While walking in a small town in Thailand years ago, Richard Blount spotted some Buddhists entering a temple and sensed his first heart-tug for missions.
At the end of the appointment service Jan. 31, Jerry Rankin, IMB president, offered a prayer of dedication for 43 new missionaries lined up across the sanctuary at Immanuel Baptist Church in Highland, Calif.“I witnessed several Thais … bowing down, lighting incense and praying to a big, gold Buddha,” he recalled. “I thought how fruitless, these people seeking hope in an idol. It was then that God began to burden my heart for the Thai people.”
Blount and his wife Linda were two of 43 new Southern Baptist missionaries appointed Jan. 31 at Immanuel Baptist Church in Highland, Calif. The event drew a crowd of 2,200 people as part of the International Mission Board’s trustee meeting and Immanuel’s Global Outreach Celebration. The outreach celebration was designed to personalize missions with the help of an additional 45 missionaries on site to share their experiences.
Rob Zinn, senior pastor at the church, thanked all the missionaries for following God’s call to the mission field.
“Trust me when I say that the kingdom of God is grateful for your obedience,” he said. “The world will be grateful for your obedience … and what God is going to do through your life.”
IMB president Jerry Rankin noted the diversity and various backgrounds of the new missionaries.
“Yet, there is one thing you all have in common,” he said. “Someone touched your life with the witness about Jesus Christ … and the Great Commission became very personal. You’re bringing the skills, the experience, the education, all that God has put into your life to focus on the one thing of significance: God’s glory among the nations.”
One missionary, born a Hindu in Bangladesh, shared how another missionary impacted his life when he had no other way of hearing the gospel.
“From that day, I became a follower of Jesus,” he said. “Afterward, God used my wife and me to share and lead many people to Christ in Bangladesh as well as in the United States.”
The couple now plans to share the good news with people in South Asia.
Another missionary, headed to Russia, told how the Lord revealed a call to missions while he was sharing the short story “The Missing Missionary” with a group of boys at church.
“Before the end of the story, God had revealed to me the identity of the missing missionary,” he said. “It was me.”
Rankin later challenged the new missionaries to look beyond simply going to the mission field. Missionaries must first “look, love and live,” he said.
“You’re following Jesus Christ, and he’s told you to go, but what he commanded you to do was to look and see a lost world, and to love and to live in a way that reflects Christlikeness,” Rankin said. “And as you fulfill that commandment, you’ll fulfill the mission that God has given to you.”