First Baptist Kettering has a variety of groups, classes, and commitees that need to keep in contact with each other. It is common to maintain a list of e-mail addresses on your own computer, and maybe create your own distribution list. The problem with everyone keeping there own distribution list is that there is no "master list" of all the appropriate people with the most accurate information.
What if someone changes their e-mail address? You won't know that they
have changed it until you send out a message and maybe you will get an error message from
the mail server saying that e-mail is no longer valid. Now you need to find the person and ask
them to give you their up to date e-mail address for your distribution list.
Another tactic is to take someone elses e-mail that they have sent to a large list of people and use their list of e-mail addresses to send out your message. The problem with this is that you don't know who is on that list, are they all the people you meant to reach?
Needless to say, it's just hard to keep a centralized list of e-mail addresses for a topic. That's why we have the centralized distribution lists for First Baptist Kettering's interests. You can subscribe or unsubscribe to the topics you have interest in, then send to one e-mail address to get your message to all those participants. Convenience for you - just one e-mail address - and assurance that your message is going to the most accurate list of members.