Check out photos of our 2013 missions conference on our ODBC Facebook Page!

This year, we are focusing on reaching the world by planting more churches in America. For a long time, America has been the strongest sending force for missionaries, but over the last few decades the United States has become one the world’s largest mission fields. Every year, 4,000 churches close their doors, and 85% of existing churches are declining in attendance. 98% of Christians admit to not sharing Christ during the year. Despite these negative statistics about churches as a whole, consider what God is doing through church planting. Newly-planted churches (typically less than ten-years-old) are proportionately bringing more people to Christ than the largest churches in America. Also, as we consider the future of world-wide missions, we need more churches to be able to support the growing demand for missionaries at home and abroad. That’s why we’re having our missions conference, “Reach the Word. Plant a Church.” We must get involved in helping church planters and starting churches in our “Jerusalem” (our surrounding communities). Let the Lord’s love for people and the souls of the lost appeal to you, so that you might be moved to get involved in Faith Promise Missions Giving. Together, we can do this!

Dr. Charles Shoemaker will be our missions conference speaker. He has been a friend of our church, and he is the president of Church Planting America (CPA). CPA is actively involved in helping plant new churches across the country. ODBC supports CPA through our Faith Promise Giving Program, and we support CPA’s annual effort to get churches involved in church planting through “National Church Planting Month.”

In fact, one of the church plants CPA is involved with is affectionately nicknamed “the beach church” in Rockaway Beach, New York. Through a turn of events brought about by Hurricane Sandy in late 2011, God has saved souls and brought together a nucleus of believers. The new church will be pastored by Ron Taylor, a church planting missionary who has been serving in the New York City area for about six years with his wife, Susan, and their two children. We’ve invited the Taylors to come and present their ministry, and we would like to take them on for support as they start “the beach church.”

Through our missions conference, we encourage you to pray and ask the Lord to help you give through our Faith Promise Missions Giving Program to help the Gospel reach the world. We will receive Faith Promise Commitment Cards during the conference to establish our budget for the next year. Our goal is $56,000.