Mission Excellence Awards

Purpose:

The Missions Council of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship seeks to recognize three CBF partner congregations on an annual basis with Mission Excellence Awards that exemplify one or more of CBF’s Mission Distinctives and thereby offer the wider Fellowship cause for celebration and models for replication.

Selection Criteria for Mission Excellence Awards:

Primary Criteria:

Consistent with Scripture and our missionary experience, CBF upholds a trinitarian understanding of Christian mission expressed through the contexts and commitments that comprise our Mission Distinctives:

Mission Commitments:

• Cultivating Beloved Community: We cultivate communities of reconciliation and hospitality that serve as signs, instruments, and foretastes of the kingdom of God.
• Bearing Witness to Jesus Christ: We bear witness to the gospel through words that invite faith in Jesus and actions that embody the way of Jesus.
• Seeking Transformational Development: We seek to transform systems that suppress the capacity of individuals and communities in order to recognize, claim, and celebrate the God-given gifts of all people and places.

Mission Contexts:

• Global Poverty: Cooperative Baptists seek sustainable responses to systems of poverty that devalue life and diminish the image of God.
• Global Migration: Unprecedented levels of human migration afford Cooperative Baptists the opportunity to extend hope and hospitality to those who are driven by circumstance or drawn by opportunity away from their homes.
• Global Church: Cooperative Baptists befriend Christians from around the world to share and receive gifts and to engage in God’s mission together through worship, fellowship, education, and service.

Additional Criteria:

Beyond CBF’s theology of mission, the Mission Excellence Awards would also like to particularly consider congregation’s that have demonstrated mission innovation during this pandemic, as well as these three additional factors:

• Robust involvement in the life of the Fellowship (e.g., OGM support, Encourager Church partnership, SRO involvement, and etc.).
• If the congregation’s mission efforts can be replicated by others.
• Sensitivity to the size of the church.

Nominations can be made here. For more information or if you have any questions, please send an email to cbfmissionawards@gmail.com.