English
Korean
Spanish
HOUSTON?As the world continues to come to the United States, Southern Baptists are beginning to re-evaluate how they reach those new and established immigrants with the gospel. Training once reserved for missionaries bound for foreign lands is now being made available to local missions directors bound for neighborhoods within their own cities.
Because it is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the U.S., Houston serves as a prime arena for integrating this new concept, The Texas Great Commission Initiative. Terry Coy, senior church planting strategist with the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, said, “If we’re going to reach the uttermost ends of the earth, the uttermost ends of the earth are here.”
Union Baptist Association Executive Director Tom Billings has known this for some time. As the director for the association covering the Houston area, Billings and other directors in the largest Texas cities have been rethinking how to reach their ever-changing communities.
Billings said, “Houston was changing so dramatically that we needed to work like missionaries in our own environment.”
Houston, the fourth-largest city in the country, is host to 82 foreign government consular offices and 87 international chambers of commerce, government trade offices and private business associations, according to the Greater Houston Partnership. Houston is consistently ranked as the city with the third-largest consular representation, coming in behind New York and Los Angeles. Billings added that more than 100 languages are spoken in Houston among the 200-plus ethnic groups.
It was at a 2003 meeting in London where International Mission Board, North American Mission Board, and state and associational representatives like Billings met to discuss the shifting American population. The meeting was held in London to show the participants the dynamics of a mega-city with a diverse population. IMB missionaries, for example, are not sent to London to reach only Anglo “Londoners” but the growing number of Muslims immigrating to the city. Billings said London is about 10-15 years ahead of American cities in its population shift and therefore served as a good example of what churches in major U.S. cities can prepare for.
Beginning in the 1980s, the IMB spent more than a decade gathering information on the people groups of the world before presenting its findings to the board of trustees at an April 1997 meeting in Little Rock, Ark., said Jim Slack, IMB global evangelism and church growth consultant. The culling of all that information, he said, has resulted in what is today the most accurate and up-to-date people group database in the world. With that kind of information, IMB can send missionaries to a very specific population instead of commissioning them to work in a certain geo-political region that could be home to people of varied backgrounds.
Coy said missions directors in the U.S. were asking, “Why aren’t we doing that in North America?” On a national, state and local level, Southern Baptists have developed programs to reach people from differing ethnic backgrounds, but that approach has become too broad, Billings said. Associations can’t just target Mandarin-speaking Chinese people, he said, because of the disparity between the people of that nation. Language is not necessarily the common bond between peoples as populations find their identity in shared culture, not shared nationality.
NAMB has historically recognized the need to focus mission efforts on specific people, but the approach is not as culturally specific as IMB has become. That is why the two associations met in May to discuss the development of a database for the identification of people groups within North America.
In the meantime, IMB resources will be used to help connect churches and associations with people groups in their cities. In mid-May, Slack met with Coy, Billings, and representatives from other Texas churches, associations, and conventions at Trinity Pines in what was the first of three meetings designed to teach churches how to identify and reach specific people groups.
Slack led the week-long meeting with the same manuals that are used to train overseas mission workers. The first step in the evangelism process, he said, is to identify the people groups with
