NAMB’s ’Bridge’ links volunteers to mission projects

By Mickey Noah

Originally, Mullen Baptist Church was a one-room schoolhouse. A year ago, the church’s members decided to step out on faith and add 7,000 square feet for a new sanctuary, classrooms and bathrooms. Cosat’s local associational missions director told him about The Bridge, a North American Mission Board (NAMB) website designed to link projects with SBC volunteers around the country.

“I still shake my head and can’t believe it,” says Cosat. “A team of 42 people from three or four Southern states came up and framed the building in four days. A second team came up from Tennessee and did the inside framing for us. There’s no telling what the man-hours and materials donated were worth and the money we saved. It put us a light-year ahead of where we would have been had we tried to do it all ourselves. It made it affordable. All we had to do was put on the siding. Another team even volunteered to come back and do the drywall.

“Thank God for this program. It was amazing to see – a humbling and awesome experience. We can never thank the mission board and these volunteers enough,” said Cosat.

Launched in 1999, The Bridge website recently underwent a major facelift. It now has a new look, is more functional and more user-friendly, according to Mickey Caison, NAMB’s team leader for adult volunteer mobilization.

NAMB’s adult volunteer mobilization team facilitates short-term mission projects/trips among Southern Baptists, usually those lasting one week to four months. Through The Bridge, Baptists are connected with needs, and information is exchanged between SBC missionaries, churches, campgrounds and ministries needing volunteers, and the Southern Baptist volunteers and churches who want to help.

“The Bridge website may get 400,000 hits a month in wintertime,” said Rick Head, promotions coordinator at NAMB. “Now is the busy time because people are looking for projects for this coming summer.”

Some 30,000 are registered users on The Bridge website, which Caison says could represent as many as 200,000 people since the users represent churches, families and other teams searching for volunteer projects.

While The Bridge website is the clearing house for NAMB’s major adult volunteer initiatives – Appalachian Regional Ministry, Baptist Builders, Campers on Mission, Disaster Relief, Families on Mission and Operation NOAH Rebuild – it’s not just for major projects.

“We probably have 1,000 different projects listed on The Bridge website at any given time,” Caison said. Any entity can put its project on The Bridge, whether the need involves church construction, clowning requests or prayer-walking. Every project does have to be authenticated by a local association or state convention before it goes ‘live’ on the website.

Users accessing The Bridge website can search for projects by type of project, region of the U.S., time of year, etc.

“Last year we had 225,000 volunteers sign up for projects as part of NAMB’s adult volunteer mobilization, and 165,000 to 170,000 of them came through The Bridge,” Caison said. “But last year, only 300,000 people out of 16 million Southern Baptists reported mission trips in North America. So the reality is we should be having a million or more Baptists doing mission trips each year.” 

Caison said NAMB’s goal is to have 500,000 Southern Baptists participating in annual mission trips by 2020.

“There are always more needs than we’re meeting,” Head said. “There are tons of needs and not enough volunteers to go around. So we need to add more and more projects to The Bridge so there are more opportunities.”

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