GREENSBORO, N.C. (ABP) — 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.
Embracing God's call means “putting our arms around something too great for us. … It is a task we will never complete,” she said. “And sometimes it means Christ's followers must “toss overboard some of the baggage we've been carrying far too long.”
“If we would stop clinging to things that leave us empty and look to the Lord who wants to fill us again and again with what is meaningful and valuable and worthy and worthwhile, then we will begin to see that nothing is worth holding onto that the Lord says to discard,” she said.
As part of the event, 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 said 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. They also adopted a Chilean baby and said they 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.
Pam's work 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.
After Pam's address, 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.
To that end, Norma Melton, who leads church and community ministries in Asheville, N.C., encouraged the WMU women to see themselves as instruments through which God touches a broken world.
“The most important partnership we will ever have is our personal partnership with Christ,” she said.
Also at the meeting, 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 Graceville, 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.
The meeting took place before Southern Baptist Convention messengers voted to decline an executive committee recommendation to “invite” WMU into an exclusive relationship with the convention.
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