An international discipleship effort organized by a division of one of the world’s largest providers of Christian products and services has impacted more than 22,000 churches in 58 countries worldwide over the past seven years.

The effort, made by LifeWay International, a division of LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention, aims to help believers establish a higher degree of commitment in their relationship with Christ through consultants sent across the world to teach pastors how to strengthen their congregations.

"LifeWay International started almost seven years ago," said Luis Lopez, LifeWay’s manager of international consulting and training. "Since we started, one of our main goals has been to help churches be intentional about discipleship. We are training [pastors] to be able to develop a plan for discipleship in their churches so that believers can be developed into spiritual leaders." more >>

Lifeway Christian Resources, a ministry of the Southern Baptist Convention, found that prayer is the top issue of concern for evangelical ministers today.

Beginning November 2004, LifeWay surveyed more than 1,300 evangelical leaders around the world to dtermine what were the “Top 10 Issues Facing Today’s Church." For the past 10 weeks, the ministry released, one week at a time, the title for each topic.

On April 11, the ministry reported prayer as being the number one issue facing churches today. Thus, concluding this project. more >>

Lifeway has partnered with ChurchStaffing.com has created the Ministry Personnel Center to meet the increasing demand of online job hunting. The center was created to help match those seeking positions with ministries looking to fill openings.

"Our coordination with ChurchStaffing.com was a natural choice," said Gary McClure, LifeWay’s e-business marketing manager. "We desired to meet the needs in the ministry marketplace, and this organization had a successful model and robust tools already in place."

ChurchStaffing.com is an online job board developed in 1999 that now has more than 6,000 resumes and 800 vacant positions throughout the country. It is the largest ministry job database on the Internet and houses resumes, information and position openings from multiple denominations. more >>

The Rolling Stone Magazine reversed its decision not to air an advertisement for the Today’s New International Version (TNIV) of the Bible earlier this week, but the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC)-affiliated Lifeway Christian Resources has not yet changed its decision to keep the edition out of its 122 bookstores because of the version’s gender-neutral translations.

The controversy over the International Bible Society (IBS) and Zondervan Publishing House’s TNIV began in 2002 when initial publishing began. Fundamentals and evangelicals rejected the version’s rendering of male terms like “son” and “father” into the gender neutral “child” and “parent”, respectively.

By the year’s end, two of the nation’s largest evangelical denominations, the SBC and the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), passed resolutions establishing that the TNIV has “gone beyond acceptable translation standards.” more >>

One of the world’s largest providers of Christian products and services announced Tuesday that it plans to contribute $50,000 to the $1.4 million already donated to the International Mission Board for disaster relief efforts in South Asia. In addition to the corporate gift, 125 employees of LifeWay Christian Resources sent individual gifts to the IMB’s relief fund.

"Our LifeWay family is concerned and compassionate," said James T. Draper Jr., president of the South Baptist Convention (SBC) company. "We feel it is a great privilege to share in this relief effort through giving to a fellow SBC entity. We have great confidence in the relief efforts of the IMB and know that 100 percent of our gifts will go to minister, both spiritually and physically, to Asia’s poor."

Draper also said that at a time when national news reports have questioned the ability of governments to properly and effectively handle the massive monetary donations, he was confident that the IMB was equipped to minister to hundreds of thousands of survivors and help rebuild their lives. more >>

Mission efforts by a Southern Baptist Convention company have helped lead 7,371 individuals to Christ this year, bringing the total number of professions of faith to 56,014 since its first mission trip seven years ago.

LifeWay Christian Resource, one of the world’s largest providers of Christian products and services, had 145 volunteers ministering internationally this year and received over $156,000 in contributions for corporate-sponsored mission trips since the inception of the mission program. Through employee trip participation and donated funds, more than 23 international churches were planted this year, bringing the total to 166.

The donated funds have also helped cover the cost of building two Bible schools in Africa, which provide on-site training to local pastors from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and the Sudan, LifeWay reports. more >>