At Bible Believers Baptist Church, we believe that supporting missions is a vital part of the local church ministry, so much so that missions and the local church are inseparable. We currently support over 45 missionaries worldwide with monthly support. These missionaries are serving on every major continent and in all parts of the world.
Local churches have a variety of ways of supporting missionaries. Some churches fully support the missionaries that they send out of their church, thus eliminating the need for their missionaries to raise support on deputation. Other churches support missionaries who visit them on deputation. Of these churches, some give larger amounts of support to fewer missionaries while others give smaller amounts of monthly support to more missionaries. BBBC falls into the category of churches who give larger amounts of support to fewer missionaries.
We have our annual missions conference in February. Sometimes we host a special speaker who preaches each service and at other times we ask the missionaries to preach the various services. We always have a mixture of veteran missionaries on furlough and new missionaries on deputation. We don’t use faith promise missions here; however, we encourage our folks to give regularly and faithfully to missions. The church, in addition to monthly support, also gives to fund special missions projects that come up from time to time.
Over the years we have taken several missions trips. These are a great help and encouragement to the missionaries and they are a great way to increase the burden for missions in our church. We usually combine evangelistic work with a project so that there is a good balance of help to the church and missionary we visit. There is not a missions trip currently planned for 2013, since we are in the middle of building a new sanctuary and since we will be be conducting a major summer crusade in July. Lord willing, we’ll be traveling in the summer of 2014.