From: Impact Your World Acts 1:8 Update
Beulah Baptist Church, Hopkins, S.C.
”We’d been working on our Jerusalem for two hundred years. It was time to go to the ends of the earth,” said Brad Bessent, pastor of Beulah Baptist Church, Hopkins, S.C. He was one of the presenters at the February 2009 Impact Your World Pastors’ Conference at the International Learning Center in Rockville, Va. How did a church that was planted when Thomas Jefferson was president become a missional church?
In 2006, Pastor Bessent sat in a restaurant with two International Mission Board (IMB) church services team members. Brad said, “We wrote out a strategy on an envelope.” When asked to define “missions” for Beulah Baptist Church, his answer was “engaging lostness, planting churches.”
The church participated in a West Africa Summit then went on a vision trip where God confirmed He was calling them to the Bambara people. After Bessent got home, IMB missionary Steve Roach called him from West Africa and said, “I need you to come here every six weeks.” When Bessent presented this plan to the deacons, every one of them said, “You’ve gotta go back!” His church family agreed, and six weeks later he returned to the Bambara people to work alongside Roach.
The church has sent 42 different people in teams of five or six on 13 trips in two years. The youngest team member was ten; a 73-year-old lady has gone five times. They have spent $260,000, and none of it has come from the church’s budget. How do you get that kind of money for missions? “Ask God,” Bessent says. “People tell me they don’t want the ‘God’ answer, but that is the only answer there is.”
Fifteen churches have been planted in Bambara villages. Five other churches in the U.S. have sent members with the Beulah Baptist teams. Has it impacted Beulah Baptist Church in other ways? Indeed it has! Attendance has gone from 150 to 350, and their Cooperative Program giving has increased from 10 percent to 11 percent, with plans to increase giving each year.
When a pastor at the conference asked Bessent how a church can discover its own place in the ends of the earth, Bessent shared this strategy: “Look at a map and see where your eyes continually land.” West Africa was that place for Beulah Baptist Church.
Church Services Group: imb.org/main/lead/page.asp?StoryID=5671&LanguageID=1709
Events, Summits, Appointment Services, Pastors’ Conferences: imb.org/main/news/listbykeyword.asp?k=Events
People Group Information: peoplegroups.org
”International Missions Priority Prayers” box for your Web site: http://sbcpray.net/imb/prayerbox.asp
