Baptist Convention of New England

    Transformation speaks to a spiritual change that begins from the inside and works out.  It is different from changing a habit or gaining a new skill or deciding to take on a new discipline.  It is a paradigm shift that begins with a change of heart.  

    Missional means participating in missions rather than just giving to or learning about missions.  It means thinking and responding like a missionary.  A missional church goes out into the world to serve rather than waiting for the world to come to the church.

   We have three anchor strategies at BCNE:  churchplanting, evangelism, and leadership development.  Each of these strategies is impacted by these two key words.

   Leadership Development is basically about transformation.  We can't change churches (only the Holy Spirit can do that), so we do not focus on church health.  We focus on transformed leaders.   We do offer training in how to do certain things, and we do provide opportunities for skill enhancement.  But our desire at BCNE is to not just train leaders, but to provide avenues so that the Holy Spirit can actually transform leaders.  We know that transformed leaders will guide transformed churches, and transformed churches are missional churches, and missional churches will change the face of New England.

   Church Planting focuses on planting missional churches.  We want to plant churches that are ready to get out in their community and serve in the name of Jesus.  We have discovered that almost 90% of New Englanders receive Christ based on established relationships, and over 70% of them take more than a year to make that decision.  So we need missional churches.  Going to the lost and building relational bridges through ministry  and service rather than waiting for the lost to come to the church is crucial to planting churches in New England.  In order to have missional churches such as these, we must have transformational leaders to lead those churches, so both of these strategic teams work together to make that happen.

   These two concepts also influence our evangelism strategy.  Based on the findings quoted above, there are very few New Englanders who are ready to receive the gospel based on a one time encounter.  It requires a process that can last a year or more.  So a missional strategy in a local church or church plant is absolutely crucial to seeing people come to Christ.  There must be many "touches" with a lost person through missional activities before they are ready to hear the gospel, much less receive it.  And a transformed witness whose life reflects Christ on a daily basis (often for a year or more) seems to also be necessary to break through that deep spiritual lostness of a New Englander.

   So, we focus on being missional and being transformational in the BCNE.  I hope you will come and join us as, in the power of the Holy Spirit, we push back the spiritual darkness of our region.

Dr. Jim Wideman

Executive Director

Baptist Convention of New England