ORLANDO (BP) – Nearly 150 fellowshipped, worshipped, ate and received ministry updates at the SBC National Haitian Fellowship (NHF)Business and Ministry Luncheon, held on June 7 at First Haitian Baptist Church of Orlando, with a theme built on Romans 8:37-39.
“This afternoon, we want to celebrate and reinforce our unity, to continue to strengthen and encourage one another,” said President Keny Felix, pastor of Bethel Evangelical Baptist Church in Miami. “The goal is for us to accomplish the task that God has entrusted to us – to search for lost souls and develop disciples from all nations. And not only those who look like us, but from all different nations.”
The gathering also served as the launch for The Black Collective, a fellowship of various groups from the Black diaspora, including African American, Ghanaian and Nigerian voices.
Felix told the group of growth from a single Haitian Baptist church founded in 1975 in Brooklyn to the group of more than 500 Haitian churches in the Southern Baptist Convention, with mission work and church planting stretching over to Louisiana and northward along the East Coast up to New England.
“Our goal is to collaborate to achieve the Great Commission,” he said. “Everywhere God wants to send us, that’s where we want to go.
“But we are not only to advance the Gospel, for this Gospel addresses all the needs before us. Our role is not only to engage in evangelism, but to stand for our communities in the work of advocacy. When our community suffers, your churches suffer. When churches suffer, families suffer. And so we have to stand – and we know that we’ve gone through a very challenging season as a people. But we have so many leaders and pastors engaging on behalf of our community, standing with our brothers and sisters and meeting with representatives in D.C.”
Strengthening church planting efforts in Florida, where approximately 370 Haitian congregations minister, remains important. But with an eye on missions elsewhere.
“We want to connect with different churches through fellowships nationwide,” said Felix, “so we can truly serve and encourage one another and engage in this work together.”
Another emphasis for the Fellowship, he added, is to serve with others across the SBC.
“We want to collaborate with others in the convention to accomplish the Great Commission, to engage in missions, to plant churches where God has called us.”
Participation across the SBC has grown in recent years, he reported, with “great progress where we’ve been more at the table along other ethnic fellowships to engage in the Convention. We see more effort within the convention for them to engage us in different activities, different conversations.”
Collaboration includes encouragement, he shared.
“We want to care for the needs of our pastors and their wives, their needs and the well-being of their families as the pastors [grow] in the work God is giving them. We want to encourage them to continue to develop all the tools they have.”
Felix referred to “great progress” in recent years of the NHF being “more at the table” alongside other ethnic fellowships to engage in the convention.
“We see more effort within the convention to engage in activities and conversations, and we want to take advantage of that to advance the work and address the needs before us,” he said. That happens, Felix added, by becoming more involved in leadership within the SBC as church planters, denominational leaders and state representatives.
Steps to do so begin within churches and associations, said Felix. They gain momentum through contributing their presence and actions. They also do so through the Cooperative Program to further missions.
“We are part of a great convention, but we are also a people who God is using to reach the world,” Felix said. “Today, when we look at the Haitian church, we know that we don’t only make an impact where God has placed us, but we continue to work in Haiti, Canada, France, the Dominican Republic, Spain, St. Martin and Turks and Caicos.”
Other speakers addressed the crowd on various topics, including Pastor Cansky Masson of CAYA (Come As You Are) Baptist Church, who took part in Crossover. He shared with the group how, as a part of Crossover, he and his daughter were handing out flyers for a block party the next day and encountered a group of four young men.
“Even from a distance, you couldn’t mistake the smell of what they were smoking,” he said.
He let his daughter move ahead and was about to leave because the smell was making him physically ill when he heard a voice saying, “Do you remember that, in the past, you smelled even worse than them?”
He felt directed to 2 Corinthians 2:15-16.
“The verse came to me and spoke to my heart,” he said. “There was a day when I carried that same scent, an odor of death. I prayed for the Lord to protect my health and stepped forward to talk with them.”
He gave them a flyer and invited them to the block party. The next day, there weren’t four, but six young men who showed up from the invitation.
“I started over to speak to them when one of them said, ‘Pastor, you don’t need to speak.’ Then, that man began preaching to them! He said it was the first time he had found a church that opened its doors to him,” and it was the first time anyone had approached them.
“They received not only food for the body, but food for the soul. And, they all prayed together.”
