The ADOM/CSS: Origins and Role With the North American Mission Board

A growing number of NAMB appointed missionaries who serve as Associational Directors of Missions are being designated by the title of Associational Director of Missions (ADOM)/Church Starter Strategist or ADOM/Church Planter Missionary. Many of these missionaries have assignments in predominantly rural regions or have large rural sectors within their geographical areas of responsibilities. This paper is for the purpose of identifying the origin of this missionary model and clarifying its role.  An understanding of its origin and unique role can assist to expand the use of the model and encourage effective practices by those who serve in these assignments.

An historical perspective of the rurality of the SBC, the factors behind national denominational expansion, and the development of the role of the ADOM helps to frame this subject. Southern Baptists have had a rich history of growth and expansion since their organizational beginnings in 1845. This growth extended to cities, towns and open rural areas. Southern Baptists have been predominantly rural folk from their beginnings.[1]  Up to the present, numbers of Southern Baptist congregations have been found predominantly in rural settings.[2]

The numerical strength in congregations and numbers of adherents has been clustered in the eighteen southern and southwestern states. While there has been a growing strength in the cities of these dominant states, the numbers of smaller membership congregations in small towns and rural settings have been dominant.[3] However, being the missionary people that they are, Southern Baptists were destined to extend from the rural areas and cities of the South into the rest of the nation.

Territorial expansion was inevitable for this missionary people called Southern Baptists. Jesse Fletcher calls the years of 1945 to 1964 “The Great Advance.”[4] Actually, prior to these dates Southern Baptists in California “breached regionality” when the first Baptist church related to Southern Baptists was established near Bakersfield in 1936 at Shafter.[5]  Leon McBeth states that “migration, not mission policy, led to the early Southern Baptist churches outside the South.[6] However, during this great advance, Southern Baptist agencies did initiate what was termed “modern pioneer missions.”[7]  The Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention (HMB) established the Department of Pioneer Missions. Wendell Belew wrote:

Pioneer missions . . . includes the following areas: Alaska, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Dakota, Utah, Vermont, Wisconsin, and Wyoming. When the South Burlington, Vt., Baptist church was constituted, July 6, 1963, Southern Baptists then had one or more churches in every state of the Union.

This happened in less than a half century, triggered by large shifts of population induced by opportunities offered in industry, business, and education, plus military assignments causing an estimated 1,300,000 Baptist to leave the southern states between 1940 and 1950. Additional large numbers moved during subsequent years.

In 1959 the Convention instructed the board to “continue emphasis on work in areas where there is no state convention or where the state convention is not well established.”[8]   In this migration, people moved into communities that had no Baptist witness and few churches. Often there was little or no evangelical witness. The emergence of the new churches arose not so much by the work of appointed field workers, but by committed laymen and lay women who met in various settings such as homes, rented lodge halls, mortuaries, or church facilities such as those of the Seventh-Day Adventists. Many turned to the Home Mission Board for assistance in employing a minister or other resource needs.[9]

The territorial expansion was not done without complaints by the Northern Baptist Convention (now the American Baptist Churches, USA) regarding the basis of comity agreements made in 1912 and confirmed in 1942.[10] Jesse Fletcher explains:

 Southern Baptists were now expanding north from bases that stretched throughout the Old South across the Southwest to the West Coast. In part this resulted from continued migration of Southern Baptists to the Midwest, West, and Northwest that began with the depression and continued with the Second World War. In part, the expansion was due to the collapse of the restraint that Southern Baptists had practiced, however unevenly, in Northern Baptist territories. According to H. K. Neely, Southern Baptist expansion had to overcome four barriers: (1) competition from the Home Mission Society of the northern body; (2) the sectional name of Southern Baptists; (3) limitations presented by Southern Baptists’ by-laws and constitution; and (4) fears of the size of Convention gatherings and the distances involved. The California decision in 1942, the Convention meeting in Chicago in 1950, and the Northern Convention’s name change to the American Baptist Convention motivated Southern Baptist to ignore all barriers.[11]

  From actions taken in the 1944 convention meeting, and reaffirmed in 1949 and 1951, the Southern Baptist Convention “expressed itself as being free of territorial limitations within the United States, as provided almost a century earlier in its constitution.”[12] The HMB began the western missions work in 1944 with projects in California, New Mexico and Arizona. This involvement led to the appointment of Fred A. McCaulley in 1946 as “general field worker for the western states, with responsibility for promoting ‘Tentmakers’ added later.”[13] Also reflecting the change to an expanded national scope, in 1952 the HMB changed the name of its “Western Mission Work” to “Western and Pioneer Mission Work.” The 1952 Annual “stated that Southern Baptist churches in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, Wyoming, and Idaho were now co-operating with the State Conventions in New Mexico, Arizona, California, Washington-Oregon, and Kansas; thus indirectly with the Home Board through the aid it gave to these western Conventions.”[14] In this same year, the Board hired Fred R. Barnes as “an itinerant missionary to minister to ranchers and other isolated groups in frontier and pioneer areas of the west.”[15]

Therefore, during the years after World War II, the movement of the Southern Baptist Convention intentionally became nationwide. By 1970, “The Program of Pioneer Missions” of the HMB, which was created in 1959 to relate to the new emerging state conventions established after 1940, reported that in the previous year 54 new churches, 238 new home fellowship missions, and 50 new pastors to pioneer fields were approved and supported.[16]  Likewise, in the same year, the “Program of Rural-Urban Missions,” which related to non-metropolitan regions, reported establishing 44 church/missions, approving 32 new mission pastors, nine new student pastors, four new “superintendents of missions,” and one new “pastoral missionary.”[17] Old comity agreements, formally or informally, had begun to thoroughly pass off the scene.[18] Farley noted one factor contributing to this new reality, “The industrialization that accompanied World War II drew Baptist young people to the northern and western towns and cities.”[19] 

Other factors played a significant part in Southern Baptist adherents relocating to new regions. For example, during the “dust bowl” era and then beyond, many moved from Oklahoma to southern California to secure employment. Likewise, families that were connected with the U.S. military were stationed in regions outside the traditionally dominant Southern Baptist states.[20] With the rise and expansion of corporate America, many persons from dominant Southern Baptist regions received job promotions and moved with their companies to the cities of the North and West.[21] Some of these were lost to the Southern Baptist movement, but many played roles in founding new churches that sought affiliation with the Southern Baptist Convention. Most of this growth of congregations resulted not so much from a missional philosophy, but from a colonial tendency. Migrants could not find Baptist churches that sang the old time gospel hymns to which they were accustomed, folks who ate grits, or who played “Texas 42.” Therefore, they looked to create a church model in a “distant land” like they had back home.[22] 

From this natural expansion came the organizing of new state conventions. While the earliest of these conventions were New Mexico (1912), Arizona (1926), and California (1940), an additional seventeen new conventions have emerged since 1943. Throughout these areas, once referred to as “pioneer mission states,” later as “new work states,” particularly in the southwest and western mountain regions, the Baptist movement has prospered.[23]   Gary Farley expands this concept as he points to some significant strategy moves that gave impetus to this expansion:

In most areas, we (Southern Baptists) have moved past the Mainline Protestants and have become the second or third largest Christian Body. A major component of this growth since 1960 has been the deployment of associational missionaries. Here they have been given a territory, much like an area sales person, in which they are charged to generate new Southern Baptist congregations. This seems to have saved us from blindly accepting the conventional wisdom and focusing on the cities. These missionaries have been close enough to see “where the action is” and respond accordingly. Evidence of this is the statistic that since 1971 more than half of the successful new church plants by Southern Baptists have been in rural or town communities.[24]

Farley is stating that the HMB picked up on this natural grassroots national expansion and made some intentional organizational and strategy commitments for church extension into these new regions, namely the deployment of field missionaries. As growth came in numbers of congregations, new associations of smaller size were created and more ADOMs were deployed. These ADOMs also assisted in deploying pastoral missionaries[25] who were funded by the national agency, thus expanding the number of church planting workers. These pastoral missionaries, as church planters, were usually the pastor of one local congregation while facilitating multiple new church-starts within a given region.

An emphasis begun in 1975 termed the Bold Mission Thrust was officially adopted by the SBC in 1978. The goal of this emphasis was to capture the imagination of Southern Baptists and unify the agencies toward a common focus of unprecedented expansion.[26] In 1979, during the blossoming of the Bold Mission Thrust, the HMB through the Church Extension Department initiated the new planter apprentice program.[27] Likewise, the program of Church Extension was elevated from department level to division level in the Mission Section of the HMB in 1980. Both actions signaled significant changes in the strategic plan of the HMB.[28] The movement was toward a priority of and a return to appointing field missionaries who were church planters.

By 1984, the Church Extension Division, under F. J. (Jack) Redford, was reorganized into two departments: the New Church Growth Department, Joel Land, Director, and the New Church Starting Department, Nelson Tilton, Director.[29] Increased numbers of church starter strategists, along with catalytic missionaries through the Language Mission Division, were deployed in cooperative agreement with state conventions into all new work regions as well as new growth areas of established Baptist strongholds in the South. The above actions represented a stronger thrust of the HMB toward the planting of new churches nationwide. 

While starting new churches, especially in the emerging new work states, was always integral to the work of the HMB, church planting moved to a new level in 1987, when Larry Lewis became the President of HMB. Lewis, being a church planter at heart, led the agency to set a goal of 10,000 new church plants by 2000.[30] This church planting priority was coupled with a growing emphasis on volunteerism that was launched as a program of the HMB in 1978 in which hundreds of SBC laity found opportunities beyond their home areas to serve in short and long term assignments.[31]  

A somewhat obscure, but very significant field strategy was initiated in 1987. John Allen became the State Director of Missions for the Colorado Baptist Convention, and introduced a new model of church planting strategists.[32] This model combined the role of the ADOM and the church starter strategist. Boatman explains Allen’s approach in Colorado:

Allen believed a new approach was essential for the Missions Department. The strategy he put forth required a reorganization of the department and close scrutiny of how money was spent. One of the challenges was eliminating the pastor missionary program in which a missionary was assigned to one congregation. Instead, catalytic missionaries—now called church planter strategists—were given an area in which to work. Those included resort ministries and pastoral missionaries. . . . five Directors of Missions served Colorado’s 11 associations at the beginning of Allen’s service. During his tenure, that number doubled. The smaller area allowed the DOMs to focus on church starting and assisting churches that had reached a plateau.[33]

Allen saw the weakness in the prevailing models of appointed missionaries whose assignment should have been to carry the burden of church extension, i.e., the ADOM and the pastoral missionary. The church planting task was originally built into both models. However, without an intentional strategy and accountability for the church planting task, both models gravitated toward administrative and pastoral maintenance. The pastoral missionary was expected to plant a church and then lead that congregation to plant multiple churches. In some cases this task was accomplished with success, as was the case of W. J. (Dub) Hughes, who came to Grand Forks, North Dakota as a pastoral missionary in 1958 and served there until 1972.[34] However, the primary church served by the pastoral missionary was often left in a weakened state due to the long standing outside financial subsidy for the pastor.

Weaknesses in the associational director of missions model appeared as the individual missionary or the association tended toward maintaining the existing churches rather than leading in church extension. This movement from mission to administration may be deduced from the historical progression of titles given to this worker over the years: “pioneer missionary,”[35] “associational missionary,”[36] “superintendent of associational missions,”[37] and “director of missions,” or “associational director of missions.”[38]

The strengths of both the pastoral missionary and the ADOM models were also recognized by Allen.   He sought to combine the strengths of an ADOM as a “mission strategist” with the passion and church planting skills of the church planter strategist. In his “325 by 95” challenge to Colorado Baptists, Allen stated 15 objectives in the process to achieve this ambitious church planting goal. One of the objectives called for the ADOM, which he referred to as DOM, to be a generalist and field missionary. He stated, “Nothing is new about this goal over the past 30 years; however, the past assignments of Colorado DOMs made it very difficult, if not impossible.”[39]  Allen outlined six actions relating to ADOMs (DOM) and their work:

a.       The DOM should be personally involved in Church Extension.

b.      The DOM should be primarily a catalyst in church starting.

c.       The DOM should develop, promote, [and] implement a five year plan of extension.

d.      The DOM should develop, promote, [and] implement the Associational Mission Development Program (AMDP) and the Church Missions Development Program (CMDP).  

e.       The DOM should supervise mission pastors.

f.       The DOM should encourage potential sponsoring churches and pastors as possible.[40]

All ADOMs and five other missionary personnel positions in the state convention were appointed positions by the HMB and jointly funded by the state convention.  During 1989 and 1990, Allen worked to secure agreement for redesigning the ADOM role and moved from five ADOMs to eleven—nine ADOM/CSSs in nine associations, and ADOMs for the two metro associations (Denver and Colorado Springs). Because a reorganization of HMB had taken place in the Extension Section, this agreement involved Charles Chaney, Vice President of the Extension Section, Robert L. Wiley, Associational Missions Division Director, the New Church Extension Division Director (vacant), and New Church Starting Department Director, Jim Hill. Each of the nine Colorado associations receiving the ADOM/CSS program also was given the option to reject or receive this change of strategy. From this mutual agreement from all partners, a new model of an associational position was born, providing the potential for changing the kingdom landscape of a state convention. The documented results of this strategy change reveal its success.[41]

 Other state conventions picked up this model begun by Allen in Colorado: Montana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania-South Jersey. Veryl Henderson, who followed Allen as the SDOM of Colorado, stated, “The church starter strategist concept [meaning ADOM/CSS] originated in Colorado with John Allen. I learned of the concept when I arrived and liked it immediately.  The strategist component multiplied the church planting focus.  John may have instituted it in concert with HMB, but it was a good move.”[42] Henderson conserved the direction Allen had established and moved even more toward the intentional involvement of ADOMs in the church planting process.[43]

This model actually was not new, as Allen states above. The ADOM/CSS is a return to the way an area or associational missionary and the pastoral missionary generally functioned in the Rocky Mountain western states from 1952 through 1975. The thrust of church planting was dominant in the individual missionaries’ passion and skills and was the expectation of the denominational entities that supported his appointment. Notable persons who exemplified this model in Arizona, Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota were O. R. (Benny) Delmar, W. A. Wiggins, Albert Casteel, Leroy Smith, A. Wilson Parker, Joe Smith, W.J. Hughes, Roy Owen, John Allen, and David Bunch, just to mention a few. These planters served under the various titles of area missionary, associational missionary, superintendent of missions, and pastoral missionary. The records reveal that each of these and others functioned as catalytic workers, mission strategists, and pastors who accepted the responsibility to lead their churches and associations to be multiplying entities.[44] 

In many cases, persons filling these missionary roles in subsequent years did not have the mindset, skills, or passion for church planting and allowed the positions and their ministries to reflect this lack. David Bunch, who served as a pastoral missionary in South Dakota, and later in positions in Iowa, the HMB, and as Executive Director of the Colorado Baptist General Convention, identifies part of the reason this degeneration occurred.

The ADOM was an old South style of leader which was blessed by the denomination and adopted by the Home Mission Board as a structure, probably because the resource states understood the role.   The ADOM in the new work areas was chiefly financed out of the HMB, but the position description was redesigned for the needs of the new work areas. This worked well until an ADOM of the old South became an ADOM of the new work areas and, then, there was tension because of the expectations for the new work churches and the expectations of the ADOM of the old South. The ADOM gave integrity and guidance to the churches and church leaders.  

Benny [Delmar] was an ADOM who forgot about all the roles of an ADOM except church planting and was very successful, but not without much criticism from the places that expected the Old South Model.  Dub Hughes was a great church planter from the revivalist tradition, which was his strength.   Both are great models for contemporary church planting if you can find the persons who have the ability and passion for them.  Both will work in the inner city as well as among the unchurched or becoming-unchurched rural America.[45]   

The ADOM/CSS model has continued to the present from this auspicious beginning in Colorado. An increasing number of other state conventions are employing the model, at least in name. Nevada and Iowa have recently begun to employ this concept in their church planting strategy.[46] 

With the creation of the North American Mission Board in 1997, the program assignment of church planting and language missions was given to the Church Planting Group. Those missionaries called “church starter (planter) strategists” and “catalytic missionaries” under the HMB were grouped together as Church Planting Missionaries and related to the Church Planting Group in NAMB. The Association Initiatives Team was given the assignment to relate to ADOMs. Those ADOMs who had been considered ADOM/CSS, and who related for assignment, reporting, and training opportunities under the HMB to both the Associational Missions Division and the New Church Extension Division, now relate to both the Church Planting Group and the Associational Initiatives Team. These ADOM/Church Planting Missionaries are considered both an associational missionary and a church planting missionary. This research project refers to these by the original HMB designation of ADOM/CSS.

At the time of this writing, of the 169 appointed ADOMs (there were 991 appointed and non-appointed ADOMs in the SBC), twenty were listed on the Church Planting Group list serving as CPMs, and 110 of the total appointed ADOMs served in town and country (rural) associations.  Fourteen of these “Town and Country” ADOMs were considered ADOMs and CPMs.  Although no specific or separate list has existed that designates these workers as ADOM/CSS, these missionaries are the consideration of this paper. To NAMB national personnel this classification is not so much an intentional strategy as a vestige from the HMB. Certain Church Planting Group leaders have given some attention to the distinctiveness of the model, while some are unaware of this classification, how it came about, or its value (the results of this 2006 survey are available upon request).

Conclusion

 Those who are in the ADOM/CSS category have, over the years since 1989,

benefited from training opportunities from HMB and NAMB in the areas of church planting strategy as well as associational development. This unique position, and training that was offered, has had an unrecognized bearing on church planting results in many missionaries that were examined in a major research project I conducted in 2006. Because of my own personal journey serving under this classification, and the work as a national rural church planting specialist working within the Church Planting Group, I became increasingly aware of those on our list in the national field who have an assignment as church planting strategists in rural North America. At the time of that study, the number of appointed town and country ADOMs, as mentioned above, was approximately 110. Of these ADOMs, only fourteen had been significantly impacted with church planting training and strategy updates from HMB/NAMB.[47] Had all town and country ADOMs been considered on the NAMB Church Planting Group (CPG) list as ADOM/CSSs over the years since NAMB’s inception, one can only speculate about the difference this could have made in the progress of church planting in rural North America.    

The ADOM/CSS model has great potential for reinventing rural associations that move toward prioritizing resourcing local congregations to penetrate lostness and to implement effective church planting strategies. The goal of this paper and subsequent initiatives is to project a model of a NAMB appointed missionary leader for SBC rural associations—which by definition of “appointed” will be in new work areas—who can be an effective mission strategist rather than a “minister of maintenance,” with particular focus on designing and implementing an associational-based church planting strategy.[48] Lacking at the present is a definitive description of this model, definitive training components, and the adoption by the North American Mission Board as an intentional classification.