Sending Celebration, Biden Renews Refugee & NAMB/N.C. Partnership

At a recent IMB Sending Celebration 24 missionaries were commissioned to the nations. It happened at Beaverdam Baptist Church in Beaverdam, Va.

The IMB’s board of trustees approved the appointment of the new fully funded missionaries in their meeting, also held on Wednesday.

These missionaries represent those who made their way through the IMB’s pipeline, first as candidates, and then as approved missionaries. As the IMB celebrates these and the more than 1,100 more in the pipeline, they also understand that the need is great, and in order to reach the nations, together, more are still needed to go.
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President Biden again has set a refugee resettlement ceiling of 125,000 for the next year despite an expectation this year’s admissions will fall 100,000 short of that goal.

The White House announced the admissions cap for refugees in the 2022-23 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. It appears the United States will resettle fewer than 25,000 refugees under the ceiling of 125,000 established for this fiscal year, based on the number of admissions during the first 11 months of 2021-22.

The announcement of Biden’s latest admissions ceiling came four days after the Southern Baptist Ethics & Religious Commission (ERLC) and seven other organizations in the Evangelical Immigration Table (EIT) wrote the president and congressional leaders with a plea for them to rebuild the country’s refugee resettlement program, which has experienced record lows in recent years. In that Sept. 23 letter, they urged Biden to set a ceiling of 125,000 for the next year as a step in rebuilding the program.
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The North American Mission Board (NAMB) and N.C. Baptists announced a new church planting partnership in the state, known as SendNC, on Tuesday (Sept. 27).

In 2014, North Carolina ranked in the top-10 most religious states in the U.S., but even then, the metrics utilized to measure religiosity were down from seven years prior. If the state has trended with the rest of the nation, then those numbers continued trailing slowly downward.

A key avenue N.C. Baptists see in reversing that trend is to energize churches to plant more churches throughout the state.

“This partnership allows us to more than double our church-planting efforts and allows churches of all sizes to be obedient to the Great Commission in planting churches,” said Todd Unzicker, executive director-treasurer of N.C. Baptists.