August 28, 2000
THE EXPANDED SCOPE of the Texas Key Church strategy is illustrated in this chart, produced by the BGCT.
Burgin spells out a vision birthed from experience & faith
___By Dan Martin
___Texas Baptist Communications
___Jim Burgin's dream of missions might have something to do with the fact he was baptized twice on the same day.
___Or that his parents were among the first teachers to serve as Southern Baptistmissionaries to Korea.
___Or that his mother is the renowned Tillie Burgin, the legendary minister of missions and initiator of Mission Arlington.
___All of those factors together have combined to give Jim Burgin a powerful dream about missions.
___"When I was 6, my parents came and said we were going to Korea," he recalls. "Even at that age, I recall having a sense of excitement about going to another country to tell people about Jesus."
___A year later, Burgin made his own profession of faith in Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior in a Korean church with a Korean pastor.
___"When I was baptized, he spoke to me in English and translated his comments into Korean. Shortly after I was baptized, he came to me and said we had to do it again. He said he translated part of it wrong.
___"So I was baptized again. Right then," Burgin said with a laugh.
___Burgin's dream of missions winds through those early years in Korea, through his undergraduate experience at Baylor University, his seminary years at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and through 10 years as a minister of missions in Texas and Georgia.
___Through those years, his dream--and his vision--of missions in the local church has continued to grow and expand.
___"Have you ever had a dream so large that you knew you no longer held onto it, but that it held onto you?" he asked. "Have you ever struggled with the dream, desperately wanting to know if it is God's or merely yours?
___"Have you ever been frightened of your dream, knowing it couldn't possibly happen, no matter your best efforts or the best efforts of those around you, no matter how well or effectively you strategized or communicated?"
___Burgin, who planned to be the pastor of a very big church when he was going to seminary, knows the dream that began long ago led him to missions.
___His dream is about the minister of missions movement.
___It is appropriate that his dream and his work have converged, because he is director of the creative church development department at the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
___Since September 1997, he has overseen the minister of missions effort of the BGCT. The umbrella program over the minister of missions effort is called Key Church.
___Key Church actually began more than 20 years ago. Then, the primary focus was starting congregations. It was targeted to larger churches with the resources to start six mission congregations a year and to commit to calling full-time ministers of missions to oversee the effort.
___In the ensuing years, it has been modified to include smaller and middle-sized churches and to incorporate bivocational and volunteer ministers of missions. The number of missions a church had to start to be classified as a Key Church was lowered, and ministries to multi-housing resident were incorporated into the program.
___Texas Baptists help churches implement Key Church strategies through financial support of the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas missions.
___"Over the past couple of years, it has become evident that changes are happening. Churches continue to do church planting and ministry, but they also are doing missions education and partnerships," Burgin said. "Our churches are focusing strongly on world missions conferences, mission trips and prayer walks as ways of being Key Churches.
___As Burgin envisions it, the Key Church program should include every congregation in the BGCT. "Every church can be a key church," he maintains.
___All it takes is the will, the desire and the commitment to prioritize missions in the local congregation.
___"The ministers of mission movement has some parallels to the Christian education movement of 150 years ago. Interestingly, when Sunday School started, some pastors criticized it as a 'newfangled human invention.' They claimed it was at best a waste of time and at worst an interference with the work of the Holy Spirit."
___Yet today most churches see a need to have someone responsible for the Christian education program, whether a volunteer Sunday School director or a full-time minister of education.
___"Why can't every church in the state have a similar effort promoting and cultivating missions?" Burgin wonders. "Why can't every church be a Key Church for missions?"
___
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