ALPHARETTA, Ga. (BP)–The North American Mission Board’s award-winning On Mission magazine is celebrating its fifth anniversary by introducing several new features to benefit the missions leadership of the local church in addition to the readers it already serves.
The new features are designed to make NAMB’s flagship magazine “indispensable” to the missions-minded pastor and the church missions committee, said Nate Adams, vice president for mobilization and media for NAMB.
“On Mission is already effective at giving Christians personal inspiration and practical help for an evangelistic lifestyle,” Adams said. “In the redesign we hope to add even more benefits to the church and the missions leadership of the church. The new On Mission will help leaders plan church-wide missions involvement as well as their own on mission lifestyle.”
Central to the new direction is a commitment to urging churches and on-mission Christians to embrace a balanced, Acts 1:8 missions strategy, one that sees the local church at the center of the missions task and its influence emanating out to its Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and the “ends of the earth.”
“For the churches of the Southern Baptist Convention, three of those four ‘circles of influence’ are within the North American mission field,” Adams said. “In partnership with state conventions and local associations we want to help each local church reach its unique Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.”
Carolyn Curtis, editor of the magazine, said the seamless Acts 1:8 approach also is helpful in an era when boundaries of domestic and international missions no longer are always clear.
“Because so many people of other countries and cultures come to the U.S., you can often reach another people group right in your community, and certainly in North America,” she said. “So there will be times when we focus on missionaries and on mission churches and laypeople who are reaching a particular people group that’s located both in North America and abroad.”
Curtis said On Mission plans to show how all missionaries are ultimately from the local church and central to the local church’s strategy for reaching the entire world with the Gospel.
“One of the most exciting changes will be vignettes about missionaries, those serving in North America and also through the IMB in ‘the ends of the earth,'” she said.
There will also be more material designed to help the church develop and implement its missions strategy.
“The church is the center of the Great Commission,” Adams said, “and we want to help every local church see their world and plan a balanced strategy to that world. On-mission Christians serving through on-mission churches in a balanced Acts 1:8 strategy is the key, and that’s the worldview the new On Mission plans to deliver and encourage.”
Two new features include maps showing locations of missionaries plus their assignments and prayer requests and a department called “The Pulse” that provides quick-read pieces with practical ideas and insights.
“We’ll have a lot of practical, how-to articles that can give people some solid ideas they can use, for example, when they plan a mission trip, a missions conference, even a missions committee meeting or task force,” Curtis said. “We’ll also give ideas for doing missions in a church with a small budget.”
There also will be more use of maps, photos and charts to convey information, as well as shorter stories that provide a “quick-read” overview of a particular topic, Adams said. Greater efforts also are being made to point readers to supplemental materials available through the Internet.
“We’ll do more of the digging and research and summarizing needed to give you quick, visual summaries of what you need to know about your world and your mission fields,” Adams said.
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For more about On Mission magazine, visit www.onmission.com. (BP) photo posted in the BP Photo Library at https://www.bpnews.net. Photo title: ON MISSION.
