JEFFERSON CITY — Messengers to the 178th annual meeting of the Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) in St. Louis this October will be asked to approve two new missions partnerships—to the Up-State New York area around Albany, and to Puebla, Mexico.
The proposed New York partnership is at the request of the Hudson Baptist Association and will last four years, until Dec. 31, 2016, with a possible extension of up to four more years. This will be for the purposes of church planting and church strengthening.
The Mexico agreement will also be through Dec. 31, 2016, with a possible extension of up to four more years. This will be to help the Puebla/Tlaxcala Mexico Regional Baptist Convention achieve their strategy of seeing 10,000 baptisms, 100 starts, and 50 new churches by 2020 and to help the International Mission Board (IMB) in their strategy to have local churches embrace the nearly 100 unengaged, unreached people groups in the nearby mountains.
Messengers also will be asked to extend for a fourth year the MBC’s overseas IMB partnership with the Sub-Sahara Africa Affinity Peoples for the Western Gateway Cluster. (For more information on how you can be involved with this partnership, see page 11.)
An offering to support the work in both New York and Mexico will be taken on Oct. 30 during the annual meeting.
The overall MBC plan calls for existing partnerships with Iowa and Northern Ontario to be ongoing and a partnership with Northern Illinois to be discontinued as of Dec. 31, 2012.