New Frontiers of Missions

Southern Baptist Missions in a Changing Southern Baptist Convention

The picture is of a missions team from my church that arrived earlier this morning in Trujillo, Peru, a medium-sized city that sprawls along the nation’s northern coastline not far from Ecuador. The church I serve as pastor has been sending teams here for the last few years—medical teams, sports ministry teams, evangelism teams and leadership training teams for the local church pastors—in cooperation with the existing mission work that’s centered in the Peruvian Baptist Seminary located in Trujillo. Of course, we’re not the only church that sends out mission teams. The truth is that missions lies at the heart of almost all of the churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, and most congregations are quick to raise money and send out their own people to distant places in service of the gospel.

But today many of the ways we’ve done missions in the past are changing, and the picture is a snapshot of those changes. From left to right on the front row, you first see a young American woman, a leader and professor in the Peruvian Baptist Seminary, who came here years ago as a missionary but stayed when she married a Peruvian church leader (he’s standing in the middle of the second row). The next two women in the front row are the Peruvian translators for the portion of our group that will be doing women’s discipleship. Beside them are two members of our church who will be working with children during the week. The man on the far right of the first row is a leader in the local Peruvian church who will also translate. The back row from left to right begins with a woman from our church who will be teaching Peruvian women how to study the Bible, then a man from our church followed by another man connected with our church who’s fluent in Spanish and will translate for me as I teach at the seminary. Finally, that’s me on the far right. The whole group is a combination of locals and internationals who’ve come together apart from any official denominational agency to do gospel work. We’ve taken the time through the years to get to know one another well enough to do missions together without the oversight of larger agencies and bureaucracies.

But that’s not all. The vision for our mission trip flows from the Peruvian Baptist Seminary, which serves as the spiritual foundation for pastoral training, church ministry and church planting in this region and, to a lesser degree, throughout the country. Begun in the 1950s as a ministry of the International Mission Board (the massive bureaucratic agency that controls thousands of missionaries and hundreds of millions of dollars on behalf of our denomination’s commitment to gospel ministry around the world), the Peruvian seminary by the 1990’s no longer fulfilled the IMB’s strategic vision and was turned over to the Peruvian Baptist Convention. Without the IMB’s funding, though, the seminary wasn’t able to function and soon reached a financial crisis. That’s when an independent Baptist missional agency, Tom Cox Ministries, stepped in and became a partner. Other ministries and churches came alongside the seminary, to the point where today, the seminary has regained its role—and in many ways expanded its footprint—in the nation as a whole. My impression is that the seminary is the spiritual center of Baptist work in the region.

The point is that the Peruvian Baptist Seminary, which was once a prime example of the Southern Baptist Convention’s leadership in international missions, has become instead an example of the Peruvian Baptist church taking control of its own destiny. The local always has greater value than the national. I also believe that it’s an indication of things to come.

As the Southern Baptist Convention continues its shift from a cooperating denomination (in which individual churches choose to cooperate for the sake of the gospel) to a confessing denomination (in which individual churches are required to confess to the same doctrinal standard prior to cooperating for the sake of the gospel), ministries like the Peruvian Baptist Seminary will, I believe, become more numerous. And that’s a good thing! Southern Baptists have a genius for this kind of thing, and it’s a healthy expression of our heart, our culture and our desire to see the gospel spread across the world.

I’ll try to push out my daily reflections on this trip, so check back each day to keep up with what’s going on here in Trujillo.