LANSING, Mich. (BP)–To rousing applause from Michigan’s largest Southern Baptist gathering ever, the SBC’s 26 newest international missionaries shared stories of their calls, including testimonies of dramatic overseas adventures that etched into their hearts love and concern for those dying daily without Christ.
“I came to America 19 years ago to escape the oppression of communism in Laos,” said Dena McAnally, who along with her husband, Marty, was commissioned for service among the unreached Asheninka Indians in Peru. “Then 14 years ago, God saved me in a youth revival at First Baptist Church of Houston, Texas.
“My faith has cost me my family,” she said. “But God has done so much for me that I want to take this message of hope and salvation to people who have never heard of him. This is the least I can do for Jesus, my Lord.”
Another couple, whose names cannot be released because they are going to a part of the world sometimes hostile to missionaries, told about being English teachers in East Asia for 12 years and how that influenced their call today.
“When I first arrived I didn’t understand the culture,” she said. “I couldn’t speak the language or even read a street sign. But in my heart I knew I was home. That was when I knew God had called me to invest my life among the unreached peoples of World A.
“He asked me to give him my own plans and dreams, and I praise God that now his dreams have become my deepest desires as we go to serve in Central and Southern Asia,” she said.
During the International Mission Board’s commissioning service March 23 in Lansing’s Holiday Inn-South Convention Center, 40 people responded to the invitation to make a commitment to missions. It was one of the largest responses ever to an invitation at a commissioning service.
Appointee Jim Black of Emporia, Kan., told about attending a Buddhist funeral service for a college student in Bangkok, where a non-Christian student asked him, “What will happen to my friend now?”
“I wanted to tell him everything would be OK, but inside I knew she would go to hell. God used this event to confirm his calling on my life.”
Black and his wife, Marilyn, will be returning to Thailand to minister to students.
“As a junior in college, I was an exchange student to the former Soviet republic of Kazakstan,” said Jeff Brawner of Memphis, Tenn. “It was there that I looked around and saw the lostness of thousands of people — not because they had rejected the gospel, but because they had never heard.”
He and his wife, Christy Akins Brawner, will go to Brazil to work with the Cearense people group.
Appointee Beth Wilson told about going to the Ukraine in 1995 to serve two years as an International Service Corps worker with university students.
“For 75 years, the government told the people that there is no God,” she said. “Now they have the freedom to openly worship God.
“I have met students in Dnepropetrovsk who have never heard about having a relationship with Jesus,” she said. “Through this experience of seeing people so hungry for something to believe in, I feel the Lord calling me back to Ukraine as a career missionary.”
IMB President Jerry Rankin told the audience of some 1,200 people that a Christian can truly determine whether he or she belongs overseas only after yielding to the possibility God could be calling him or her overseas.
“He [God] may want you to stay right here in Michigan, but how will you know unless you are willing to say, ‘Here am I, Lord, send me [anywhere]’?” Rankin said.
Citing Isaiah 6, Rankin said God has issued a generic call to all Christians to carry the gospel worldwide, and he is waiting for believers to respond with Isaiah, “Here am I, send me.”
What distinguishes the IMB’s missionaries from other Southern Baptists is their willingness to heed God’s call to all Christians and go, Rankin said.
Rather than needing to come with skills and talents, missionary candidates need to come with contrite hearts that are willing for God to make them qualified, Rankin said.
As the world approaches the 21st century, “there is not a nation on the face of the earth that is not open to someone willing to go — someone willing to pay the price of going,” he said. That worldwide openness dramatically increases the need for more missionaries, he has said in other settings.
