Bring Hope and Healing When People Need It Mos

Hey Pastors and Ministry Leaders,

If you’ve ever preached through a sermon series, you know that sometimes you have to take a break. Maybe there is a holiday, a special emphasis, or something happening in the life of the church that you need to address. The break makes sense, but then you come back the next week and have to figure out how to get everyone back into the conversation. Where were we? What were we talking about? Where were we going?

That’s a little bit how I feel this week. A couple of weeks ago, I introduced what we are calling our Three Gears: Flourishing Leaders, Thriving Churches, and Church Planting and Missions. I told you that over the next few weeks I wanted to spend some time looking at each of them, showing you not only what we’re doing together, but how your church can be part of it.

Then the fires happened in Eastern Washington.

Last week, we took a break from our conversation to tell you about what our Disaster Relief volunteers and churches were doing in the Spokane area. But the more I’ve thought about it, I’m not sure we really took a break at all. I think last week may have actually given us a pretty good picture of what I’ve been trying to say.

Most of our churches will never send a Disaster Relief team to Spokane. Most of us will never operate a Disaster Assistance Center, prepare 1,200 sack lunches, or have the opportunity to sit across from someone who has just lost their home and tell them about the hope we have in Jesus. But we can help make sure someone does.

That is one of the beautiful things about cooperation. As Baptists, we believe deeply in the autonomy of the local church. Every church follows Christ, calls its own leaders, determines its own ministry, and chooses how it will participate in the mission God has given us. But autonomy doesn’t mean we have to do that mission alone.

Autonomy does not produce isolation. It produces voluntary partnership.

Sometimes when we talk about Southern Baptist cooperation, our minds immediately go to the national or international level. We think about churches giving together to send missionaries around the world, plant churches across North America, train the next generation of pastors and missionaries, and do things none of our churches could ever accomplish alone. And I’m incredibly grateful for all of that.

But cooperation doesn’t begin somewhere else. It begins at home.

It looks like churches within a town or an association working together to reach their communities. It looks like a church with experience or resources helping another church that needs them. It looks like pastors encouraging and praying for other pastors. It looks like churches across the Northwest giving together, serving together, planting churches together, reaching college campuses together, and, when disasters strike, making sure someone is there to Bring Help, Hope and Healing.

None of that diminishes the autonomy of the local church. It is actually an expression of it. Autonomous churches choosing to work together because we believe we can accomplish more for the Kingdom together than any of us can accomplish alone.

And I believe cooperation is going to be essential if we are going to see the vision we’ve been talking about become reality: A disciple-making church in every community in the Pacific Northwest.

No church can accomplish that alone. No association can accomplish it alone. And the Northwest Baptist Convention staff certainly cannot accomplish it alone. It is going to take churches helping churches. Pastors encouraging pastors. Leaders investing in leaders. Strong churches helping struggling churches. Established churches helping plant new churches. Churches praying, giving, sending, serving, and sharing what God has entrusted to them.

In other words, it is going to take all of us.

And that brings us back to our Three Gears. The first is Flourishing Leaders. Because before we talk about programs, strategies, church health, or multiplication, we need to talk about people.

We believe flourishing leaders and their families are essential to thriving, multiplying churches. So next week, I want to talk about what we mean by a flourishing leader, why this matters so much to us, and some of the ways our churches are already working together to encourage and strengthen leaders across the Northwest.

Thank you for faithfully serving where God has placed you. Lisa and I count it a privilege to serve alongside you as a family of churches on mission together.

by Faith,

Lance Caddel

Executive Director-Treasurer

Northwest Baptist Convention