Missions is the heartbeat of God and of who we are as Indiana Baptists!

SCBI will offer its annual Missions Lifeline event on Saturday, August 21 (8:30 am-3:30 pm) at Calvary Baptist Church in Greenfield. It’s designed for Pastors, mission-minded church members and children. The purpose is to help your church continue to pursue reaching the world for Christ in a day when our world looks very different than it did before COVID. You’ll hear from missionaries and key missions leaders as they tackle topics that will challenge your church to reach out. A variety of breakout conferences will be offered for adults who are looking for ways to be more active in missions and lead their church to become more mission-minded. Children birth-6th grade will learn about the work of our IMB missionaries in Mexico City; they’ll enjoy crafts, snacks, games and incredible stories as they hear about God’s work there. See https://scbi.org/events/missions-lifeline/ to register now.

Also in the next month, we’ll be kicking off our Indiana Baptist State Missions Offering Emphasis. Why should your church consider giving to this offering? There are still many people in Indiana who haven’t placed their faith in Jesus Christ! Here are a few statistics:

  • Only one in eight Indiana households attends an evangelical church once a week.
  • Two-thirds of Indiana households do not have even one evangelical believer.
  • There are more than 4.3 million unreached people in Indiana.

Your State Missions Offering funds will be used to:

  • Revitalize churches: Congregations of believers may be stuck in a season of hardship and need a helping hand to regain strength for their mission.
  • Develop leaders: Churches need leaders who are maturing in their faith and equipped to train more leaders.
  • Evangelize: We are commissioned to make disciples! Training and strategies are provided to help.
  • Plant churches: We will establish Bible-believing congregations in un-churched or under-churched communities.

Every penny donated goes directly towards funding ministry opportunities in our State. Joining resources through the State Missions Offering is a great way that we work together. To download your resources for promoting this offering, visit https://scbi.org/resources/state-missions-offering/

During this time we encourage your church to pray for missions in Indiana and around the world. In his excellent resource for churches, Return to Me (available from LifeWay), author Claude King tells of the Moravian Revival of 1727, which began when a group of 300 divided believers came together in a prayer meeting that lasted all night. The result was that relationships were reconciled, and God called them to commit their lives to taking the Gospel to the ends of the earth. They began to have around-the-clock prayer meetings where members each took an hour to pray. Over the next 25 years, God sent out 100 of this original group of 300 Moravians to mission fields around the world! Moravian missionaries influenced the conversion of John Wesley, and the call of William Carey to India. By 1900, the Moravians had one missionary in a foreign field for every 58 congregants in their home churches. What could happen this year if our SCBI churches committed themselves to prayer and missions like the Moravians?