|PIC1|INDIANAPOLIS - Ending their annual meeting on an encouraging yet challenging note, Southern Baptists were called to make their impact on "the lostness that remains" around the world.

"And that lostness is massive," said International Mission Board president Jerry Rankin.

Rankin urged Southern Baptists Wednesday evening to "go tell the world love has come" and to "go tell the story of Jesus" as he passionately presented the annual report of the Southern Baptist Convention's international mission agency.

Southern Baptist churches are supporters of one of the largest mission efforts in the world. Today, there are over 5,300 missionaries working with people groups in 184 countries, according to the IMB report. The number of new believers jumped 28 per cent to 609,000 in the last year and more than 25,000 new churches were started. Additionally, there were 567,413 new believers in discipleship training last year.

Despite growing numbers, millions have yet to hear the Gospel.

As of October 2007, there are 2,086 unreached people groups with populations greater than 100,000, according to the IMB report. Although the mission agency is interacting with 616 of those unreached groups, 641 are still without missionary engagement.

Parts of South America remain unreached even though Southern Baptist missionaries have been dispatched to the continent for more than 100 years.

"There are 41 cities in our region that have more than 1 million inhabitants. There's incredible lostness in those cities," said Dickie Nelson, IMB regional leader for South America, according to Baptist Press.

While aiming to advance the Gospel even further across the globe, Southern Baptists are also pushing a bold new evangelism initiative at home in North America - a mission field that is also becoming increasingly lost, as Geoff Hammond, president of North American Mission Board, described it.

This week, NAMB, the domestic mission agency of the Southern Baptist Convention, launched the National Evangelism Initiative, challenging the denomination to share the Gospel to every person in North America by the year 2020.

"Just like a GPS device gets people to their destinations, NAMB's GPS will help Southern Baptists reach their destination, which is every believer sharing, every person hearing by 2020," Hammond said in his report.

The initiative is called God's Plan for Sharing and can be contextualised to any mission field. It encourages Southern Baptists to pray, engage in witnessing, sow the Gospel, and ultimately see a harvest of people responding to the Gospel. The evangelism effort is also compounded with a media campaign in which television, radio, print and Internet ads will tell millions who Southern Baptists are.

Rankin reaffirmed his conviction that Southern Baptists are the people whom God has called to spread the Gospel around the world.

The two-day annual Southern Baptist Convention meeting, aptly themed "Fulfilling The Mission", was held at the Indianapolis Convention Center and concluded June 11. Next year's meeting will take place June 23-24 in Louisville, Kentucky.