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One family on one mission through one cooperative effort.
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You are now listening to the SC Baptist Podcast.
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Welcome to the South Carolina Baptist Podcast.
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I'm Tony Wolf.
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I'm your Executive Director Treasurer, and I have with me in the studio today Cliff Marshall.
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Cliff leads our church planning strategies here at the South Carolina Baptist Convention.
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And speaking of strategy, we have a shift coming.
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We're shifting in our strategy, a major announcement that our listeners may or may not have heard of.
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So, Cliff, so that we don't bury the lead, what exactly are we doing here?
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What is this new church planning strategy?
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Yeah, so this exciting new opportunity for us is that our SC Baptist world, we are going to, we have, uh, thanks to our executive board, we have entered into an agreement with the North American Mission Board, specifically the SYN Network.
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And we are now going to join their mission of churches planting churches for everyone everywhere.
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And obviously, you know we've we've been about that work anyway.
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So for us, the the everyone is all of our folks here in South Carolina that are moving in, that have been here their whole lives.
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The uh everywhere is is South Carolina.
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It's every corner of our state.
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And then the churches that'll be planting those churches are our SC Baptist churches, who have already been doing a great job of that over the last few years.
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And this is just going to give us an opportunity to amplify what's already been happening.
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And we're very excited about it.
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Yeah, I'm excited about it too.
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Send SC, becoming part of the National SIND Network with our North American Mission Board.
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Uh Cliff, so whenever uh a strategy change like this is announced, and we've been working on this for honestly for years and definitely closely for months, but when a strategy shift like this is announced, people have questions.
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Right.
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Baptist people got questions, Cliff.
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So uh the good news is we have some answers.
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So I just want to answer maybe a few of the most basic questions today that are probably on people's minds.
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And let's start with what may be the most obvious question.
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We have a lot of churches in South Carolina already.
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So why do we need to plant more churches in South Carolina?
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Right.
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Good question.
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Well, obviously the first reason, the most basic reason is we see it biblically and outlined in the book of Acts.
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And it's also foundational of our Baptist theology.
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So we are a church planting people.
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Uh all of these existing churches we have, one thing they have in common is they are all church plants, because at one point they didn't exist and now they do.
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So we want to continue that good work.
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But some practical reasons are lostness is a real problem in South Carolina, even though we're in the middle of the Bible Belt.
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And we know that somewhere around 80% of our population is not meaningfully connected to a church that really teaches the Bible.
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And so that's an issue.
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And then, as you know, we've seen historic growth in our state, and we are on the edge of even more growth in our state.
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So our population has increased about a million folks in the last 15 years, and the experts tell us we're looking at a million more in the next 15.
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So you combine this lostness with this historic growth.
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We are at a point where I think the need for new churches has probably never been greater in our state than it is now.
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I agree.
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The number one fastest growing state in the Union.
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Yes, for the last couple of years.
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For two years running, at least, South Carolina.
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Several of the fastest growing cities and counties in the United States are in South Carolina.
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And a lot of this population growth is coming from vastly unchurched portions of the United States.
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They are coming to our backyards.
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So we need to plant more churches.
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So uh churches in cooperation with the South Carolina Baptist Convention, with the other churches in the South Carolina Baptist Convention, they've been planting churches for years.
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We've in fact, Cliff, uh, under your leadership over the last eight years here, we've already exponentially increased the number of healthy church plants under funding, I think, to God and also to you for your leadership here.
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So, since honestly, since we're already planting more churches and God is blessing our efforts, why do we need to enter this new relationship with the North American Mission Board to create SIND SC?
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What's the benefit here?
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Why are we doing this?
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Well, first of all, we're big fans and believers of the work of the North American Mission Board, and our SC Baptist churches are as well, giving to the Annie Armstrong offering every year.
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And the SYN Network of the North American Mission Board is the premier church planting effort that's going on in our country, uh especially in the Baptist world.
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That's right.
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And we want to partner with them for a few reasons.
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One is it's going to shine a national spotlight on South Carolina church planting, probably for the first time, maybe in a long time, or maybe ever.
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We think about planting in South Carolina all the time.
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Me and my team and our SC Baptist team and a lot of our pastors across the state, they they think about it every day.
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But folks in other parts of the country, when they think about the need for church planting, South Carolina may not be on their radar.
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We believe that this will help.
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And in fact, it's it seems to already be helping.
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Uh, since the executive board vote, I'm already having folks reaching out.
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That's exciting.
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So that's exciting.
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The other thing is um, just in a very practical sense as well, there's gonna be funding that's gonna be unlocked for us with this agreement that was not unlocked before.
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And so we are still going to need our SC Baptist churches to support the Janie Chapman State Missions offering at a high level, but there will be matching funds made available through SYN Network that is gonna help us to hopefully double the number of funded church plants and more.
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And then on a real, real micro uh you know, practical level, just for our team and the way we do our work, uh, SYN Network has created the best tools and systems for things like planter care and training and tracking progress and things like that that have never been open to us now.
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And we're knee deep right now in the middle of learning all that, and it's gonna help us to be more effective in our work.
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Amen.
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So South Carolina Baptist Churches, whether they know it or not, if they're cooperating, then they're already part of the work of church planning in South Carolina.
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So that's right.
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Uh through their cooperative program giving, they're funding uh an organization, a mechanism here that's Office Out of the State Convention and elsewhere, uh, whereby people, church planning catalysts and employees are actively working with church planners and with church planning churches across the state.
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So they're they're uh funding the salary structure and the organizational mechanisms through the cooperative program, but through Janie Chapman, uh that that extra giving every year.
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I mean, we're getting direct church planning support that goes to church planning churches from Janie Chapman, the WMU.
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So every month.
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Every single month.
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So if you're giving through the cooperative program through Janie Chapman, you're already part of the church planning work here in South Carolina.
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But I think the whole point of this is that we have to do more.
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We have to do more.
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So, Cliff, I'm a I'm a pastor at a local church or I'm a layleader at a local church, and I'm watching this podcast or listening, and I'm thinking, man, I want to do more.
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I want to get involved.
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What if God's calling me to plant a church or to be part of a church plant?
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Or what if God's calling our church to plant a church?
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What's my next step?
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What do I do?
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So here's two real practical things.
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And um, one of those is you can go on the SC Baptist webpage and go onto the church planting page, and you'll find there a button uh that says um, you know, find out more.
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You click on that, it'll give you a little form to fill out, and whether you're a potential planter, whether you're just someone who's trying to figure some stuff out, whether you're a uh uh one of our existing church pastors and you want a partner, you fill that out and someone for our team will reach out to you and we'll start a conversation.
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You can also email me anytime you want to do that.
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My email address is C Marshall, C-M-A-R-S-H-A-L-L at synnetwork.com.
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And um, I will reach back out to you as soon as possible, and one of our team members will start a conversation with you.
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So those are just real practical ways, and we want to have those, we're having those conversations and we want to have more of them.
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That's right.
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Yeah, we uh we say this all the time uh in our staff and in our building and across the state uh with existing church plants and church planting churches.
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Uh conventions do not plant churches.
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That's right.
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We don't.
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Uh churches plant churches.
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And so this is the work of cooperating churches, and we will not plant any more churches in South Carolina unless cooperating churches do the work of giving sacrificially, raising up and releasing church planners and church planning core teams.
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The churches have to plant more churches.
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Our our role, our joy is to help facilitate that uh and increase it exponentially through arrangements and strategies like this.
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But arrangements and strategies are just that.
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You know, we can we can put the best administrative detail into everything we do, and we do.
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Uh we can have the best organization, the best structure.
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We can even have buckets of funding, which we don't, by the way, but it would be great if we did.
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We could, and still nothing could happen because uh, unless the Holy Spirit breathes on something, there's no meaningful movement, there's no eternal effect.
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So we're a praying people.
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Uh South Carolina Baptists believe in the power of prayer.
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We believe that God actually cares, He listens, and that He can.
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So uh for some of our listeners who are just thinking, all right, I I may I may be ready to take a step into doing something, either through the website or through your email address.
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But others of us are just thinking, okay, I want to get involved by praying.
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How specifically can I pray?
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Can you give us two or three specific prayer requests that we can lean into as this new strategy agreement uh with Send Network starts to take shape?
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Yeah, I would say our top three.
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Number one, we need to pray, beg God that our SC Baptist churches would disciple and train up young men, older men, men to be sent out from their church to plant new churches, to go to across the street and plant a new church or grow across the state to plant a new church.
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It's they're gonna come from our SC Baptist congregations.
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And so that would be the first prayer.
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The second one is for our SC Baptists to live missionally wherever they are.
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Um, all of our folks, I I just am amazed when I think about the number of South Carolina Baptists that are spread out across this state every day in the workplaces, in the schools, on the pickleball courts, on the golf courses, where wherever they are.
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If they will live missionally and think about actively sharing the gospel in all these places where they are, we'll begin to see some things happen that we've probably never seen before and we'll be amazed at.
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And then the last thing, and and maybe you pray this before the second one, but uh that the hearts of South Carolinians, new South Carolinians and lifelong residents, would be convicted over their need for a savior.
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Um one of the things we know about the folks that have moved in and the folks that are moving in, most of them aren't coming here because they're looking for a church.
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They mostly are looking for warmer winters and lower taxes and things like that.
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And we got that in South Carolina.
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But what we can do is we can help them to understand that their greatest need was not a nice house on the lake with lower taxes or even being near their grandkids, which is important.
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Their greatest need is a need for a savior.
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But the way that starts is that's got to start in their heart.
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The Holy Spirit's got to do that work, and that's the work that only He can do.
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So pray for pray for that as well.
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Amen.
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And you can get involved directly right now by actively praying for these three requests and sharing them with your Sunday school class, your small group, your church family, uh, put them on the screen, do something, and pray with us that that the Holy Spirit would breathe on this new strategy in these very three, three very specific prayer requests areas that Cliff's given us.
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And we know that we've only begun to scratch the surface of answering your questions.
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We are fully aware of that.
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Uh, but as Send SC takes shape over the course of the coming months, look for more information and more very specific information about what it looks like and how you can get involved as we release more and more information over the next two or three months, just throughout the summer.
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Just look for more information.
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Uh and Cliff, thank you.
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Thank you for joining us on the podcast today, and thank you for listening.
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And Cliff, brother, if I hadn't said it enough, I thank God for you.
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Thank you.
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Thanks so much.
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Thanks for listening to the SC Baptist Podcast.
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This SC Baptist resource is made possible through the cooperative program giving of South Carolina Baptist churches.
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One family on one mission through one cooperative effort.
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You are now listening to the SC Baptist Podcast.
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Welcome to the South Carolina Baptist Podcast.
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I'm Tony Wolf.
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I'm your Executive Director Treasurer, and I have with me in the studio today Cliff Marshall.
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Cliff leads our church planning strategies here at the South Carolina Baptist Convention.
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And speaking of strategy, we have a shift coming.
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We're shifting in our strategy, a major announcement that our listeners may or may not have heard of.
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So, Cliff, so that we don't bury the lead, what exactly are we doing here?
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What is this new church planning strategy?
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Yeah, so this exciting new opportunity for us is that our SC Baptist world, we are going to, we have, uh, thanks to our executive board, we have entered into an agreement with the North American Mission Board, specifically the SYN Network.
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And we are now going to join their mission of churches planting churches for everyone everywhere.
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And obviously, you know we've we've been about that work anyway.
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So for us, the the everyone is all of our folks here in South Carolina that are moving in, that have been here their whole lives.
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The uh everywhere is is South Carolina.
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It's every corner of our state.
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And then the churches that'll be planting those churches are our SC Baptist churches, who have already been doing a great job of that over the last few years.
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And this is just going to give us an opportunity to amplify what's already been happening.
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And we're very excited about it.
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Yeah, I'm excited about it too.
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Send SC, becoming part of the National SIND Network with our North American Mission Board.
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Uh Cliff, so whenever uh a strategy change like this is announced, and we've been working on this for honestly for years and definitely closely for months, but when a strategy shift like this is announced, people have questions.
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Right.
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Baptist people got questions, Cliff.
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So uh the good news is we have some answers.
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So I just want to answer maybe a few of the most basic questions today that are probably on people's minds.
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And let's start with what may be the most obvious question.
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We have a lot of churches in South Carolina already.
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So why do we need to plant more churches in South Carolina?
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Right.
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Good question.
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Well, obviously the first reason, the most basic reason is we see it biblically and outlined in the book of Acts.
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And it's also foundational of our Baptist theology.
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So we are a church planting people.
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Uh all of these existing churches we have, one thing they have in common is they are all church plants, because at one point they didn't exist and now they do.
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So we want to continue that good work.
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But some practical reasons are lostness is a real problem in South Carolina, even though we're in the middle of the Bible Belt.
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And we know that somewhere around 80% of our population is not meaningfully connected to a church that really teaches the Bible.
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And so that's an issue.
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And then, as you know, we've seen historic growth in our state, and we are on the edge of even more growth in our state.
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So our population has increased about a million folks in the last 15 years, and the experts tell us we're looking at a million more in the next 15.
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So you combine this lostness with this historic growth.
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We are at a point where I think the need for new churches has probably never been greater in our state than it is now.
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I agree.
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The number one fastest growing state in the Union.
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Yes, for the last couple of years.
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For two years running, at least, South Carolina.
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Several of the fastest growing cities and counties in the United States are in South Carolina.
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And a lot of this population growth is coming from vastly unchurched portions of the United States.
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They are coming to our backyards.
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So we need to plant more churches.
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So uh churches in cooperation with the South Carolina Baptist Convention, with the other churches in the South Carolina Baptist Convention, they've been planting churches for years.
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We've in fact, Cliff, uh, under your leadership over the last eight years here, we've already exponentially increased the number of healthy church plants under funding, I think, to God and also to you for your leadership here.
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So, since honestly, since we're already planting more churches and God is blessing our efforts, why do we need to enter this new relationship with the North American Mission Board to create SIND SC?
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What's the benefit here?
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Why are we doing this?
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Well, first of all, we're big fans and believers of the work of the North American Mission Board, and our SC Baptist churches are as well, giving to the Annie Armstrong offering every year.
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And the SYN Network of the North American Mission Board is the premier church planting effort that's going on in our country, uh especially in the Baptist world.
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That's right.
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And we want to partner with them for a few reasons.
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One is it's going to shine a national spotlight on South Carolina church planting, probably for the first time, maybe in a long time, or maybe ever.
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We think about planting in South Carolina all the time.
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Me and my team and our SC Baptist team and a lot of our pastors across the state, they they think about it every day.
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But folks in other parts of the country, when they think about the need for church planting, South Carolina may not be on their radar.
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We believe that this will help.
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And in fact, it's it seems to already be helping.
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Uh, since the executive board vote, I'm already having folks reaching out.
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That's exciting.
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So that's exciting.
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The other thing is um, just in a very practical sense as well, there's gonna be funding that's gonna be unlocked for us with this agreement that was not unlocked before.
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And so we are still going to need our SC Baptist churches to support the Janie Chapman State Missions offering at a high level, but there will be matching funds made available through SYN Network that is gonna help us to hopefully double the number of funded church plants and more.
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And then on a real, real micro uh you know, practical level, just for our team and the way we do our work, uh, SYN Network has created the best tools and systems for things like planter care and training and tracking progress and things like that that have never been open to us now.
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And we're knee deep right now in the middle of learning all that, and it's gonna help us to be more effective in our work.
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Amen.
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So South Carolina Baptist Churches, whether they know it or not, if they're cooperating, then they're already part of the work of church planning in South Carolina.
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So that's right.
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Uh through their cooperative program giving, they're funding uh an organization, a mechanism here that's Office Out of the State Convention and elsewhere, uh, whereby people, church planning catalysts and employees are actively working with church planners and with church planning churches across the state.
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So they're they're uh funding the salary structure and the organizational mechanisms through the cooperative program, but through Janie Chapman, uh that that extra giving every year.
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I mean, we're getting direct church planning support that goes to church planning churches from Janie Chapman, the WMU.
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So every month.
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Every single month.
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So if you're giving through the cooperative program through Janie Chapman, you're already part of the church planning work here in South Carolina.
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But I think the whole point of this is that we have to do more.
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We have to do more.
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So, Cliff, I'm a I'm a pastor at a local church or I'm a layleader at a local church, and I'm watching this podcast or listening, and I'm thinking, man, I want to do more.
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I want to get involved.
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What if God's calling me to plant a church or to be part of a church plant?
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Or what if God's calling our church to plant a church?
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What's my next step?
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What do I do?
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So here's two real practical things.
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And um, one of those is you can go on the SC Baptist webpage and go onto the church planting page, and you'll find there a button uh that says um, you know, find out more.
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You click on that, it'll give you a little form to fill out, and whether you're a potential planter, whether you're just someone who's trying to figure some stuff out, whether you're a uh uh one of our existing church pastors and you want a partner, you fill that out and someone for our team will reach out to you and we'll start a conversation.
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You can also email me anytime you want to do that.
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My email address is C Marshall, C-M-A-R-S-H-A-L-L at synnetwork.com.
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And um, I will reach back out to you as soon as possible, and one of our team members will start a conversation with you.
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So those are just real practical ways, and we want to have those, we're having those conversations and we want to have more of them.
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That's right.
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Yeah, we uh we say this all the time uh in our staff and in our building and across the state uh with existing church plants and church planting churches.
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Uh conventions do not plant churches.
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That's right.
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We don't.
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Uh churches plant churches.
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And so this is the work of cooperating churches, and we will not plant any more churches in South Carolina unless cooperating churches do the work of giving sacrificially, raising up and releasing church planners and church planning core teams.
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The churches have to plant more churches.
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Our our role, our joy is to help facilitate that uh and increase it exponentially through arrangements and strategies like this.
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But arrangements and strategies are just that.
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You know, we can we can put the best administrative detail into everything we do, and we do.
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Uh we can have the best organization, the best structure.
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We can even have buckets of funding, which we don't, by the way, but it would be great if we did.
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We could, and still nothing could happen because uh, unless the Holy Spirit breathes on something, there's no meaningful movement, there's no eternal effect.
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So we're a praying people.
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Uh South Carolina Baptists believe in the power of prayer.
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We believe that God actually cares, He listens, and that He can.
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So uh for some of our listeners who are just thinking, all right, I I may I may be ready to take a step into doing something, either through the website or through your email address.
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But others of us are just thinking, okay, I want to get involved by praying.
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How specifically can I pray?
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Can you give us two or three specific prayer requests that we can lean into as this new strategy agreement uh with Send Network starts to take shape?
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Yeah, I would say our top three.
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Number one, we need to pray, beg God that our SC Baptist churches would disciple and train up young men, older men, men to be sent out from their church to plant new churches, to go to across the street and plant a new church or grow across the state to plant a new church.
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It's they're gonna come from our SC Baptist congregations.
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And so that would be the first prayer.
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The second one is for our SC Baptists to live missionally wherever they are.
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Um, all of our folks, I I just am amazed when I think about the number of South Carolina Baptists that are spread out across this state every day in the workplaces, in the schools, on the pickleball courts, on the golf courses, where wherever they are.
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If they will live missionally and think about actively sharing the gospel in all these places where they are, we'll begin to see some things happen that we've probably never seen before and we'll be amazed at.
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And then the last thing, and and maybe you pray this before the second one, but uh that the hearts of South Carolinians, new South Carolinians and lifelong residents, would be convicted over their need for a savior.
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Um one of the things we know about the folks that have moved in and the folks that are moving in, most of them aren't coming here because they're looking for a church.
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They mostly are looking for warmer winters and lower taxes and things like that.
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And we got that in South Carolina.
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But what we can do is we can help them to understand that their greatest need was not a nice house on the lake with lower taxes or even being near their grandkids, which is important.
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Their greatest need is a need for a savior.
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But the way that starts is that's got to start in their heart.
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The Holy Spirit's got to do that work, and that's the work that only He can do.
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So pray for pray for that as well.
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Amen.
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And you can get involved directly right now by actively praying for these three requests and sharing them with your Sunday school class, your small group, your church family, uh, put them on the screen, do something, and pray with us that that the Holy Spirit would breathe on this new strategy in these very three, three very specific prayer requests areas that Cliff's given us.
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And we know that we've only begun to scratch the surface of answering your questions.
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We are fully aware of that.
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Uh, but as Send SC takes shape over the course of the coming months, look for more information and more very specific information about what it looks like and how you can get involved as we release more and more information over the next two or three months, just throughout the summer.
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Just look for more information.
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Uh and Cliff, thank you.
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Thank you for joining us on the podcast today, and thank you for listening.
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And Cliff, brother, if I hadn't said it enough, I thank God for you.
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Thank you.
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Thanks so much.
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Thanks for listening to the SC Baptist Podcast.
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This SC Baptist resource is made possible through the cooperative program giving of South Carolina Baptist churches.
