Southern Baptists Will Cut 600 to 800 Missionaries and Staff

IMB president David Platt announced Thursday that the agency needs to cut at least 600 missionaries and staff in order to balance its budget. Those cuts are needed to make up for a $21 million deficit for 2015.”

Discussion

Are there any other ways of providing missionary support than these two?

1. The SBC method where the mission agency is supported and they send out missionaries.

2. The independent Baptist and independent church method where the missionary is directly supported by the local church.

The former might be preferable in that it gets rid of the lengthy deputation time, but it also seems to least engage churches who don’t get exposed to missionaries as much as they would by doing missions the second way. My sister has been in a 3,000+ member SBC church and has not seen a missionary in 10 years.

There are other ways, thankfully. Maybe SBC is going to start looking outside of that box a bit more now?

On a side note, it’s ironic to me that the author of Radical is now having to discover the value of a dollar… and learn some economics.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

If only he was a capitalist, eh Aaron?

1 Kings 8:60 - so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the LORD is God and that there is no other.

On “capitalist,” I’d have to define it specifically before I could wish he fit the term.

But reading Radical, it was clear that he did not, at the time, understand that:

a) value (and therefore, cost) comes from human affections
b) cost does not go away; it only moves around

In the book he avowed that he didn’t know anything about economics but then he continued to make a fair number of important economic assertions (and even more assumptions).

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.