By BNG staff
The co-authors of a new book about the United States’ first Ebola victim and the saga that drew the world’s attention will be featured speakers at the annual Friends of Baptist News Global Dinner on June 18 in Dallas.
Louise Troh and Christine Wicker both joined Wilshire Baptist Church, a prominent Cooperative Baptist Fellowship congregation in Dallas, within the same year, each coming from extremely different backgrounds and never imagining the way an international news story would bring their lives together.
Troh came to Dallas from Liberia. Earlier she had been a refugee in Ivory Coast. Her religious background was as a Jehovah’s Witness. Wicker had grown up Baptist but had wandered away from what she perceived to be a narrow religious perspective.
“Louise and I came to the same church from opposite ends of the religious spectrum,” Wicker explains. “She was a Witness, much more flinty in her fundamentalist beliefs than most of Wilshire is. I’m still trying to figure out what kind of God they’re talking about and unable to believe in a lot of what I hear. We could be in such a church because Wilshire Baptist Church is fashioning something that’s almost unheard of — a big tent Baptist church. But what Wilshire knows and the outside world doesn’t is that in doing so they’re drawing on the deepest Baptist ideals — another reason I came back to the Baptists.”
Wicker is a former reporter for the Dallas Morning News who helped create the paper’s award-winning religion section at the height of interest in religion coverage in America’s daily newspapers. Soon after coming back to faith, Wicker witnessed how Wilshire became involved in the Dallas Ebola crisis, because Troh was the fiancee of Thomas Eric Duncan, America’s first Ebola patient.
Through this ordeal, these two unlikely acquaintances became fast friends and sisters in the faith. Together, they wrote the new book, My Spirit Took You In, a memoir that chronicles Troh’s decade-long love story that started in Liberia and ended with Duncan’s death in an isolation ward in Dallas.
“Over and over, Louise used spiritual language to talk about her sadness and grief,” George Mason, Wilshire’s pastor, said recently. “We said in the quarantine house how we all acted in response to this would be a witness. When she spoke of forgiveness and mercy, compassion and kindness, leaving vengeance to God and judgment to heaven, she did so because she saw Eric’s death and her suffering from inside the story of Christ. The light of Christ has shone from within, chasing away the darkness.”
At the BNG dinner June 18 during the CBF General Assembly in Dallas, Troh and Wicker will share their remarkable story in a Q&A session with Mark Wingfield, associate pastor at Wilshire and a member of BNG’s board of directors. Wingfield is a former Baptist journalist who found an unexpected role as a spokesman for Troh and her family with the international media last fall.
The dinner will also celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of Associated Baptist Press in July 1990 as the first and only independent news service created by and for Baptists. In January 2014 ABP merged with the Religious Herald, the 185-year-old newsjournal for Baptists in Virginia and the Mid-Atlantic region to create Baptist News Global.
The dinner begins at 5:30 p.m. in Reunion Ballroom EF at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Dallas. Tickets purchased by Friday, June 5, are only $25 per person, thanks to the generous support of table sponsors and event underwriters who have defrayed a portion of the cost for the $40 meal. A limited number of tickets will be available after June 5 and at the BNG exhibit at the General Assembly for $40 each. To purchase tickets online, click here to access BNG’s secure server. To help support the event as a table sponsor or event underwriter, click here or contact Barbara Francis at [email protected] or (804) 698-0749.
“Louise came to Wilshire because God told her to,” Wicker says. “I came because I want to be part of what that church represents, which is a radically different way of looking at the world, one I’m deeply skeptical of but still intrigued after all these years. That radically different way of seeing reality worked throughout the Ebola crisis to make religious people in Dallas move away from fear toward love for the other in amazing and redeeming ways.”
The authors will be available to sign copies of their book immediately following the dinner.
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