OKLAHOMA CITY — A web site
launched May 10 aims to become an online platform for churches, mission
organizations, strategists and international partners to collaborate to share
the gospel in the 21st century.
“This was born out of a
desire for churches to reclaim their place in missions,” Tom Ogburn, senior
pastor of First
Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, and member of a facilitating team for
Missions Together, an idea born at a meeting of mission-minded Baptist pastors
last fall.
Ogburn was among several
pastors and other leaders who have been seeking mission partners and
connections that go beyond denominational lines and structures. They wanted to
cooperate with partners who had a similar vision, to help create opportunities
they could not create on their own and to share resources and ideas. But there
wasn’t a good way to connect people all over the world apart from
identity-driven organizations like the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and
Southern Baptist Convention.
Together with Dennis
Wiles, pastor of First Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, Ogburn invited about
50 pastors to Oklahoma City in October 2009 to envision what a new
collaboration might look like. Consensus from both the meeting and two
follow-up conference calls was that what was not needed is the birth of a new
denomination or mission organization requiring administrative leadership,
offices and staffing. This time the choice was to create an open-source web site
to share documents, contacts, relationships and opportunities for churches
already involved in missions.
“Missions Together seeks, in
God’s power, to build a covenantal collective of mission-passionate churches,
missions partners, strategists and implementers that assist churches and
facilitates accomplishing the Great Commission without a sense of competition
and without compromising the integrity of our ecclesiology,” says a statement
on the site
Missionstogether.org is a
public site that serves as an entry point for those desiring to add their voice
to the collaboration. The actual resources are being collected on a
password-protected site, missionstogether.net, which costs $25 a month to join.
Limiting access to
subscribers, Ogburn said, will allow users to post information like e-mail
addresses they might be reluctant to share in an open environment where people
can lurk or comment without using their real names.
The facilitation team has
seeded the site with some initial information including educational resources,
training opportunities, links to mission organizations, and volunteer
opportunities both overseas and in the United States. The concept is for those
resources to multiply exponentially as subscribers use the site and begin to
upload documents, post links to websites and exchange ideas on discussion
boards.
The platform is built with
Microsoft Sharepoint, a content-management system with search capabilities
designed for businesses to work in a Web-based collaborative environment.
“It has been encouraging to
see congregations connecting with one another and sharing missional resource
and relationship information with each other even before we establish the
website,” Ogburn said in an e-mail announcing the launch sent to people who
attended the original Oklahoma City meeting. “I can hardly wait to see what God
will do in us and through us as we discover new ways to empower each other and
partner with one another for the sake of the Kingdom.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE — Allen is
senior writer for Associated Baptist Press.)