"Global Missions Matter"
by Tom Goodman
November 29, 2006

“They could have gone to anyone, but they came to the Jahanka.  They could have gone to any village, but they chose our village.  They have come with a message from God, and we’re waiting for them to be able to speak our language so we can hear this message that they have brought to us.”

That was what one Jahanka man said of a married couple sent to his village by the International Mission Board (IMB).  The story was told in a recent report from the IMB.  In many parts of the world, the names of IMB missionaries cannot be released for security reasons, and so this couple has not been identified in the report.  The Jahanka of West Africa number only about 60,000, with fewer than 20 known followers of Jesus.  But the Southern Baptist missionary couple is winning friends.

This is good news!  Southern Baptist missionaries and their international Baptist partners baptized more than 475,000 new believers last year, started nearly 23,500 churches and began church planting among 104 people groups for the first time.  They also planted churches among 19 people groups where no Baptist churches previously existed—including 13 peoples with no evangelical churches of any kind.

A major part of our mission dollars at Hillcrest go to support the global efforts of the IMB, and every Christmas we challenge you to give generously to a special offering for international missions.

Our IMB is a major partner in massive enterprise with many laborers.  According to D.A. Carson, God is blessing the work:

The progress of the gospel on a worldwide basis during the past one hundred years should be cause for great thanksgiving.  More Muslims have come to Christ in Iran during the last fifteen years than in the previous one thousand years.  Conservative estimates put the number of Christians in China at sixty million—a sixtyfold increase [since] 1950.  At the turn of the century, Korea had no Protestant church, and was deemed by many experts to be impenetrable.  Korea is over 30 percent Christian today, with something like seven thousand churches in Seoul alone.  The nation with the highest number of Muslims in the world, Indonesia, has also witnessed the greatest number converting to Jesus Christ.  Africa has at least ten times as many Christians today as it did in 1900.