Sunday Evenings and Strategic Planning

The past several Sunday evenings have been so exciting for me as we have been discussing several important items related to the future of Wakefield Baptist Church. We began with a "Profile of our Community" in which we analyzed some detailed demographic information obtained from The Center for Missional Research of the North American Mission Board, as well as a body of subjective information gleaned from a series of probing questions we all attempted to answer to the best our our knowledge. The end result was a profile of the people in our target community and the basic characteristics of the type of church which would reach them.

We then began a quest for the specific identity of Wakefield Baptist Church. Our starting point was to consider the mission of every New Testament church. MT 28:18-19 was the verse we decided gave us our mission which is to "make disciples". We defined a disciple as a person that was not just saved, but someone who was a fully devoted follower of Jesus Christ.

Our conclusion is that we are to be about reaching un-churched people with the Gospel and to seek church growth not simply through biological or transfer growth - but through conversion growth.

From there we began to look at our functions...what we should be doing as a church. While some call these "purposes" we have chosen to call them functions because our purpose is to "make disciples". Acts 2:42-28 was the basis of our discussion in which we came up with 6 primary functions seen in the early church which every church should emulate. We defined these functions as prayer, praise, fellowship, equipping, care, and evangelism. Last night we combined these 6 categories into 4 and are now searching for the 4 words which will serve as the foundation of a Mission Statement. There are too many words to type here...but all of you came up with some good ones.

The Way Forward...

In the coming Sunday nights we will do the following....

Develop a mission statement which will be an extended sentence or paragraph which will combine our "Mission" (make disciples) with our functions and will be a snap shot of who we are.

Develop a "Mantra" which will be a short memorable sentence which captures our mission, functions, and specific identify translated into a short phrase. Some call this a "motto".

In this process we will profile ourselves...who are we...who is WBC. We will compare our analysis with the target group we are trying to reach and then consider any changes we will need to make in our methodology in order to reach them.

We will also "flesh out" our functions and attempt to discover how we can organize our entire church around our mission and our functions so that we can contextualize the message of the Gospel in a culturally relevant manner.


Obviously, this is going to take some time to do. But be encouraged everyone...this is well worth the effort. We will emerge from all of this with a clear identity, direction, and vision for our church, our community, and the people we will reach for Jesus.

I am so proud of all of you and am honored to be your pastor!