DALLAS—A committee formed to look at the long-range future of the Baptist General Convention of Texas began by examining the past.

At its initial May 5 meeting, the BGCT Future Focus Committee reviewed the work of previous study committees and examined Cooperative Program giving trends over the last 10 years.

“We wanted to gain a historical perspective and orient everyone on the committee—to get everyone to the same starting point,” said Stephen Hatfield, co-chair of the committee and pastor of First Baptist Church in Lewisville.

A look at Cooperative Program trends in the last decade revealed giving by Texas Baptist churches has remained fairly consistent, but the buying power of the funds has eroded significantly, noted Andy Pittman, co-chair and pastor of First Baptist Church in Lufkin.

“It particularly was eye-opening” to discover 51 percent of the Cooperative Program budget came from 171 churches last year, and 1,749 BGCT-related churches gave nothing to the Cooperative Program in 2007, Pittman added.

Executive Director Randel Everett challenged the committee to think about two questions as it looks to the future: “What does the BGCT do well? What are Texas Baptists passionate about?”

With 20 of its 25 members present, the committee divided into three subcommittees to explore specific concerns.

Hatfield will chair an eight-member finance subcommittee; Pittman will chair an eight-person institutional relations committee; and Steve Vernon, BGCT past president and pastor of First Baptist Church in Levelland, will chair a nine-member subcommittee related to Executive Board staff.

The Future Focus Committee scheduled its next two meetings for Aug. 5 and Nov. 3. The committee will complete its work and present its final report no later than the 2009 BGCT annual meeting.

ABILENE, Texas—Religion and politics inevitably will mix—especially in the U.S. presidential campaign—but that does not mean Americans should sanction a free-for-all, church-state expert Melissa Rogers insisted.

Rogers, director of the Center for Religion & Public Affairs at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, N.C., delivered the annual T.B. Maston Christian Ethics Lectures at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon Seminary in Abilene.

“There’s a growing interest in religion’s role in politics that could result in an ‘anything goes’ approach,” she observed. “But it doesn’t have to be that way. There are some constructive ways of managing these issues.”

The U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to mix politics and religion—to a degree, reported Rogers, former executive director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life and former general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee on Religious Liberty, both based in Washington.

“Our Constitution certainly says that religious groups and people have the right to participate in the debate of political issues,” she said, adding, “Private citizens clearly have a constitutional right to comment on issues of public concern in religious terms.”

And while Article VI of the Constitution forbids any government-imposed religious test for public office, “voters certainly are free to cast their ballots for any reason, including voting for or against someone because of his or her religion or lack thereof,” she noted. Still, the spirit of this constitutional provision should influence voters’ decisions, she argued.

Religion and politics will mix

More broadly, Rogers offered six suggestions for “managing the mix of religion and politics.” They are:

• “Accept the fact that religion and politics will mix,” she said. “They always have; they always will.”

Long before Mormon Mitt Romney and former Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee ran for president and candidate Barack Obama’s pastor made headlines, Americans were bringing their values to bear on political/religious discussions, she noted.

“There is nothing unconstitutional, un-American or otherwise wrong with the mere fact that some will draw on religion as a source of guidance when making decisions about public matters or that some will include religious references in their discussion of such matters,” she said.

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“The separation of church and state does not require the separation of religion and politics. Further, I believe any attempt to do so would not only generate a tremendous backlash, it also would be ultimately unsuccessful.”

Risks involved

• “Although the religious and political spheres overlap, they are different, and there are risks when religion and politics mix,” Rogers warned.

“This is one indication of the risks when religion and politics mix: We begin to think that those who disagree with us are enemies of God, and we are at the right hand of God. Other risks include the potential for damage to our pluralistic democracy and to the integrity of religion, including the use of religion as a means to a political end.”

• While religious people have rights to participate in politics, they are not better rights than others’ rights, she admonished.

She quoted Huckabee, who said on the campaign trail, “… I don’t feel like a person has to share my faith to share my love of this country.”

“America should be a place that welcomes all people of good will to bring their values to the political process and to participate fully and equally in that process,” she urged. “After all, religious people who are political conservatives are not the only Americans who have values and vote them. All God’s children got values, including nonreligious people, and all of us vote them.”

Candidates' obligation

• Candidates have an obligation to answer some questions that “touch on religion,” she insisted.

To illustrate, she showed a video clip of John McCain talking about whether the United States is a “Christian nation” and quoted Barack Obama discussing his beliefs about teaching evolution in public schools.

Emphasizing candidates should be willing to answer questions “about how their personal beliefs, including personal religious beliefs, might affect their governance,” she also referenced some statements by Obama about race, religion and patriotism, and played a clip of Huckabee answering a question about whether his religious perspective on marriage would impact his political decisions.

• “There’s good religious outreach and bad religious outreach by candidates,” Rogers said.

“Here I am talking not about what is politically effective, but about what is right,” she explained. Assuming they are respecting the tax rules that nonprofits must follow, she said, “It is good for candidates to reach out to religious as well as nonreligious communities and listen to religious as well as nonreligious groups.

“But it is not good for candidates to try to tell people of faith what their faith means to them, how they should vote, or to otherwise try to command, control and co-opt religion.”

The good and the bad

• Religious communities engage in both “good and bad forms of religious engagement” of politics, she reported.

The late U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan offered “wise advice to those who speak of religion in the public square,” Rogers said, quoting Jordan: “‘You would do well to pursue your cause with vigor, while remembering that you are a servant of God, not a spokesperson for God.’”

Similarly, churches and other religious groups should resist politicians’ attempts to usurp the autonomy and freedom of religion, she added, warning against giving politicians access to church members’ contact information, church money and volunteers.

“Our faith is not an instrument of electoral politics, and we should never do anything that suggests it is,” she admonished. “Partisan politics should have no place in the pulpit. … Let’s say it again this election: God is not a Republican or a Democrat. An awesome God does not affiliate with any political party.”

ABILENE—Whatever the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately decides, communities should strive to have better conversations about the role of religion in public schools, Melissa Rogers told participants at the T.B. Maston Christian Ethics Lectures at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon Seminary .

Rogers, director of the Center for Religion & Public Affairs at Wake Forest University, offered a few ground-rules for guiding the religion-in-schools debate in communities across the nation.

Before outlining her ground-rules, Rogers explained what kinds of prayer, religious speech and religious curriculum are allowed and disallowed in public schools.

Put simply, she said, “The only kind of prayer that is not permitted at public schools is the kind the government leads or sponsors.” For example, students may pray silently at any time and may pray audibly over lunches and at other times “as long as they are not disruptive and the school does not sponsor the religious expression.”

But schools “cannot organize or sponsor prayers during class time or at school events, whether through teacher-led prayer, inviting clergy to pray, organizing student votes on prayer or otherwise,” she reported, also noting, “Moments of silence are unconstitutional if they are used to promote prayer.”

Rogers affirmed the place of religion in public school curriculum.

“We cannot understand our nation or our world without understanding religion,” she said. “But how can we ensure that schools teach about religion rather than preach about it? After all, preaching about religion is not the job of the schools, but rather the job of religious leaders, houses of worship, and family.”

The landmark 1963 Supreme Court decision Abingdon Township v. Schempp “made clear that public schools could not engage in devotional teaching of religion,” she noted, adding, “In this same decision, the court also noted that academic teaching about religion was constitutional and even desirable within public school classrooms. …

No indoctrination

“The Supreme Court has made it clear that the school’s curricula must be shaped by academic rather than religious principles and that it must not otherwise seek to indoctrinate students in religion,” she said. Schools may teach about religion if they are neutral regarding faith, neither inculcating nor denigrating religion, she added.

Rogers noted some ways in which the new justices on the Supreme Court may differ on these issues from the justices they replaced. But she acknowledged predicting the Supreme Court’s course is risky and often unproductive.

“We cannot control what happens in the future at the Supreme Court,” she said. “We can control, however, how we deal with these issues in our communities, and I believe that we can and should invest our energies there.”

Seeking to alleviate local battles over religion in school, Rogers proposed four general ground-rules that she believes everyone can endorse, even if they differ on more specific church-state issues:

Not religion-free zone

• “Our nation’s public schools are not and should not be religion-free zones,” she said.

“Students who are people of faith will want to express that faith on campus, and they may do so in many ways that do not involve state sponsorship and thus do not violate the First Amendment. … Further, schools need to teach about religion. Schools should never indoctrinate; they should never press for the acceptance or rejection of religion. But schools should instruct students about the way religion has shaped societies.”

To ensure that these matters are handled appropriately, she called for “mandating and funding teacher training” regarding religion and public schools.

• “The government should never create a hierarchy of faiths,” she insisted.

“It isn’t the job of government to determine which faith is right or best or dominant,” Rogers said. Instead, it is the job of government to safeguard the rights of all people.

“In short, one does not have to believe all religions are equally true in order to believe that the government ought to treat all religions equally,” she said.

“We demand full religious liberty for Christians abroad, in countries that are majority Muslim, for example, and properly so. On the flip side, we must demand religious liberty for non-Christians here at home.”

• “We should never heckle or bully others because of their faiths, lack of faith or positions on church-state issues,” Rogers urged.

“This should not be a difficult one for Christians, given that Christ taught us to love our neighbors. Frankly, and sadly, we don’t have to look hard to find examples of Christians behaving badly when it comes to debates about religion and public schools. That’s a shame. As the song goes, they should know we are Christians by our love.”

Truth, not cliche or rumor

• Tell the truth about church-state issues, she pleaded.

“Prayer has not been kicked out of public schools,” she asserted, citing one of the persistent untruths told about church-state relations.

“As the saying goes, ‘As long as there are math tests in school, there will be prayer in school.’ More seriously, we’ve talked about a range of other ways in which prayer is permitted in public schools.”

If people have more narrow concerns, they should voice them, Rogers said, noting blanket statements are not truthful or helpful.

“We only confuse the issue and hurt our public witness when we make false statements like ‘prayer has been kicked out of public schools,’” she insisted.

BROWNWOOD—When clients arrive at Good Samaritan Ministries seeking food, clothing or school supplies for their children, some see no way out of poverty’s grip. Angelia Bostick gently encourages them to look around at the facility that houses the community ministry.

“It’s a testimony of transformation and what God can do,” said Bostick, founding executive director of Good Samaritan.

The 15,000-square-foot facility, just a few blocks off Main Street in downtown Brownwood, originally was three buildings separated by alleys. Over more than three-quarters of a century, the structures had housed a car-repair shop, a roller skating rink and a variety of businesses that flourished and floundered.

By the early 1990s, the abandoned buildings had fallen into disrepair. Good Samaritan secured the central 9,500-square-foot building for $200 a month, and then the ministry’s leaders purchased the surrounding property.

Thanks to a bequest from the estate of Suzanne Bacon—whose only contact with Good Samaritan was reading a newspaper article about the ministry—along with other gifts and a grant from USDA Rural Development, the three buildings were enclosed under one roof and totally renovated.

A chaplain thought of the ministry and its needs when he saw a load of discarded tiles at Carswell Naval Base and asked if Good Samaritan could have them. The mason who set the wall tiles at the Brownwood ministry marveled that he had the exact number needed to complete the job.

Bostick interprets that incident as a parable—an example of how what someone considered “junk” possessed value when placed in God’s hands. She uses that story—as well as other examples of denoted furnishings and decorations at the Good Samaritan facility—to teach subtle lessons about transformation to clients.
Most of the people who come to Good Samaritan receive that message gladly. Even though they may be working on Sundays and unable to attend church—or they may not feel altogether comfortable in church because they are embarrassed by their life situations—they recognize God as their only hope, she noted.

“Most of these people have a deep faith. The only way they can make it through the day is relying on God and his people,” she said.

Bostick, a member of Coggin Avenue Baptist Church in Brownwood, committed her life to vocational Christian service at age 17, but she struggled with how to fulfill what she believed was God’s calling. In 1991, she participated in a life-changing mission trip to Brazil. That’s when God gave her a passion for serving poor people, she said.

“In America, we can put blinders on and pretend poverty doesn’t exist. But in the Third World, you can’t avoid contact with poverty and human suffering. It touched my heart so deeply,” she said.

But rather than seek appointment to a foreign missions post, Bostick said, “God told me to go home and serve the poor.”
Consultants with the Baptist General Convention of Texas worked with the local association to conduct a community needs assessment of the Brownwood area.
Baptists in the area recognized the need for a comprehensive ministry that could draw support from churches of various denominations, and leaders invited Bostick to direct it.

“I agreed to do it until they could find somebody else,” she said, chuckling about the temporary assignment that has lasted 15 years with no end in sight.
Good Samaritan Ministries receives support from 38 churches—Baptist, Methodist, Disciples of Christ, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Church of the Nazarene, Assembly of God, Church of Christ, African Methodist Episcopal, Catholic and nondenominational.

Last year, volunteers from many of those churches logged more than 12,000 hours service at Good Samaritan.

The ministry provides food to about 600 families and 1,500 individuals a month. Texas Baptists help provide funding for Good Samaritan through gifts to the Texas Baptist Offering for World Hunger.

Good Samaritan purchases most the nonperishable food it distributes from the Food Bank of West Central Texas. In fact, the ministry is the food bank’s largest client in the 17 county-area it serves.

About one-third of the people in Brown County live in poverty, Bostick noted. The clientele at Good Samaritan reflects the ethnic make-up of the area—about three-fourths white, 18 percent Hispanic and 6 percent African-American.
About 15 percent of Good Samaritans’ clients are age 60 and older.  Three-fourths of the families served are single parents—or widowed grandparents caring for grandchildren.

“We have a lot of elderly people on fixed incomes. Many are grandparents who are raising kids because the children’s parents are not around or able,” Bostick said. “Meth labs are a bad problem around here, and they are breaking up families.”
Two-thirds of the people who seek help at Good Samaritan fall into the age 20 to 60 bracket. “We serve a lot of the working poor—the underemployed,” Bostick noted.

Elderly and disabled people represent a majority of the “regulars” at Good Samaritan who depend on the ministry for ongoing needs, she added.
“The working poor, on average, come about once every three months—when things get tight,” Bostick said.

“These are good people—the salt of the earth. But they are faced with tough choices. ‘Do I eat, or do I pay a bill?’ That’s not a good place to be.”

SAN ANTONIO, Texas – Cameron Byler, a pioneer in national disaster relief and men’s missions within the Southern Baptist Convention, died Apr. 28 in San Antonio after a bried illness. He would have turned 80 May 11.

A memorial service will be conducted at 1 p.m. May 3 at Trinity Baptist Church in San Antonio, where he had lived since moving from Tennessee last July. James Porch, executive director of the Tennessee Baptist Convention, will officiate.

Byler was preceded in death by his first wife, the former Joyce Christian, and his second wife, the former Andrea Hawkins, who died two months ago. He is survived by three children: Barbara Garland, Portland, Ore.; Chris Byler, San Antonio, and foster son Brad Gray, Nashville, Tenn. He is also survived by three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

Relatives, friends and Southern Baptist Convention colleagues remember Byler as literally a gentle giant of a man who stood 6’ 1” and weighed some 400 lbs. Byler played tight-end on the football team at Howard Payne University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree. He later coached at various Texas high schools.

“Cameron had forearms bigger than my thighs,” says Jim Furgerson, a friend for 45 years, who followed Byler’s footsteps in Texas Baptist Men’s ministry and as national disaster relief director.

“I never saw anything he couldn’t lift. I’ve seen him carry a horse to a stall. When I first met him in 1963, he had a 28-inch waist and a 60-inch chest. Southern Baptists have lost a giant – physically and spiritually,” said Furgerson.

Vision and mission

Furgerson described Byler as a man of vision and mission.

"He was a pioneer in volunteer missions, disaster relief, men’s mission education and church recreation,” Furgerson added. “Cameron was one of those ground-breakers and a change agent’s change agent. He was one of the first Southern Baptist men brave enough to take volunteers on challenging international response missions into foreign countries like Albania and Nicaragua.”

Byler began his career in ministry at Buckner Baptist Boy’s Ranch in central Texas in 1956. Six years later, he moved his family to Lubbock, where he served as activities director at First Baptist Church – at the time, only one of a few such positions in the entire SBC. He moved on to serve as Royal Ambassador director on the staff of Texas Baptist Men, and as manager of Zephyr Baptist Encampment on Lake Mathis near Corpus Christi, Texas.

When Hurricane Beulah trounced Texas in 1967, Byler and fellow Texas Baptist Bob Dixon became the SBC’s first-ever disaster relief team, serving food prepared on “buddy-burners” from the back of a pick-up truck in the wake of the devastating Category 5 hurricane which killed 58 Texans.

In 1981, Byler and first wife Joyce moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where he served four years on the Alaska convention staff in church planting and Baptist Men’s ministry. He built the first Baptist recreational camp in Alaska, Furgerson said.

Disaster relief strategist

Byler was tapped as the Baptist Brotherhood Commission’s first man to develop and execute a national strategy on how the Southern Baptist Convention would respond to disasters nationwide, according to Jim Burton, a North American Mission Board (NAMB) staff member.

“Until Cameron came along, each state did its own thing, but even the states knew national coordination was necessary,” Burton said. “As Baptist Men’s director and national disaster relief director out of the Brotherhood Commission in Memphis, he was responsible for bringing the states together.

Recently retired NAMB staffer Douglas Beggs, who hired Cameron for the national disaster relief director’s job in the mid-1980s, said it was Byler who negotiated the very first agreement between Southern Baptists and the American Red Cross on how the two agencies would cooperate in response to U.S. disasters.

“Cameron was a great friend and mentor to me and so many others,” says Beggs. “If Cameron was your friend, you could count on him for anything. He was a great giver, both of his time and himself. He loved reaching young boys and men for Christ and spent so much of his Baptist career in RA and recreational work.”

Research findings to be presented at social work colloquium WACO—Catherine Sykes, who is graduating with a master’s degree in social work from Baylor University, received inspiration for her research project sitting at breakfast one morning.

Because she had at one time suffered from an eating disorder and saw many of her friends still suffering, she wondered what she could do to address the situation. Her cereal box gave her the answer.

“Next to a picture of a morsel of the cereal were the words ‘not actual Size,’” Sykes said. “Here they have regulations on acknowledging the actual size for a bit of cereal, but never mind about the entire human being that gets published in advertisements. Where’s her ‘not actual size’ label?”

Photo labeling

Sykes’ research on photo labeling as it applies to truth-in-advertising regulations, completed in cooperation with the Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Eating Disorders will be presented May 7 in Waco at the Baylor School of Social Work’s master of social work practice colloquium.

Sykes’ presentation will be one of 66 research and/or practice reports given that day— each on a topic regarding social justice issues.

Sykes conducted an online survey made available on the ANAD website (www.anad.org ).

Survey questions measured self-perception in terms of thoughts, feelings and behaviors after viewing fashion models representative of current cultural ideals in photographic advertising.

Two hundred and thirteen participants viewed photos of fashion models of both genders, and then answered a series of questions, responding according to a four-point scale. The participants then viewed the same photographs with photo-labels and responded to the same set of questions.

Positive impact

Findings from the research study provide evidence that photo-labeling has a positive impact on self-perception for the population and in the context studied.

“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that examines a point-of-contact intervention in photographic advertising,” Sykes said. “The findings are exciting because they show that it is possible to negate some of the psychological damage that can occur when individuals view unrealistic media images and then attempt to hold themselves to those same unrealistic standards.”

Registration for the School of Social Work’s colloquium begins at 7:30 a.m., May 7, in the Cashion Academic Center on the Baylor University campus in Waco. Presentations are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. There is no cost for the colloquium. For more information, contact Krista_Barrett@baylor.edu or call 254-710-6400.

 Kelsi Kelso is serving with HandsOn Missions, a five-month program of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board that places people ages 18 to 29 in ministries throughout Africa. Nelson—who recently recovered from malaria—serves among the Zerma people in Niger, West Africa. “Living out here without running water and just one light and cooking from scratch and living in sand isn’t the ideal life for me because I’m American,” said Nelson, 21. “But this is life for them (the Zerma), and for me to understand who they are, I have to become like them.”

BROWNWOD—Baptist Immigration Services of Brownwood has opened its doors to meet the need for Christian immigration services in Central Texas.

According to its mission statement, the ministry exists to “show the love of Christ by offering affordable legal immigration services to Brown County.”

Jesus Romero, pastor of Iglesia Nuevo Amancer and co-director of the program with his wife, Elsa, knew someone who was charged $5,000 to obtain U.S. residency, but she was “left hanging.”

“They took advantage of her,” Romero said. “So, we prayed about it. And then we met Alex Camacho, who has done this ministry in McKinney since the ’80s, and we knew the Lord wanted us to be part of it.”

No other immigration service agencies serve the Brownwood area, Romero noted. Baptist Immigration Services of Brownwood does not harbor undocumented immigrants or encourage illegal activity, he stressed.

“There are undocumented immigrants who would be eligible for help, and we want them to find legal relief,” he said.

Jesus Ramos, co-director of Baptist Immigration Services of Brownwood, receives a plaque honoring the agency’s membership in the Chamber of Commerce.

People in the community have been very supportive of the program, providing a new tile floor, office supplies and the first four months of rent, he added. Someone even anonymously donated a new computer.

Buckner International and the Baptist General Convention of Texas helped the program get started through the Immigration Service and Aid Center (ISAAC), a collaborative venture that helps churches serve immigrants, said Richard Muñoz, director of the ISAAC program.

Texas Baptists help support ISAAC through their gifts to the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas Missions.

Each site served by ISAAC is an independent, autonomous agency, Muñoz said.

“We don’t control what they do,” Muñoz said. “We just help them become recognized by the government and we give them help along the way. … We provide some of the tools and let them take care of construction.”

ISAAC helped the Brownwood ministry get its accreditation package ready, Romero noted.

“They provided us with software that guaranteed that we would have the nation’s best electronic law library at our disposal,” he said. “We feel that ISAAC is really walking with us.”

The Brownwood agency is the second ISAAC-affiliated program operating in Texas. The other program is the Ruth Project in Waco.

For more information on ISAAC, contact Richard Muñoz at richard.munoz@bgct.org or visit www.isaacproject.org .

Before Grace Davis traveled to North Africa, she expected to be immersed in the Muslim culture and to be tested and challenged in ways she had never experienced. The journey did not disappoint.

Davis, a junior at Howard Payne University , traveled to North Africa with seven classmates as part of a cross-cultural studies program. The group, led by Mary Carpenter, assistant professor of Christian studies, worked primarily with Muslim university students—helping them with their English and building relationships.

Howard Payne University students Deya Baldazo, Allysa Pendly, Jackie Phillips and Grace Davis visited a coliseum while in North Africa. (Grace Davis Photos)

Working directly with Muslims allowed the Howard Payne students to learn about Islamic culture. Although Davis thought she understood the culture before leaving, she found that it was not like what she expected. She felt humbled by the experience as she worked with students her own age.

“They were very friendly, loving and welcoming. In spite of all of our differences, it was still easy to connect with them,” she said.

Evangelism looked quite different to the students, as they grew to recognize the value of simple conversations about their faith in the Islamic culture, not traditional methods of personal evangelism. And they discovered the importance of prayer.

“The best impact and strongest influence that we could have was on our knees praying for these lost people,” she said. As they drove across the foreign land, Grace would look out the window of the bus and pray for each person she saw.

Jami Oliver, another student on the trip, also shared about the significance of prayer. “There is a spiritual darkness in North Africa that I can’t even describe,” she said, “but I gained an understanding on the importance of prayer – the greatest way for us to shine a light in the darkness was to saturate every area with prayer.”

Through their class, an international missions practicum, the students have been learning all semester about all of the details involved in planning a mission trip.

Howard Payne University students Ovi Reyna (left) and David Kampfhenkel (right) explore caves in North Africa.

“Many of our students will be workers in cross-cultural settings or as leaders of global missions in their local churches,” Carpenter said. “Students need to be trained in how to discern and work effectively in diverse types of partnerships.  They also need to know the practicalities of budgeting, raising support, orientation and re-entry. More than just a trip to North Africa, this course is designed to offer them hands on experience on how to create those connections both locally and globally, and give toward kingdom goals.”

The students left North Africa encouraged by the work that God is doing there, they said. “It was very overwhelming to see the multitudes of people who are lost,” Oliver said. “But it is awesome to be able to confess that we serve a God who is much bigger than the multitudes and perfectly capable of reaching these people through his power. I was honored to be an instrument used for his glory.”

GARLAND—Whether in the streets of Bangalore, India, or northeastern Dallas County, the sight of people in need compels Christians to respond in compassion, veteran medical missionary Rebekah Naylor said.

“God is a compassionate God. When Jesus saw the multitudes, he was moved with compassion. The New Testament epistles tell us we are to be clothed in compassion,” said Naylor, who served 35 years as a Southern Baptist medical missionary in India.

Naylor spoke to a May 1 prayer breakfast sponsored by Hope Clinic , a Christian health care provider serving the uninsured and underserved working poor in Garland.

Compassion spurs Christians to action, Naylor said. But every response needs to be bathed in prayer, she insisted.

“Our efforts must be preceded and supported by prayer,” she said. “Pray believing that God answers prayer.”

Naylor described the crushing poverty and spiritual darkness she encountered in India, and she challenged Christians in Texas to recognize the less obvious but no-less-urgent needs close to home.

“We need to focus on the needs of people around us—to look outward and not at ourselves,” she said.

The United States faces a health care crisis, said Steve Arze, head of the emergency department at Baylor Medical Center at Garland and medical director of Hope Clinic.

For example, two hospitals in nearby communities closed in recent years, creating an increasing burden for the Garland hospital—and an increasing opportunity for Christian ministries such as Hope Clinic, he noted.

Faith-based free clinics not only can relieve suffering and promote physical well- being, but also can provide spiritual comfort and the hope of everlasting life, said Arze, a member of Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall.

Barbara Burton, executive director of Hope Clinic, reported more than 200 people professed faith in Jesus Christ last year as a result of their contact with the clinic, and several home Bible studies have grown out of the ministry.

“When people are treated with dignity and respect, so many of them are receptive and willing to listen to the good news of Jesus,” she said.

The six-hour journey from a remote Ethiopian village was not easy for a woman pregnant with twins and going into labor. Making matters more difficult was her mode of transportation—being carried by several men.

The woman arrived at the medical clinic frightened and bleeding, but she was assisted by a group of students from Baylor University’s Louise Herrington School of Nursing who were ready to help.

The first twin to arrive was born healthy. However, the second twin was born with several life-threatening complications. The team of Baylor nurses worked through the night providing medical care to make sure the baby survived.

“I really view it as a child who was able to survive due to the Baylor team that assisted the mother,” said Lori Spies, a lecturer in nursing at Baylor who coordinated the mission trip.

“It was a matter of life or death, and the students used what they had learned to save the baby.”

The women who helped save the life of the child were five Baylor nursing students on a month-long medical mission trip to Ethiopia and Uganda.

Ethiopia and Uganda

The trip was created to increase the capacity of nurses as health care providers and designed to enhance their education while serving the health needs in a developing country.

The trip began in Addis Abbaba in Ethiopia, where Spies and her students worked along side Kim Scheel, a graduate of Baylor’s family nurse practitioner program.

Michelle Sanders, a Baylor University alum, teaches a group of children from an orphanage in Uganda the “Sic ’Em Bears” cheer.

The students worked in an established medical clinic in a predominantly Muslim area and treated a wide variety of tropical diseases like anthrax, trachoma, malaria, intestinal worms and amoebic infections. The students also provided prenatal care and assisted in labor and delivery, a first for the annual trip.

Inspiration for the trip

After leaving Ethiopia, the group traveled to Uganda, where they toured the International Hospital and its associated nursing school. Rose Nanyonga, the hospital’s nursing director, is a former student of Spies at Baylor who traveled with the group several years ago. Nanyonga was the inspiration for starting the annual trip to Uganda, Spies said.

“Rose could have held a powerful position in the hospital system in this country, yet she felt called by Christ to return to Uganda and work for the benefit of her people. I have tremendous respect for that,” Spies said.

The Baylor students also worked in an orphanage in Uganda, providing medical care and health education to nearly 500 children, primarily orphaned because of the AIDS epidemic. They provided each child with one-on-one counseling and guidance on topics ranging from hand washing to staying in school.

“By returning each year we are working to create a sustainable outreach to improve the lives of some of the neediest people in God’s kingdom,” Spies said. “It is a blessing to serve the needs of some of the poorest people in the world. This trip just fits perfectly into Baylor’s mission.”

BROWNWOOD—Evangelism and ethics both grow out of a vibrant relationship with the God who is love, speakers told participants at the inaugural Currie-Strickland Distinguished Lectures in Christian Ethics at Howard Payne University.

People cannot fully come to know God apart from the Bible, but they cannot really know the Bible apart from God, said David Sapp, pastor of Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta, Ga.

“If God breathed it, how can we possibly understand it apart from knowing him?” Sapp asked.

Proper understanding of Scripture and application of its teachings in daily life require disciples to seek the mind of God, he said. Sapp suggested three themes that help Christians interpret Scripture—love, covenant and conquest of fear.

Love is the key

“Love is key to understanding the mind and heart of God,” he said.

But determining the most loving thing to do in the midst of any circumstance proves difficult, he acknowledged. Consequently, many Christians retreat to a rule-based ethic and treat the Bible as a “moral and ethical encyclopedia” from which they pluck isolated verses—usually ones that reinforce their own opinions and prejudices, he added.

God demonstrated his love through covenant relationships, and covenant serves as an interpretive key for reading Scripture, Sapp noted.

“Without commitment, there is no covenant,” he said. “Covenant commitment is an obligation not just of contract but of relationship.”

Covenant finds its expression in community, Sapp noted. In the Old Testament, God established covenant with Israel as a people, not strictly with individuals. While the New Covenant has more individual expression, he observed, it still offers invitation to enter into a larger community as part of the kingdom of God.

“Sin is social and not just personal,” he said.

The defeat of fear

Much sin grows out of fear, and “defeat of fear is part of the agenda of God,” Sapp said. “Much of our sin has its genesis in fear. Fear is fertile soil for evil.”

Both ethics and evangelism express God’s love, said Richard Jackson, director of the Jackson Center for Evangelism and Encouragement and pastor emeritus of North Phoenix Baptist Church in Phoenix, Ariz.

“Evangelism is born in the heart of a God of love,” Jackson said. From the earliest passage in Genesis and throughout the Bible, Scriptures testify to God’s loving pursuit of spiritually lost men and women.

“Jesus Christ didn’t come to heal the sick, or he would have healed them all. He didn’t come to feed the hungry, or he would have fed them all,” Jackson said. “He came to seek and save the lost. He healed the sick and fed the hungry because of who he is.”

Likewise, Christians today evangelize because Christ gave them that assignment, he said. Christians meet needs and seek justice because of who they are.

“Because Jesus lives in me, I will reach out to help those who are hurting,” he said.

Evangelism and ethics

Evangelism and ethics—“winning people to Jesus and wanting people to act like it”—bring Baptists together, noted Jimmy Allen, former denominational executive and recent coordinator of the New Baptist Covenant celebration in Atlanta.

Allen recalled his experiences as pastor of First Baptist Church in San Antonio, leading a church with a historic commitment to missions and evangelism to recognize ethical challenges and injustices in their own community.

At the downtown San Antonio church, Allen noted, people already possessed the necessary desire. They just needed to be challenged.

“A church will follow the vision of its pastor if the pastor has a passion for it,” he said.

But in some churches, he added, members must be shaken from their complacency and challenged to look beyond the four walls of the church building to see community needs.

“The moribund church never looks outside its windows except to see if the grass is mowed,” he said.

Gary and Molli Elliston of Park Cities Baptist Church in Dallas established the Currie-Strickland lectures in honor of David Currie, executive director of Texas Baptists Committed, and in memory of Phil Strickland, longtime director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas’ Christian Life Commission.