Community engagement is our theme this year. In order to be intentional, it often requires that we learn from our history in order to avoid issues and to celebrate advances.
Let’s step back a few years. When Kevin Ezell became president at NAMB, things changed here in Cincinnati. An emphasis was given to church planting with the Cincinnati Area being one of 30-some Send Cities. If you look at the 13 to 14 years since 2010, you’ll learn that 77 churches have been planted here that were affiliated with CABA. There are 33 plants that are still with our association. That’s a 43 percent survival rate. Although 25 plants have closed, 19 others left the SBC, the association, or in three situations, became satellite churches. Of these 33 churches last year, 76 percent that completed their ACP accounted for nearly one-third (30.8%) of CABA’s baptisms.
Let’s go back even further. In the 15 years prior to Ezell’s presidency, from 1995 to 2009, there were 22 churches started in CABA and 13 are with us today. Five left the SBC and four closed. That’s a 60% survival rate.
Dependence on generic training and outside funding have made reproducibility very difficult. After a serious attempt for our churches to train leaders for two years using NAMB’s Multiplication Pipeline, 17 pastors signed up, but only one church continued to use it. They have yet to send out a planter.
Outside funding puts a planter quickly into Cincinnati, but creates a very difficult model to copy. Nobody in CABA has yet followed this model so that a church member has planted.
Further, in my tenure, there has not yet been a CABA church member appointed and sent out by the IMB to serve anywhere overseas that calls a CABA church their home church. Has God truly not called anyone? Are our churches not making disciples with the DNA that the Lord wants to see used in missions?
Community engagement gets better when we realize what happened in the past and how we can do community engagement better today.
--Mark Snowden serves as director for the Cincinnati Area Baptist Association
#CommunityEngagement, #LearnFromHistory, #ChurchPlantingImpact, #CincinnatiMissions, #SustainableGrowth, #MissionFocus, #EngageBetter, #PastToPresent, #CABAChurches, #ReproducibleMinistry
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