A Florence minister who was the only announced candidate for president of the South Carolina Baptist Pastor’s Conference for 2008 was elected by acclamation at the group’s annual meeting Nov. 11 at Calvary Baptist Church in Florence.
Bryant Sims
Ron Lynch
Howard AllenHoward Allen, pastor of South Florence Baptist Church since 1991, succeeds Danny Burnley, pastor of West Gantt First Baptist Church in Greenville. Also elected by acclamation at the Monday afternoon session were Ron Lynch, pastor of Siloam Baptist Church, Powdersville, vice president; and Bryant Sims, pastor of First Mount Moriah Baptist Church, Greenwood, secretary-treasurer.
Special guests at the conference were more than 200 Gideons and their wives, praised as “partners” with South Carolina Baptists in witnessing for Christ through the distribution of copies of the New Testament and the Bible.
Offerings taken at the afternoon and evening sessions of the conference, which usually go to help pay expenses for the meeting, went to the Gideons. A total of $9,058 was collected.
Two of the speakers – Elliott Osowitt, pastor of Faith Fellowship and Harvest Ministries in West Jefferson, N.C., and Bobby Welch, former SBC president and now a strategist for Evangelical Global Relations for the Southern Baptist Convention – told how they were led to become Christians as a result of the Gideons ministry.
Osowitt, who grew up in a Jewish home, but had “never been told that God loved him,” gave a testimony of how he was led to accept Jesus as Savior when, with his personal and family life in shambles, he contemplated suicide on Christian Eve in 1996. In a motel room with a gun in one hand and a Bible in the other, he read in John’s gospel of the peace that Christ gives.
He said that Jesus is now his passion, asking, “What am I going to do with it?” before answering, “I’m going to tell about Jesus.”
Welch said he was “led to the Lord” by a “red Gideon New Testament,” which stayed with him even during years of rebellion in college, but was lost while he was serving in Vietnam.
In his message, Welch said that God has “chosen us to be co-laborers with him for his glory,” noting, “He trusts us with the gospel, not for us to keep it to ourselves, but to go and to gather others. Don’t let anything interfere with that.”
Mentioning the story of Jesus raising Lazarus, Welch said that there are “a lot of walking dead people today” who need for someone trusted with the gospel to share with them “resurrection power.”
Braxton Hunter, the 26-year-old evangelist for Trinity Crusades for Christ in Jacksonville, Fla., said that the only reason he is in the ministry is that “Jesus is real and on his way.”
He challenged the pastors to help church members “understand what they believe and why they believe it,” underscoring the emphasis the New Testament places on knowing Christ.
Hunter said that it is not enough to tell church members to “take it on faith” when they seek “good reasoning and logic.” He urged the conference goers to “grow in grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ” and to “have an answer for the hope that you have in Christ.”
Aubert Rose, a church growth evangelist from Kentucky and a former pastor, claimed promises God has made to him and others who have received what he termed “the greatest calling” – eternal and abundant life, assurance of God’s call to preach, that Jesus would be with him and that opposition to his ministry would ultimately fail, that God would place him “where he wanted me to be” and would supply all of his needs “on time,” that he would be given the power of the gospel “but to leave the results to God,” a promise to save his family and the final victory “for our labor for the Lord is not in vain.”
Harold Hunter, president of Trinity Theological Seminary in Indiana, whose son Braxton had preached earlier in the day, said that some are preaching what he called a “convenient Christianity that has no cost, no price” – and he labeled this a “heresy.”
He said that Christians will endure “baptisms by fire” in their lives “when you come to a place in life where everything says quit” and “when life is so hurtful it seems that even God doesn’t care.” The seminary president said that pastors must be “totally centered on Jesus Christ – him and him alone.”
Sam Cathey, an evangelist from Oklahoma, recalled the story of how God sent down fire from heaven to establish his superiority over the gods of Baal and to validate the ministry of the prophet Elijah. For the fire to come down now, he said, it requires rebuilding the altar, making an offering, giving up your most prized possession, creating situations that demand divine intervention and praying the right prayer.
“Most of what we do,” he said, “does not require the touch of God.”
Richard Lee, pastor of First Redeemer Baptist Church in Atlanta, affirmed that “the key to church growth is the preaching of the gospel,” which is the “gospel of salvation.”
“The apostle Paul never got over being saved,” he said, “but too many today have gotten over it.”
He said that the early church added members each day “by winning people to Jesus Christ.”
Lee told the pastors to “preach the word in season and out – and preach in the power of the Holy Spirit, knowing that the gospel doesn’t change through the years.”