Missions

Our forebears helped to create and launch Crisis Control Ministries, Samaritan Ministries, Habitat for Humanity, and the Downtown Church Center among others. Denominationally, our church was a founding congregation for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina, in part due to our desire to partner together in the renewing of God’s world and serving the world’s most neglected.

Global Missions

Our global concern found a home for more than 20 years with Mission Emanuel in the Dominican Republic, where members traveled each year in a women’s team, family team, or building team to the small town of Cielo, extending love and care by returning year after year to the residents of Cielo. An ongoing commitment to the beans and rice program allows us to provide hundreds of families with enough beans, rice, and oil for many months’ supply. A handful of the women of our church maintain this commitment even still.

A new partnership through the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship began in 2022, as we became an Encourager Church for Missy Ward Angalla, CBF field personnel in Kampala, Uganda in her work leading Amani Sasa. As an Encourager Church, we offer steady, sustained financial support for Missy, and are exploring the possibility of future trips to Uganda to bear witness to Amani Sasa’s work providing holistic, wraparound services for refugees in Kampala.

Winston-Salem Center for Education and the Arts

Because we have long-valued a place to call home, First Baptist Church on Fifth founded the Winston-Salem Center for Education and the Arts (WSCEA), and WSCEA became the primary extension of First on Fifth’s mission in downtown Winston-Salem. At its core, WSCEA is our church’s ‘home grown mission.’

Born in 2014 out of the church’s desire to provide purposeful, rent-free space to organizations committed to changing lives of those on our city’s margins, the WSCEA, operating in the John 3:16 Building, gives its resident organizations – the Winston-Salem Street School, Dress for Success, Authoring Action, and Leadership Winston-Salem – and all those they serve a deep sense of groundedness in place. In so doing, WSCEA gives First on Fifth a direct opportunity to live into its stated priorities – particularly in cultivating the well-being of children and mitigating poverty in our community. As partners together in this home, belonging leads to thriving, and beloved community is practiced in abundance.

Missional Priorities

In a season of discernment in 2018 of aligning the church’s facilities with our mission, the church identified four missional priorities, which are:

Cultivating the Well-Being of Children

Mitigating Poverty in Our Community

Becoming a Teaching and Learning Church

Growing in Number and Faithfulness

Our members live out these commitments in their own individual ways. Any given week, you’ll find our folks delivering Meals on Wheels, building handicapped ramps for residents of Winston-Salem, sorting and tagging clothes at Dress for Success, working the front desk at Crisis Control, walking alongside underserved women in both the Flourish and Pivot programs, building Habitat homes, and this list is, quite literally, endless. This list of mission partners in both our funding and our volunteering reflects the wide reach of our members’ passions and commitments in the world.

Mission Partners

Crisis Control
Winston-Salem Street School
Habitat for Humanity
Mission Emmanuel
Senior Services Inc.
Samaritan Ministries 
Shepherd’s Center
Serving Our Savior
Winston-Salem Center for Education and the Arts
City with Dwellings
Dress for Success
Shalom Project
Love Out Loud
Authoring Action
Imprints Cares 
Pivot
Brian’s Place
Green Nest
World Relief

Should you desire to apply for special project funding, please complete an application. Our annual mission partner funding window has now closed for the 2025 budget year. Should you desire to apply for mission partner funding for the 2026 budget year, applications will become available in the spring. Email the Missions Committee at Missions@Firstonfifth.Org with any questions you may have.

Shared Work

We’ve learned over the years that often our best, most impactful work is the work we share, and harness, and extend to the community. Together with the Missions Committee, we have identified three shared commitments for our missions work that we do together:

1. Tutoring students and supporting the PTA at Ashley Academy,
2. Forming a Good Neighbor Team alongside World Relief to support the growing refugee population in our city, most specifically with a family of six from Afghanistan we journey alongside in their acclimation to Winston-Salem.
3. Partnering with our neighbors of Crystal Towers, a Section 8 housing complex just out the church’s back door that serves many who are elderly or disabled, and advocating for their well-being within the city.

These commitments are bolstered by a number of hours spent each week volunteering in these various capacities. Our members read with children at Ashley. They take Afghani family members to get drivers’ licenses or help with job applications. They offer wraparound care to residents of Crystal Towers who need assistance with grocery shopping, medical appointments, and simply navigating through the complex web of being a human in the world.  They are also encouraged by a number of financial resources, offered from faithful, courageous members who have left a legacy in support of missions.