North American Mission Board (NAMB)

TRACK A  ·  PLANT IN THE U.S.

North American Mission Board

The SBC’s agency for missions here at home — and your primary partner if you plant in the United States.

What NAMB is, in one sentence

NAMB exists to mobilize Southern Baptist churches for mission across North America. Where the International Mission Board carries the gospel overseas, NAMB focuses on the United States, Canada, and their territories — helping churches reach their own communities through evangelism, church planting, compassion ministry, and chaplaincy. For a Slavic believer called to plant here, NAMB — and specifically its church-planting arm, Send Network — is the partner you’ll work with most closely.

“NAMB does not plant churches”

This is the most important thing to understand about how NAMB works, and it’s a phrase its leaders repeat deliberately: churches plant churches — NAMB helps. Since 2010, NAMB has worked to ensure that every church it helps start has a sending church standing behind it — a congregation that takes ownership of the new work as its own. NAMB provides the assessment, training, coaching, and funding support; the sending church provides the spiritual covering and accountability.

For you, this means a crucial thing: you would never plant alone. The model is built around partnership — you, a sending church, your state convention, and NAMB’s Send Network, all walking together from before launch until the new church is self-sustaining.

The four ministries

1. Church planting (through Send Network)

This is NAMB’s signature work and is handled through Send Network, North America’s largest church-planting network. It runs the church-planter assessment, the training pathway, coaching, and care. The emphasis is deliberately on regions outside the South, where Southern Baptists have historically been thin — the big cities, the underserved metros, the immigrant-dense neighborhoods. The pace is steady: Southern Baptists have planted at least 600 new churches a year for four straight years, and the 2024 “class” totaled 767 church starts (including 83 replants).

2. Evangelism

NAMB equips ordinary churches and believers to share the gospel — through training, free evangelism resources available to any SBC church, large outreach events (like the “Crossover” outreach before each annual meeting), and “Refresh” retreats that give pastors and their spouses rest and renewal.

3. Compassion ministry (Send Relief)

Send Relief is the compassion arm — jointly operated with the International Mission Board — meeting human needs in Jesus’ name: poverty, crisis, refugees, and disaster. It works hand in hand with Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, one of the largest disaster-relief networks in the United States, whose volunteers prepare hundreds of thousands of meals and rebuild after hurricanes and floods.

4. Chaplaincy

NAMB endorses and trains chaplains on behalf of Southern Baptists — more than 3,100 of them — serving in the military, hospitals, prisons, public-safety agencies, and disaster zones, carrying ministry into places a local church cannot easily reach.

How NAMB is funded

NAMB is supported two ways, both worth knowing because they’re why its help can come at little or no cost to a new planter:

•       The Cooperative Program — the SBC’s unified giving stream (see the Cooperative Program profile).

•       The Annie Armstrong Easter Offering — an annual offering devoted specifically to North American missions and missionaries. It has set repeated records, surpassing $70 million in recent years (a record $74.7 million in 2024), and Southern Baptists have given more than $2 billion to it over its history. Named for Annie Armstrong, a pioneering missions advocate, 100% of it goes to the field — to train and resource missionaries in church planting and compassion ministry and to create evangelism tools.

A noteworthy emphasis: replanting

NAMB doesn’t only start new churches; it also helps replant dying ones. Its Replant ministry comes alongside declining congregations to help them become healthy again — a distinct calling from planting, and one increasingly important as older churches struggle. If your sense of call is toward an existing, struggling congregation rather than a blank slate, this is the NAMB stream to explore (see the “Are you called?” section on discerning plant vs. replant).

What NAMB actually provides a planter

•       A clear pathway. The church-planter pathway offers clarity, strategy, contextualization, coaching, and care across a one-to-three-year development process.

•       Assessment. The Send Network assessment (covered in the “Are you called?” section) helps you and your sending church gauge readiness honestly.

•       Training and a pipeline. The online multiplication pipeline, events, podcasts, and resources for both planters and churches that want to develop missional leaders.

•       Coaching and care. Ongoing support so you’re not isolated — care is described as core to how Send Network operates.

•       Practical partnerships. For example, NAMB and GuideStone have partnered to provide retirement and insurance for new church planters.

An honest note

What this means for you

If your calling is to plant in the United States, NAMB is the door — and Send Network is the practical pathway through it. It brings assessment, training, coaching, funding support, and a sending-church partnership, all fueled by Southern Baptists giving together so you don’t carry the load alone. And its deliberate focus on the underserved regions outside the South — including immigrant-dense cities — maps directly onto where Slavic communities are concentrated and where new Slavic churches are most needed.

NAMB’s whole model is partnership: churches plant churches, and the family funds the work — so a new Slavic church is never planted alone.

North American Mission Board — an expanded profile within the Slavic Church Planting & Missions Hub. Leadership, budgets, and annual figures change over time; the data here reflects the most recent verified reports and should be confirmed at namb.net and sendnetwork.com before publishing.