Florida Baptist Witness and Tom Elliff

The Florida Baptist Witness reports Tom Elliffs vision and agenda in a Q and A session here.

This article also links to his address with the trustees last Wednesday morning, March 16th, 2011.

A portion (perhaps my favorite part!):

"When you speak of unreached people groups, you editors are very well informed on this because I know you follow closely what we do. But you know that there are 6,734 unreached people groups. Now we would consider an unreached people group [to be] a group of people, an affinity group, that they are ethno-linguistically similar, that does not have at least two percent of the population in what we'd call the evangelical faith. Now that's an unreached people group. Of that 6,734 that we currently know, 3,800 are what we'd call unengaged people groups. That means no one has taken it upon themselves to draw up a deliberate strategy, take the Gospel on the ground there. They're unengaged. They're not unengaged by the soft drink industry. They're already in there. They're not unengaged by the pornography industry. They're already in there. And that's a shame. If anybody ought to care more about their product, so to speak, than the soft drink industry and porn industry, it ought to be believers in Christ. How in the world can we let these people be unengaged?

"So I will be bringing to the convention in Phoenix a proposal that brings together many of the elements that are already in place with the International Mission Board. Our church and partner services have worked on how do we engage these people. They have all the pieces. We're going to put these together and by the grace of God, beginning with this year's convention within 12 months we pray that at least 3,800 churches in the Southern Baptist Convention–that's not even a tenth of our churches, would cowboy up and say, 'We are going to strategize, we're going to pray, and we're going to do everything we can with the ultimate goal of seeing that there are boots on the ground among those people.' And I think it would be a wonderful thing if the day came when many, many churches across our convention had missionaries among churches appointed by the IMB on the field in those people groups, doing nothing but coordinate the work of their churches among those people. That would be a dream come true."

May it be, Lord. May it be.