WMU emphasizes God’s call to missions

Posted: 6/23/06

WMU emphasizes God’s call to missions

By Charlie Warren, Bill Webb & David Sanders

Arkansas Baptist & Missouri Word & Way

GREENSBORO, N.C.—Christians need to hear, understand, embrace and live God’s call, program personalities reminded Baptist women during the 2006 Woman’s Missionary Union celebration.

“How can you hear God’s call when those around you want you to mimic the call of someone else?” asked Paige Chargois of Richmond, Va., who interpreted the missions celebration theme throughout the meeting, June 11-12 in Greensboro, N.C.

Christians should discover the authenticity of God’s unique call upon each believer’s life to follow and obey, she stressed.

Archie and Caroline Jones, former missionaries to Chile, reflected on their lifetime commitment to missions. Since retiring as career missionaries, they have served as short-term volunteers in South Africa, Venezuela, Armenia and China, and they are ready to go again “wherever God sends us and whenever he provides the plane tickets.”

They related their experiences in Chile, where they served an 800-mile-long association, starting churches and seeing them grow.

While in South America, they adopted a Chilean baby and were surprised by the reaction of the Chilean people. “You must really love us,” they often heard people say. “You adopted one of us.”

An International Mission Board representative, identified only as Pam for security reasons, described the ministry she and her husband, Ben, started at the Mindanao Baptist Rural Life Center in the Philippines.

The ministry started when representatives from some of the 14 Muslim tribes in the region contacted the center and asked for agricultural assistance. As a result, missionaries train local Christians to go into Muslim villages, providing Christian ministry and establishing house churches, she said.

Mississippi WMU President Donna Swarts described how she discovered she could balance WMU involvement with work in a ministry typically led by Baptist men—disaster relief.

She provided emergency childcare in the wake of flooding in Georgia in 1993 and then coordinated eight childcare units that responded to floods in North Dakota in 1997. She also joined relief efforts in New York City in the wake of 9/11.

“The experience of the years and the call of God have enabled me to be a small part of the army that is the church of Jesus Christ,” she said.

John and Terri Forrester, North American Mission Board church planting strategist missionaries to Kotzebue, Alaska, testified that early in their marriage, they felt God’s call and sought appointment as international missionaries. But their son was born with a birth defect, which ultimately blocked their appointment to overseas service. They served churches in their native Georgia and participated in short-term mission opportunities. Forrester served as a pastor in Montana and a director of missions in Georgia.

Then came the unexpected call to serve in Alaska in an area where snowmobiles provide the main mode of transportation, temperatures drop to 60 degrees below zero and the nearest Wal-Mart is 350 miles away. The cost of living is out of sight, with gas costing $7 a gallon and milk costing $8 a gallon, they noted.

“Nobody wanted to go, but we answered God’s call and said, ‘We will go,’” Forrester said. “I know that I know that I know God called us there.”

National WMU President Kaye Miller of Little Rock, Ark., presiding at her first meeting, presented the Martha Myers Girls in Action Alumna of Distinction Award to Jacqueline Draughon of Grace-ville, Fla. Draughon, now in her 80s, began serving as a Girls in Action leader at a young age, and girls from her mission groups have gone on to be missionaries and church leaders.

WMU Executive Director Wanda Lee presented the Dellanna West O’Brien Award for fostering Christian leadership in women to Eileen Mullins of Inez, Ky. Mullins started Haven of Rest, a ministry providing shelter and ministry to families visiting inmates.