TOGETHER: Reaching youth reaps lasting rewards_72604
Posted: 7/23/04
TOGETHER:
Reaching youth reaps lasting rewards
Beautiful things keep happening this summer across Texas. Our churches have some of their best times of the year with children, young people and families during this blessed time.
Years ago, churches held revival services in “protracted meetings” for two or three weeks during the summer. It was the main–sometimes the only–evangelistic effort for the year. My father was a teenager when he was saved in a meeting like that.
People still are being saved in the churches during the summer. But now evangelism goes on throughout the year as our pastors and people pray for the lost and involve themselves in visitation, service and personal sharing of faith throughout the week. The editorial in last week's Baptist Standard called Texas Baptists to an evangelism that embraces both proclamation and incarnation. I have felt for many years that kind of evangelism was at the heart of our Texas Baptist way of being the church.
| CHARLES WADE Executive Director BGCT Executive Board |
The spirit of evangelism and the desire to live pure and holy lives is alive and well among thousands of Texas Baptist youth. This summer's Youth Evangelism Conference in Dallas hosted 12,000 young people from across Texas. Youth camps and Super Summer conferences will result in thousands of young people coming to know Christ and thousands of others continuing to grow in Christ.
These young people live in a world where moral values are hard to nail down. Popular culture is no friend to the gospel of Christ or to living holy lives. Of course, it never has been. But the pervasiveness of immoral values being pushed to the fore in our media-saturated society causes all of us who care to pray with extra intensity.
Baptist ethicist Foy Valentine critiques our condition this way: “Our world seems determined to try to live life without discipline, enjoy plenty without work, experience pleasure without pay, wallow in adultery without love, commit crime without punishment, revel in sin without judgment, break out all the windows in order to breathe, and play tennis with the net down. Our world does not believe you have to reap what you sow.”
God bless ministers and lay leaders who challenge the world's claim on our children and seek to speak the truth and live lives that draw them to Christ. God bless those who work with young people in the churches of our state. And God bless young people who not only are leaders for the future, but also are giving dedicated leadership in many churches right now.
Another expression of ministry to and with young people by our convention could be seen at the Hispanic Convencion and at the African American Fellowship gathering this summer. These meetings offer specific activities for youth and to encourage them in their Christian walk, help them develop new friendships, and teach them life skills that open the doors to the future God wants them to have.
Your support of the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas Missions helps with these events and provides scholarship money to encourage our ethnic young people to get into college.
Tighe Marie Watkins was 19 when she came to Christ out of a life marked by abuse and failure. Now she is 21, plans to graduate from Hardin-Simmons University next spring and wants to work with underprivileged youth in the inner city. A scholarship made possible by your Mary Hill Davis Offering gifts helped her to find God's future for her.
God is at work in lives all across Texas. You and your church are making a difference in the lives of young and old. One of the ways you do that is in cooperation with all the churches and ministries who work together to do what we could not do alone in the BGCT.
We are loved.