Baptist Briefs

Posted: 9/02/05

Baptist Briefs

Samaritan Ministry director honored. Baptist layman Wayne Smith, director of Samaritan Ministry in Knoxville, Tenn., was honored with a national award for his work in HIV/AIDS education. Smith received the national Ryan White Memorial HIV Education Award from the National Education Association at its conference in Los Angeles. The Tennessee Education Association nominated Smith for the award after he led a session about HIV education at the organization's spring staff development meeting.

Samaritan Ministry–a Cooperative Baptist Fellowship partner–works with community organizations to serve about 350 people by providing food, clothing and rent assistance; sponsoring an HIV support group at Central Baptist Church in Knoxville; and ministering to HIV-positive inmates in local prisons.

WMU appoints new staff. National Woman's Missionary Union has named Dianne Daniels as multicultural ministry consultant and Wendy Wakefield as sales and marketing manager for New Hope Publishers. Daniels taught high school Spanish in North Carolina 16 years. Prior to teaching, she and her husband, Bain, served as Southern Baptist missionaries in Colombia. Daniels also served on church staffs in Burlington and Greensboro, N.C. She holds a bachelor's degree and master's degree from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro and a master of divinity degree from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. Wakefield previously worked as an advertising sales representative and marketing manager for Ingram Book Company in LaVergne, Tenn., and as operations manager of Independent Christian Catalogs in Nashville, Tenn. In 2003, Wakefield launched her own company, marketing keynote speakers and trainers for corporate America. She holds a bachelor's degree in advertising from the University of Western Kentucky.