HOUSTON — Participants at a commissioning service held in conjunction with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship general assembly not only prayed for six field personnel 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 commissioning service — joined representatives from First Baptist Church in Jefferson City, Tenn., and Second-Ponce de Leon in Atlanta, Ga., in being noted as members of the Sichuan China Ministry Network.
Steve Wells (left), pastor of South Main Baptist Church in Houston, and David Sapp (2nd from left), pastor of Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta, represent the Sichuan China Ministry Network as Harry Rowland (center), director of missional church ministries, joins Michelle and Bill Cayard, CBF field personnel in China and members of South Main Baptist, in a service of recognition and blessing for the network. (CBF Photo by J.V. McKinney)
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Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist works in church planting and evangelism in China’s Sichuan Province. First Baptist Church of Jefferson City works overseas in church planting, but also ministers locally to international students from China who attend Carson-Newman College.
South Main 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.
Rob Nash, coordinator of CBF Global Missions, identified the emergence of ministry networks as a trend in the way churches identified with the Fellowship are expressing their missional calling.
“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, he said, 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, Canada.
• Christy Craddock will serve another term as youth director at Touching Miami with Love, a ministry center in the Miami, Fla., neighborhood of Overtown, 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.
• Gabe Orea — a native of Mexico — will work in partnership with the registered church in China to build relationships and opportunities to minister with the most neglected and least evangelized in Xia-men, Fujian, China.
In presenting his charge to the new field personnel, Nash said neither the field personnel being commissioned nor those participating in commissioning them should be the focus.
“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.”