By Jennifer Johnson
The Virginia Evangelizing Fellowship and Envision (North Carolina), two mid-Atlantic evangelizing associations, publicly announced their merger at last week”s International Conference on Missions. The two groups are joining to become Waypoint Church Partners [1]. The two organizations completed a two-year process syncing their legal, financial, and organizational structures to form a new regional alliance.
Envision, once known as the Piedmont Evangelizing Association, had been involved with more than 30 new church projects in North Carolina over the past 45 years. VEF, in existence since 1938, planted more than 80 churches in Virginia and more recently in the adjoining states of North Carolina, Maryland, West Virginia, and Tennessee. VEF also featured a spectrum of mission-driven services to the more than 240 existing churches in Virginia. Many of these same services will be continued in Virginia and replicated in North Carolina and elsewhere by Waypoint.
Waypoint will be planting new churches and serving existing ones within its traditional footprint of North Carolina and Virginia, along with potential activity in adjoining states such as South Carolina, Maryland, and West Virginia. As many as eight new church projects are in the works over the next two years.
Tim Cole, formerly executive director of VEF, assumes the same role with Waypoint.