[1]DALLAS—When tens of thousands of Southern Baptists come to town for their annual meeting, it takes hundreds of local Southern Baptists working behind the scenes to ensure essential services are provided.
Many of those behind-the-scenes workers are from Southern Baptists of Texas Convention churches.
“It takes a ton of volunteers to run one of these annual meetings, some bodies on the ground who know the lay of the land [and who] can help recruit people to meet the specific needs,” said George Schroeder, lead pastor of First Baptist Church in Fairfield.
Schroeder is chairman of this year’s Local Encouragement Team, formerly known as the Local Arrangements Committee. He, a volunteer himself, leads a team of 12 volunteers, including three representatives from local institutions, who in turn recruit many other volunteers to support the children’s day camp, registration, ushers, greeters, the prayer room, and information booths for messengers and guests.
In the case of registration support, volunteers help the registration committee by stuffing thousands of messenger bags and doing other tasks that allow registration committee members to focus on helping messengers obtain their credentials.
[2]The convention’s day camp for children has trained and paid childcare workers, but again, volunteers enlisted by the encouragement team do the behind-the-scenes work that allows the frontline workers to focus on the kids.
Schroeder formerly served the SBC Executive Committee and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Even as an insider, he never noticed how many people were serving behind the scenes.
“I realize now how many people it takes who aren’t being paid, and who, in many cases are paying their own way,” he said. “I didn’t realize it when I worked for the Executive Committee. You don’t notice how much work they’re doing.”
Keeney Dickenson, senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Crockett, is the committee member assigned to manage the convention prayer room. Among other things, this involves making sure the room is equipped with resources for those who wish to pray in groups or alone. Many of these resources are provided by SBC entities, but this year Dickenson has raised funds to allow him to provide a copy of his book about the pastoral prayer life of Charles Spurgeon to volunteers.
Dickenson’s team also provides prayer requests related to the convention’s annual meeting, as well as those from Southern Baptists serving around the world. Prayer room volunteers will be praying for those who made decisions for Christ during the Crossover pre-convention evangelism push. The 2025 prayer room also has provided prayer activities for children.
“We’ve developed a wordsearch puzzle and fact sheet that sends them around to different booths and entities, so they develop their own prayer list in the exhibit area,” Dickenson said. “I’m excited about getting some of the children involved.
“I’m hoping we can create some momentum in people’s prayer lives in their walk with the Lord as they pray,” he added.
Dickenson and Schroeder are among the few team members who don’t live in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Even so, they have enlisted members of their churches and families to help.
But the “local” in the committee’s name is significant because the convention has no resources to pay for the required number of volunteers’ travel and housing expenses. Being within a local commute also allows a large area church—this year, it’s Cross Church in North Richland Hills—to commit to enlisting a substantial number of volunteers.
George Clark, a layman and deacon at Cross Church, as well as being an encouragement team member, is helping his church provide all the ushers for the Dallas meeting. The ushers are focused on all kinds of messenger needs and, most visibly, they are the ones who collect the ballots when messengers vote during business sessions.
Still, the work of the team is not high profile, important as it is.
“My hope is that everything runs in a seamless way, and people don’t notice us,” Schroeder quipped. “If that happens, we’ll know that we did the job we’ve been trying to do well.”
This story originally appeared as the Southern Baptist Texan. [3]
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