Meet Stopsley Baptist Church, a Radstock member church in Luton, UK. Steve Moody tells us about a conference they are hosting later this month, which reveals the church's priority: mission!

On March 11-12, Stopsley Baptist Church will be hosting the third MISSIONALL Conference.  This conference is pulled together by an alliance of leaders from three local churches; it is local, contextual and urgent and is formed out of the mission statement, ‘Everyone a missionary; everything is mission.’

This year the conference is called GLOCALLY MISSIONALL and will be addressed by Brian Jose, Executive Director of Radstock, and Kejdis Bakalli, an Albanian church planter. The strapline of this year’s conference is ‘Glocal Lessons for Local Mission.’

All of this inspires reflection on the church that Stopsley Baptist has grown to be over the years. We are a fellowship that is seeking to put the call to be witnesses to Christ at the centre of our life. Fundamentally, this means equipping every member to be a disciple of Christ in an increasingly alien context, sharing good news wherever we go. As a fellowship this means an ongoing commitment to relationships within mission overseas. I continue to be struck by the way that news from the Balkans or Pakistan or Cambodia or Northern Iraq is a regular feature of our life together. SBC is a local church with branches many miles away.

Recently, it has also meant instilling the same missional orientation that we hear of overseas, and have experienced through short term encounters, into the daily lives of postmen, teachers, nurses, street cleaners, civil engineers, the retired and those still at school who are our church.

For me this has meant teaching in rural Cambodia, learning in a service station in Iceland and praying in Ladbrokes, the local betting shop, as part of an initiative to offer prayer to our community.

Emil Bruner said ‘The church exists by mission as fire exists by burning.’ And that is all the more urgent in the increasingly multi-cultural and pluralistic context of Luton, within the increasingly secularized society of the United Kingdom.  

This is who we are; this is who we are learning to be. This is Stopsley Baptist Church.