DECATUR, Ga.—The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship has launched a network for missions leaders to share best practices and encourage greater collaboration around mission engagement.
The Mission Leaders Network will be an interactive community of individuals, organizations and global churches united and inspired by CBF’s mission commitments to create beloved community, bear witness to Jesus Christ and seek transformational development, organizers explained.
The network seeks to connect ministers of missions, lay leaders, state and regional associate coordinators, CBF Missions Council members, missions groups and committees from across the Fellowship.
This connection will take place through online engagement via Facebook, creating community around best mission practices, fostering cultures of mission engagement in congregations, coordinating endeavors and resources and birthing specific networks around topics and field teams. Leaders will engage in open dialogue on topics of mission and discover opportunities to engage in webinars and hear featured speakers.
CBF Executive Coordinator Suzii Paynter noted the network will offer a space for leaders to partner together in global engagement in the Fellowship.
“Planning mission engagement for a congregation is more than an annual trip or event,” Paynter said. “Mission Leaders Network is a home for church leaders and other practical dreamers who want to be great global partners by building mission identity in the congregation and sharing the love of Christ through sustained, deep, caring human connections—one person, one church, one moment at a time.”
CBF Global Missions Church Engagement Manager Ryan Clark will serve as facilitator for the network.
“The Fellowship has hundreds of churches involved in beautiful and creative mission engagements all around the world,” Clark said. “This network will connect the great work that churches are already doing as well as help churches get started with important ministries near and far. I’m excited that through this network more people who love missions will get to be involved the outstanding work our field personnel and churches are doing.”
The Mission Leaders Network is envisioned as a “mother” network to birth other CBF-related mission networks based around specific mission practices and CBF field personnel teams, organizers explained.
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Mark Wingfield, associate pastor at Wilshire Baptist Church in Dallas and CBF Missions Council member, pointed to the need for a network of mission leaders.
“Through the recent work of the renewal of CBF Global Missions, our Missions Council realized the many people across CBF who are passionate about missions often don’t have easy ways to know each other or to connect with each other,” Wingfield said. “And yet we have so much in common and so much to learn by sharing our stories and our questions. The Mission Leaders Network is a first step to connect the dots and help us build a relational foundation for the cause of missions.”
For more information about the CBF Mission Leader Network, click here.
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