB. Sometimes the decisions they make affect us adversely, but we are far, far better for being a part of the SBC family. It is a good day to serve the Lord in the Northwest.