About The Launching Zone

The Launching Zone is a partnership between the Mississippi Baptist Church planting department, the Lee and Itawamba County Baptist Associations, and local southern Baptist churches.  God is calling church planters to plant a wave of new churches in this area over the next decade.  Our purpose is to simply be the catalyst for helping these churches find the resources they need.  The Launching Zone is coordinated by Jeff Lee who is the Ministry Pastor at NorthStar Church in Saltillo, MS.  NorthStar launched on Easter Sunday 2006 with 356 people our first Sunday and we have not looked back since that time.  I will share first hand accounts of the successes and struggles that we have encountered in planting a cutting edge, contemporary church just north of Tupelo, MS.  God has blessed us at NorthStar and we have a vision of planting a new church by the end of our third year.  We have many innovative ministries and have tried some very creative outreach ideas that I will be happy to share with your church planting team.

Dr. Marc Howard is our Associational Missionary and he has a heart for kingdom work in the form of planting new churches.  Dr. Howard is fully committed to providing church planting teams with innovative training and resources to help your church get off to a successful start.  The Launching Zone will serve as the church planting resources center for Northeast Mississippi.

Mission Statement

To provide networking opportunities for new church plants in Northeast Mississippi to recruit, train, provide resources, encouragement, and support for church planters so that they can plant healthy New Testament churches.

A Community of Faith

Since its organization in 1845 in Augusta, Georgia, the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) has grown to over 16 million members who worship in more than 42,000 churches in the United States. Southern Baptists sponsor about 5,000 home missionaries serving the United States, Canada, Guam and the Caribbean, as well as sponsoring more than 5,000 foreign missionaries in 153 nations of the world.

The term "Southern Baptist Convention" refers to both the denomination and its annual meeting. Working through 1,200 local associations and 41 state conventions and fellowships, Southern Baptists share a common bond of basic Biblical beliefs and a commitment to proclaim the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the entire world.

You become a Southern Baptist by uniting with a Southern Baptist church, one in friendly cooperation with the general Southern Baptist enterprise of reaching the world for Christ. Typically church membership is a matter of accepting Jesus as your Savior and Lord and experiencing believer's baptism by immersion.

Information from sbc.net.