Glad to be SBC!!!

II. North American Missions

The accomplishments below show some of the results of our efforts in 2010.

• Crossover Orlando, held prior to the 2010 annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention and coordinated by NAMB, resulted in 1,505 professions of faith. Approximately 1,940 volunteers and 53 churches participated in the event.
• More than 5,800 evangelism resources were downloaded to support the annual Soul Winning Commitment Day.
• The strategy of sharing Christ through Intentional Community Evangelism in major cities resulted in 635 salvations.
• There are 3,504 SBC-endorsed chaplains serving in military, hospital, professional, corporate, public safety, and institutional settings. Chaplains have access to places many Southern Baptists cannot go, giving them a vital role in helping reach North America for Christ. In 2010, chaplains shared the gospel more than 62,000 times and recorded more than 10,000 professions of faith.
• As part of World Hunger Funds given by Southern Baptists, NAMB received $981,417 for domestic hunger. In North America, Southern Baptist hunger ministries fed 5.3 million meals and reported more than 33,000 professions of faith.
• Pregnancy resource ministries play a vital role in sharing Christ. There are 308 NAMB-affiliated pregnancy resource centers in the United States and Canada. Last year, center volunteers and staff shared the gospel as they ministered through more than 85,000 client visits, and 6,835 babies were saved from abortion as a result of ministry evangelism activities.
• The Evangelism Response Center (ERC) now relates to 40 state conventions and 34 SBC and non-SBC agencies. A total of 1,136 new Telephone Encouragers and 54 Regional Facilitators were trained during 2010. All certified Telephone Encouragers and Internet Encouragers are required to give 30 hours of service per year. The average conversion rate through ERC ministry is 8+ percent. In 2010, ERC received 16,245 calls, an average of 1,354 per month. There were 1,861 people who accepted Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior through ERC and its partnership ministries. In addition to these decisions, ERC referred more than 1,400 people to covenant churches. The ERC phone number will be placed on all God’s Plan for Sharing related initiatives until 2020.

Starting churches:

Southern Baptists lead all denominations in starting new churches, more than 100 each month. Church plants must be healthy and ethnically diverse, with a Kingdom perspective, and evangelistic passion, and a multiplication mindset. In addition to the roughly 50,000 churches and church-type missions in the SBC today, research indicates that an additional 125,000 churches will be needed in the coming decade to touch just a fraction—10 percent—of the estimated 258 million people without Christ.

In partnership with state conventions, local associations, and churches, NAMB has seen the following results in church planting.

• Southern Baptists added 1,271 congregations in 2010.
• Since NAMB’s formation in 1997, Southern Baptists have started more than 20,000 churches. That’s an average of more than 1,500 new churches every year, with a large percentage being ethnic or African-American.
• The Nehemiah Project has created a church planting partnership between NAMB and all six Southern Baptist seminaries and the Canadian Southern Baptist Seminary. Since 1998, Nehemiah professors have worked to train and mobilize church planters resulting in approximately 1,000 church planters, including 34 new planters in 2010 and approximately 1,324 church planter interns, including 24 new interns in 2010.
• Partnering with the Canadian National Baptist Convention, NAMB is helping to assist the convention in its goal to start 1,000 churches in Canada by 2020. There are currently 268 SBC churches and church plants in the country.