Participants at South Main Baptist Church in Houston for the CBF field personnel commissioning service July 1. (CBF photo)
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HOUSTON (ABP) — Participants at a July 1 commissioning service in Houston, held in conjunction with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly, not only prayed for six field personnel who are assuming new assignments, but also recognized representatives of a ministry network serving in China.
Pastor Steve Wells of South Main Baptist Church in Houston — host site for the service — joined representatives from First Baptist Church in Jefferson City, Tenn., and Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta in being recognized as members of the Sichuan China Ministry Network.
Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist works in church planting and evangelism in China’s Sichuan Province. First Baptist of Jefferson City works overseas in church planting, but also ministers locally to international students from China who attend Carson-Newman College, a Baptist school near the church.
South Main Baptist works with two of its own members — Bill and Michelle Cayard, CBF field personnel in Chengdu, Sichuan Province — assisting in ongoing training opportunities for ministers and periodic retreats for pastors.
CBF Global Missions Coordinator Rob Nash identified the emergence of ministry networks as a trend in the way churches identified with the Fellowship are expressing their missional calling.
CBF Director of Missional Church Ministries Harry Rowland (left) and CBF field personnel Bill and Michelle Cayard at the July 1 commissioning service at South Main Baptist Church in Houston. (CBF Photo)
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“This commissioning of a network is simply one way of expressing gratitude to God for what God is doing in the world — our effort to indicate our willingness to join with God in this engagement,” he said.
Churches — both in the United States and around the world — are discovering their central role in “being the presence of Christ” globally, Nash noted. And in the process, they are finding Christians already at work all around the globe who are “full partners at the table of global missions engagement.”
About 800 people at the commissioning service prayed for six newly commissioned field personnel:
• LaCount Anderson will work with churches in Scotland Neck, N.C., in ministering to people who are homeless.
• Cecelia Beck will serve in Shelby, N.C., as an outreach worker with the Northeast Shelby Weed and Seed, a community strategy geared toward crime prevention, literacy programs and community transformation. She served previously with a multicultural apartment ministry in Toronto.
• Christy Craddock will serve another term as youth director at Touching Miami with Love, a ministry center in Miami’s Overtown neighborhood — one of the poorest areas in Florida. She just completed a two-year assignment with that ministry.
• John and Michele Norman of North Carolina will work to develop a network of individuals and churches in the United States to pray, financially support and actively participate in CBF work in China.
Participants pray for newly commissioned CBF field personnel during a service July 1 at South Main Baptist Church in Houston (CBF photo)
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• Gabe Orea — a native of Mexico — will work in partnership with officially recognized churches in China to build relationships and opportunities to minister to the most neglected and least evangelized in Xiamen, Fujian, China.
In presenting his charge to the new field personnel, Nash used as his text the account from Luke’s Gospel in which an expert in Jewish law asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” After telling the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus asked in turn, “Who was a neighbor?”
Neither the field personnel being commissioned nor those participating in commissioning them should be the focus, Nash stressed.
“It’s not about you. It’s not about us,” he said. “It is about the most neglected. It is about the least-evangelized and the most-marginalized people in the world. It’s about homeless people in North Carolina, poverty-stricken children in Miami, churches and suffering people in China.”
At a reception following the commissioning service, officials publicly signed a memorandum of understanding between CBF and the Japan Baptist Convention. Initially, the agreement will focus on providing an English-language worker for a single church in Kanazawa, Japan, but it could serve as a model for future engagement, Nash explained.
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Ken Camp is managing editor of the Texas Baptist Standard.