My Rashionale: Picking out a few pieces of our ripest ‘fruit’ to share

My Rashionale: Picking out a few pieces of our ripest ‘fruit’ to share

The annual meeting of the Alabama Baptist State Convention will have just wrapped up for 2019 when you receive this issue of The Alabama Baptist (TAB) in your mailbox and email inbox.

Sermons, devotional moments and reports from the various groups and ministries serving Alabama Baptists were built around this year’s annual meeting theme “Fruitful.”

You know the theme worked great for me because one of my favorite Scripture passages focuses on the fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22–23).

We closed the TAB report by reading those two verses after sharing a quick snapshot of how TAB has been fruitful this year.

The word “fruitful” has a variety of abundance-type meanings such as to be productive, to provide good results and to produce much fruit.

1. To be productive — TAB makes it to you week after week in all its forms because of the team’s ability to be productive. 

Our daily lives related to the work and ministry of TAB are built around productivity.

2019 also allowed the opportunity to add a new level of productivity related to people, property and products. 

We’ve spent time this year developing and growing as a team as well as building relationships across the state and nation.

A lot of energy also has gone into decluttering and updating our work environment while also producing a variety of community spaces to share with our ministry partners.

And we’ve continued efforts to freshen up the 176-year-old print product, step up our digital presence and expand our reach through new platforms such as podcasting and a new audio ministry for the visually impaired.

2. To provide good results — TAB added the Your Voice spread for readers to engage in respectful and meaningful conversations and to bring more voices to the table. We encourage conversations through our social media platforms as well.

Our team works hard to bring a calm, positive and peaceful presence to our readers, even when there’s difficult news to share. We want to encourage a consistent focus on Jesus in all we as believers say and do.

3. To produce much fruit — or as we like to think of it, make disciples.

Our team recognizes the more we grow spiritually, create margin in our daily lives and find healthy solutions to dealing with life’s problems, the better equipped we will be to consistently and energetically share Christ and invest in others to make disciples who in turn make disciples.

We work each day toward becoming that reliable fruit-producing resource for you.

TAB also is committed to encouraging individual believers, church families, associations and all of us cooperating together as the Alabama Baptist State Convention to consistently strive for “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.”