As we enter this new millennium, we find ourselves subjected to a world of accelerating change. While change generates a stressful tension between the comfort zones of familiar traditions and the unprecedented opportunities of the future, it also challenges us to growth and expanded visions.

Someone has said that if the external changes in society and the world exceed the internal changes of an organization, the result will be irrelevance and ineffectiveness for that organization. Southern Baptists cannot continue to do things the way they have always been done, no matter how effective they have been in the past.

The Southern Baptist Convention and the International Mission Board have experienced massive changes during the past several years in an effort to be on mission with God and be positioned for all that He desires for us as a denomination and as God’s people. This has impacted organizational structures, field strategies, leadership roles and the involvement of constituent churches in our missions task.

Although communication has been flawed, motivations questioned and some relationships disrupted, the rapidity with which these changes have been embraced has been amazing. A new regional configuration in the IMB’s overseas structure, based on geographic, cultural and strategic affinity, has given a greater balance in personnel and has positioned us to assimilate growth in the future. There is a revitalized vision of actually fulfilling the Great Commission.

Redefining leadership roles in terms of missionary peers giving strategic leadership rather than staff directing administrative policies and procedures has focused our planning, resources and methods on the main thing of impacting lostness through evangelism and church planting. Many fields are taking initiative to move from historic, inefficient mission structures to focused teams that provide more effective accountability and ownership of geographic and people-group strategies.

Although different regions are moving appropriately at different paces, most are discovering there has been an effective decentralization that is liberating missionary personnel to do what God has called all of us to do. In the past we have simply administered the work where we had missionaries, but now, for the first time in Southern Baptist missions history, we are poised to focus on the whole world.

We are not on the threshold but are
already in a new era of missions advance.

God is obviously at work as never before. As we enter a new millennium, we are not on the threshold but are already in a new era of missions advance. Never has such potential and opportunity for evangelizing a lost world and reaching the nations existed.

Through 1999 the International Mission Board has seen record missionary appointments six of the last seven years. After a total of 628 new personnel were appointed in 1997, we anticipated possibly reaching 700 the following year but instead saw 885 commissioned and the net growth in missionary count twice as high as any previous year. In 1999, the number exceeded 900. As we enter this century, we anticipate having 5,000 full-time personnel on the field, 20 percent of whom are deployed in places we would never have imagined serving a few years ago. There they are impacting people groups that are hearing the gospel for the first time. God is breaking down the barriers and opening the doors to innovative access as never before.

Thanks to God’s wonder working power and your faithfulness, baptisms and church growth began to accelerate in 1998. It wasn’t due to harvest on a handful of our larger fields, as in the past, but was reflected in almost every area of the world. Southern Baptists should delight in seeing the vision, passion, sacrifice and depth of commitment which their missionaries are giving to our missions task.

Jesus said, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations … .” The expression He used for “all nations” is “panta ta ethne,” which literally means all the peoples—the ethnic-linguistic peoples—of the world. Whether translated gentiles, nations or peoples, it is clear that God wants all of them to know Him and to become His disciples or followers.

“panta ta ethne”

Jesus counters our egocentric theology with His explicit expression of the Great Commission in Luke 24:46-47. In this passage He enlightened the disciples’ understanding of the Old Testament Scriptures and the purpose of His death and resurrection. “Thus it is written, and thus it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead the third day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached in His name to all nations ….”

God will choose to bless us only as we are intentionally committed to His purpose of exalting Him among the nations. We can expect the empowerment of God’s Holy Spirit as promised in Acts 1:8 only as we are obedient to His purpose “to be witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the uttermost ends of the earth.” That is not a sequential obligation but represents the totality of our missions task. Partial obedience was not given as an option.

Israel prayed for God’s blessing in Psalm 67:1—“God be merciful to us and bless us, and cause His face to shine upon us”—but it was not for their own benefit and growth. It was for the purpose expressed in verse 2—“That your ways may be known on earth, your salvation among all nations.”

We have the challenge and responsibility of mobilizing Southern Baptists to reach the nations as we move into a new millennium confronted with unprecedented opportunities. God has blessed us with massive untapped resources that have the potential to be channeled into our mission efforts. Just as we have not done mission work as it was done in the 19th century, we cannot continue what worked so effectively in the 20th century into a new era of harvest and opportunity.

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