Buffalo, N.Y., is the birthplace of David Petro, but he was raised in Charlotte, N.C. He still pulls for the Bills, “but after the Panthers.” The blue of an October sky only whets the appetite of this Gardner-Webb grad for the excitement of Tar Heel basketball.
Don KirklandHowever, it is in ministry, not athletics, that Petro derives his greatest satisfaction and sense of accomplishment. He is minister of education and students at Northside Baptist Church in Rock Hill.
Recently, one of his columns in the church newsletter, The Informer, caught my eye and encouraged my spirit.
Petro, a graduate of Southwestern Baptist Seminary, was a missionary journeyman with the Mission Service Corps of the Southern Baptist Convention’s International Mission Board, serving in Botswana from 1998-2000.
In the newsletter, he recalled an especially inspiring experience in that landlocked country in Southern Africa. Some years before he arrived in Botswana, a group of Baptists visited the village chief to ask for a plot of land on which to build a church.
The chief told them, “When I was young, I had a toothache. I went to see a traveling dentist, who fixed my tooth. He was a Baptist missionary. Pick whatever plot you would like – at no charge.”
Petro wrote, “The dentist had no idea that the boy would one day grow up to be the chief. He had no idea that his faithfulness would one day benefit the church with a prime piece of land. He had no idea that people would come to know Christ and be baptized as a direct result of his faithfulness. Only God saw the big picture.”
Petro told how a building was completed in the village there shortly before his tenure as a missions volunteer ended. “I went back in 2001,” he said, “when the building was dedicated. I also received a picture of the baptismal pool being used for the first time. It brought tears to my eyes.”
Northside’s minister of education and students understands the importance – the necessity – of seeing what he calls the big picture. He is the force behind “covenant groups” at his church who operate under the banner of “servant evangelism.” Times of instruction and inspiration for the groups are balanced by efforts by them to “live the witness” as they “find lost people and intentionally build relationships with them.”
David PetroThere is little they won’t do to serve their community in the name of Christ. And what they often do for the people they find is?…?well, little itself. “We hope with servant evangelism,” Petro told the Courier, “to do small things with great love. And trust that God will direct our paths to those people who need encouragement and to those who need to hear that God loves them.”
He continued, “We often have the misconception that the church is to be the destination of the lost. It is just the opposite – the lost are to be the destination of the church, and in serving we identify with Christ, who became a servant.”
There are some Christians who, if they cannot do a great thing, will not do a small thing. This is not true of the covenant groups at Northside Baptist Church. Is it true of you? Is it true of me? If we live our witnesses, it will not be true of any of us. Like David Petro and Northside’s band of believers, we must see the big picture.
“We have no idea how our actions will one day impact the kingdom of God,” Petro told the Courier. “We do not know which of the seeds we plant will eventually be harvested. All we know is that we are to be faithful.”
And this reminder from Petro to us all: “We serve a God who sees the big picture.”