SAN ANTONIO (ABP) — Prayer took center stage as Woman's Missionary Union leaders, missionaries, and Southern Baptist agency leaders spoke at the union's annual meeting June 11, held prior to the Southern Baptist Convention gathering.
In her address, union president Kaye Miller, a member of Immanuel Baptist Church in Little Rock, Ark., highlighted an Old Testament admonition to “humble yourselves” and “pray and seek God.”
Miller recounted her experience growing up in Thailand, where her parents were career missionaries and where her surgeon father often treated lepers.
“It took a special kind of man to humble himself before a leper, to sponge out foul-smelling wounds, to carefully wrap bandages around people no one else wanted to be around, to listen, to care, to love in Jesus' name,” she said.
Miller, a nurse, also remembered a motherless 2-year-old with AIDS and the response of fellow WMU members. Within hours, volunteers were waiting for their chance to care for the dying youngster, and they were with him when he died.
“What would happen if we, as God's people, would truly pray and seek God?” she asked. “Often in our churches and in our personal lives, we spend much more time talking about prayer than actually praying. Let us, as Woman's Missionary Union, keep calling ourselves by his name, keep praying and seeking his face so that we will keep reaching and teaching the generations.”
Miller was re-elected president of the union, and Kathy Hillman of Waco, Texas, was re-elected as recording secretary.
Gordon Fort, International Mission Board vice president for overseas operations, also presented the women with an original letter from Baptist missionary Lottie Moon to WMU founder Annie Armstrong on Jan. 9, 1889, thanking the union for raising funds to send three missionaries to help her in China.
In the letter, Moon asked the WMU executive committee to send missionaries without delay. She said to expect “a life of hardship and self denial. … They will need to be strong and courageous,” she said. “If ‘the joy of the Lord' be their strength, the blessedness of the work will more than compensate for its hardships. Let them come rejoicing to suffer for the sake of that lord and master who freely gave his life for them.”
Fort later expressed appreciation to WMU for helping raise more than $150 million for the Lottie Moon Offering for International Missions, the largest such offering ever.