I don’t call them res­o­lu­tions, but in the new year I can’t help but think about what I want to do more and what I want to do less of in the upcom­ing year. I like to think of it as a vision for the pos­si­bil­i­ties for king­dom advancement.

The vision usu­al­ly cen­ters around flour­ish­ing rela­tion­ships and mobi­liz­ing peo­ple for king­dom impact. The DBA has a vision/mission statement:

The mis­sion state­ment of our Asso­ci­a­tion is to bring glo­ry to God through facil­i­tat­ing part­ner­ships between church­es to accom­plish the Great Commission.

Next comes strat­e­gy. What should we do to make this vision a real­i­ty? We don’t have all the answers here. I don’t think we must have all the answers. As we see in the Scrip­ture, God often pro­vides strate­gies and activ­i­ties that are unortho­dox at best, and require a lot of faith. We pray, lis­ten, trust, and work with all our might. We will swing the sword, but the vic­to­ry will belong to our Lord.

We’re going to start our year off with a God sized vic­to­ry. I believe this vic­to­ry will be so big, we won’t be able to com­pre­hend it. Our DBA broth­ers, Dan­nie Williams, Jeff Scog­gins and Scott Mor­ri­son will be on mis­sion soon. Some of our neigh­bors from the Mid­dle Bap­tist Asso­ci­a­tion are going on the trip as well, Bob­by Braswell and Chad Cofield. We are eager for a wave of sal­va­tion and church plant­i­ng to take place. Sal­va­tion by the thou­sands and church plant­i­ng by the hundreds.

Pray for our broth­ers and ask our Lord to show his pow­er through the preach­ing of the gospel. May be shak­en and nev­er be the same again and may the work of Satan be defeat­ed in that country.

What vic­to­ries might we have here at home this year and the next, where the church is estab­lished and the ground seems sat­u­rat­ed with cul­tur­al Christianity?

I tell you this with con­fi­dence, we will not be going back to the 1940’s and 50’s. We’re in 2019 and head­ing toward 2020 and we must think about how the nev­er chang­ing truth of the gospel can be com­mu­ni­cat­ed through meth­ods that will con­nect with peo­ple in the 21st cen­tu­ry. Peo­ple today want to expe­ri­ence truth, not be told the truth. “Come and sit” is no longer a good mod­el for dis­ci­ple­ship. Loy­al­ty to some­thing for the sake of duty and respon­si­bil­i­ty is not the moti­vat­ing fac­tor that it once was; espe­cial­ly loy­al­ty to things that don’t seem to add val­ue to our lives. Peo­ple want to be part of a com­mu­ni­ty, through which they expe­ri­ence truth as they live life togeth­er. We focus on facil­i­tat­ing the preach­ing of the gospel to our con­gre­ga­tions on Sun­day, let’s facil­i­tate the doing of the gospel through our con­gre­ga­tions Mon­day-Sat­ur­day in 2019.


May our Lord give us a king­dom vision and our lives be a liv­ing sac­ri­fice to make that vision a reality.