#TurnInTheACP

 

Greetings!

I'm Clark Palmer, 64, SBC pastor from Pineville, LA. I'm asking for your help in creating a widespread emphasis on returning the Annual Church Profile. 

When I became Moderator of our local association, I considered setting some goals for increased attendance and/or baptisms. I searched for data to create a baseline and discovered our numbers were off. There were no discernible trends. One year we were up, the next down.  Numbers from a decade ago showed the same issue. I realized part of the problem was the number of churches not reporting. In fact, one of the largest churches in our area had not turned in an ACP recently.  

Clearly this is a problem for determining such things as  representation on our state Executive Committee and messengers to annual meetings and tracking progress or the lack of it.  Then I began to wonder if this could also account for at least some of the reported overall declines for the SBC in terms of attendance and baptisms.  

So I'm on a campaign to ask our leaders at all levels to make some noise about the ACP this August.  I have created the hashtag, #TurnInTheACP. I've started a twitter account devoted to this @acp_2021.  My request to you folks is to give some visibility to the effort.  This is non-partisan. I just think we need good numbers.

Also there is value in church leaders seeing their numbers and making adjustments accordingly. I know I've had years where the numbers revealed a lack of attention to certain areas of our ministry. 

The person with Lifeway connected to the ACP is Scott Mconnell. He's aware of my interest but I'm strictly a one-man team. He would be a good resource for information.  

Thanks for reading and considering, 

Clark Palmer