By Tony Crocker, President • BMA of Arkansas
Greetings again to the churches of the BMA of Arkansas. After conferring with associational leaders and departmental directors, we have elected to adopt a one-day meeting format for this year’s BMA of Arkansas State Meeting.
Although the order of general sessions may change, the meeting’s content will remain the same. We will follow a format similar to that used at the 2025 BMAA National Meeting. Each department and our several state ministries will have the exact same opportunities to present reports to the association.
Perhaps the burning Baptist question is “Why change?” The answer is simple: attendance. Though increasingly the pastors of our association are part time and bivocational, we have largely failed to address this at the meeting level. We follow a format created when meetings had to be in person and means of communication were restricted to mail-outs, landlines and boardrooms. Those meetings required a greater amount of time. Now, our departments hold meetings electronically, approve recommendations with e-signatures and post documents to a website on the same day, where we can access them on our smartphones.
As your state officers, our aim is to provide a meeting that is accessible to all messengers and allows our departments to submit the necessary annual reports to as many messengers as possible. We observed the format of the National Meeting, and we could use the same idea with one tweak to our traditional meeting schedule. By replacing the slot reserved for our pastors conference with the old schedule’s Friday general session, we could have every report on Thursday. Again, after conferring with the departmental leaders, we realized this is the ideal time to announce the change, as they will be attending local association meetings starting this week.
Here is a tentative schedule for this year’s meeting on Thursday, Nov. 6, at Central Baptist College in Conway:
• 8:30 a.m.-11:30 a.m. — Arkansas State WMA and Brotherhood Meetings
• 9 a.m.-10:30 a.m. — Misc. Departmental and Committee meetings (as necessary)
• 11 a.m. — State Missionary Committee Meeting
• 12 p.m.-1:30 p.m. — Break for lunch
• 1:30 p.m.-4:30 p.m. — General Session 1 (formerly Friday morning, General Session 2)
• 4:30 p.m.-6:30 p.m. — Break for dinner
• 6:30 p.m. — Worship and Annual Message
• After the message-9 p.m. — General Session 2 (formerly General Session 1)
• Adjourn
