Other than it being a Chief’s game night, everything else was perfect for our fall Semi-Annual Meeting on October 1. The Road Church members and Elders Dale Smith and Charles Ackman were gracious hosts in their newly constructed church. It really is a beautiful facility, and we appreciate them being so hospitable. Several ministries were present during the mission’s fair portion of the evening. Peculiar First Baptist, Grain Valley First Baptist, and Abiding Love women made delicious soups and desserts and no one went away hungry.
Around 110 messengers gathered in the sanctuary for the business and program portion of the evening. We welcomed a new church plant, The Overflow Church lead by Alan Findley, into BR-KC membership, voted on our new slate of committee members, passed a trimmed down 2024 budget, and affirmed Gregg Boll as the new Director of Missions. Here is a link to the Book of Reports if you couldn’t make it and would like to see all of the reports of our various BR-KC supported ministries.
Gregg invited a special speaker, Pastor Jeremy Conrad, from The Calvary Family of Churches to share the Calvary story of how the Lord led them 10 years ago to begin planting churches and partnering with struggling churches to bring them back to health. To date they have planted or replanted 30 churches. They were a smaller church when they made the commitment to follow this strategy of giving themselves away to keep planting more churches. Jeremy’s message to our churches and pastors was that you don’t have to be a mega church before you attempt to plant a church or partner with a struggling church to help them. You do need radical dependency on the Lord and faith to initiate this kind of bold partnering and planting.
While recognizing that a few of our BR-KC churches have prioritized this kind of vision of reproducing, Gregg shared his desire for even more of our churches to form partnerships and networks for church planting and revitalization, leading to multiplication of healthy churches. Gregg led a panel discussion of several church planting practitioners, including Brian Grout, Matt Miller, Luis Mendoza and Jeremy Conrad. Brian and Luis made us aware of the great need for ethnic church plants as the Hispanic population and other ethnic groups continues to grow in Kansas City. Our People Teams leader was recognized and shared that the new Prayer Guide For The Nations in Kansas City is finished and now available to our BR-KC Churches at our website or at this link. Matt Miller, the KC Send City Missionary with NAMB shared how they work with churches to assess, train and place church planters which come to them from the churches. He reported that 29 young church planters are currently in the NAMB pipeline in the metro area at varying levels of preparedness to plant. If you couldn’t make the meeting, here are the links to videos of Jeremy’s message and the panel discussion.
