Larry’s Letter

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Spiritual Renewal

At the end of November I called for a Pastor/Staff Summit to discuss the need for spiritual renewal in our churches.  Fifty-five attended and participated in the meeting.  I handed out packets of information to those who attended.  The packets have information about a number of activities that your pastor could use to address the need of spiritual renewal.  [If you have been reading my articles over the past few years it is clear that I  relieve we need a fresh touch from the Lord to correct our lifestyle to the issues that God is interested in.]

The first and easiest way to highlight the need of spiritual renewal was to give to church members a 21-day prayer guide, Awaken 2012, written by Claude King.  GBA offered to print as many of the prayer guides that a church needed for their members. To date about 40 of our churches have requested guides and are using them in their church during the month of January.  It is our hope that this prayer guide will lead to other activities that will help the church focus on processes leading to spiritual renewal (revival).

In addition to the prayer guide, we provided information on other activities that could be used to facilitate renewal.  Here is a list of the activities that your church might consider:

1.            Lay Renewal Weekend

2.            Week-long meetings with Life Action Ministries

3.            Experiencing God Weekend

4.            Starting Relational Discipleship small groups

5.            Transformational Church Consultation Process

6.            Pastor/Staff Mentoring Groups

7.            Prayer and accountability groups

8.            A spiritual renewal conference, Oct. 11-14 in St. Louis, led by Henry and Richard Blackaby and others.

Please don’t hesitate to call our office about details of any of these suggested activities that might help your church experience revival.  There are some expenses for some of these activities.  Most will have
only minimal expense.  GBA will help any of our churches, as much as we can, to help cover some of the cost of entering into one of these activities.  Your pastor has a folder with information. 

Transformational Church Multiplication

In addition to the above activities, we are entering into a partnership with Metro East Baptist Association and Illinois Baptist State Association to pilot a project that will lead a church to plan and develop a strategy to
increase attendance, increase baptisms, increase giving, target an increase in any other church ministry, provide support and activities for missions and church planting.  We are on the front end of designing this ministry for Illinois Baptist churches and it is beginning here in our association.  It will be similar to a process already started in South Carolina that has been met with a great deal of success and excitement.  We will provide more information about this opportunity later in the year.  We tentatively plan to start with the project in late Spring 2012.  We will let you know about opportunities with this project as they are developed. 

 

The Bethel Network and Church Planting

We have prayed for years about an effective way to start new churches.  We tried to start some churches through our association with very limited success.  The Lord then began working in the heart of Tim Lewis, pastor of Bethel Baptist in Troy. God then brought Richard Rea from seminary to work with us.  Our church has voted for the Bethel Network to be our church planting arm of our work. We have had several of our churches begin to closely align with Bethel Network.  In addition churches outside of our association are beginning to support church planting efforts here.

God is beginning to bring others to our association to work with us.  Metro East Baptist Association is in the process of considering to join us in a comprehensive church planting strategy throughout the I-255 corridor that passes through both associations.  Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary has also entered a partnership with us and Bethel Network to support church planting.  In addition, North American Missionary Board has identified the metro St. Louis area as one of 25 key areas for church planting in USA.

We encourage all of our churches to consider ways to support church planting.  There are about 500,000
people on the East side of the Mississippi River in our region, 85% of whom do not have a personal relationship with the Lord. We have a lot of work to do.  It is my prayer that all of our churches will find ways to support church planting.  If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call.