By Tim Lubinus, BCI Executive Director/Treasurer

In the spring of 2016 the Baptist Convention of Iowa (BCI) executive board made several bold decisions. I’d like to give a few updates on these decisions:

Friendship Baptist Center: The BCI executive board decided to help the Friendship Center to be its own independent entity, news article here. Since the decision, the Friendship Center has created its own board made up of people who love the Center and are members of BCI affiliated churches. It has its own legal entity and enough funding in the bank to carry them through 2017. Jon and Mindy will continue to boldly move forward and serve people in the poverty impacted neighborhood around the center. The Center’s board will welcome additional ministry partners to volunteer at the Center and support it financially.

Iowa Ministry Fund: The executive board voted to restructure and release some of BCI’s savings and designate an additional ten percent of its income toward supporting the best ministries in Iowa in ten different ministry categories. News article here. Since the decision, the foundation committee made its selections here and BCI began sending checks in October. Early in 2017, the foundation committee will review the ministry categories and the process for selecting recipients to begin the process again. This fund allows our churches partner with others to impact the best ministries in the state that serve the most vulnerable among us.

Mobile Office: The executive board and the whole convention voted in the spring to sell the office building to help release our staff to better serve our churches, news article here. Since the decision, the office building sold in August for more money and more quickly than we expected. The BCI is blessed with several churches who are willing to let the Executive Board use their meeting rooms, we are grateful that Grand Avenue Baptist Church has allowed us to use their facility as our “normal” meeting location in 2016.

For other updates presented at our annual meeting in November including a four-minute video summary, click here.

Any big changes scheduled for 2017?

One of the ideas that we’ll be working on in 2017 is a better system for developing church planters from within Iowa. We will continue to do all we can to recruit quality planters to Iowa, but we want to step up our systems for developing planters from within Iowa churches.

The first meeting of the administrative committee is scheduled for January 21. Our new BCI president is Robert Knight. Please contact him at pastor@newbirthames.org or me at TLubinus@BCIowa.org if you have comments, suggestions, or recommendations.