Twenty-one-year-old Nathan Baker was recognized during the July 17 morning worship service at Elko Church, Barnwell-Bamberg Association, for being the first member to be commissioned as a Journeyman by the International Mission Board. A Journeyman is a Southern Baptist in his or her early 20s who commits two years to learn the work of a missionary.
Journeyman Nathan Baker (center) with his brothers and parents.After presenting a plaque to Nathan, the deacons formed a circle around him and each one prayed for him.
“This day will live in my memory forever,” said his mother, Crystal Baker.
Nathan, the son of Elko pastor Tom Baker and his wife Crystal, is the oldest of five brothers and a 2011 graduate of North Greenville University.
He was scheduled to leave July 25 for two months of training in Richmond, Va., before departing the U.S. on Oct. 4 for Madagascar.
Nathan said he has been told he will be serving the Mahafaly people in the city of Toliara and will be going out on three-week excursions to villages that have not been contacted by anyone from the outside.
In those villages, he said they will “share the gospel in culturally relevant ways,” mostly through oral storytelling, which will allow him to use what he learned as a theater major.
“There’s a great need both overseas and locally,” he said, but over there is “the utter hopelessness of the unreached people. Those people are stuck in a grave unless someone comes and shows them a lifeline.”
He summarized Romans 10:14: “How can they believe if they have not heard?”
“We are a ministry family,” his mother said. “God has designed our family in this way. With Nathan as the firstborn, this is the first bridge we’re crossing. There is a grief process, but you choose to walk in hope, or mire in despair.” She quoted 3 John 4: “I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth.”
“To persuade him not to go would vacate all we’ve taught him,” said his father – and pastor. “It’s simply living out what we say we believe.”
Nathan has four brothers: Andrew, 20; Daniel, 19; Adam, 15; and Benjamin, 10. “His freshman year of college prepared us,” Andrew said. When all five brothers are not together, it is evident someone is missing, and it will be an adjustment, he added.
Nathan said some of his own adjustments include learning French, becoming fluent in Malagasy and “feeling cut off from everything you know.” He said fear is not too big for God. “Other people have given up far more for the same thing,” he added.
“This is not just about one person,” his mother said. “This is about a church praying and sending. All of us don’t go, but it is our joy, privilege and responsibility to fully support those who do. This is personal to us, that we have a messenger in Madagascar.”
His father added, “We are compelled by a God who gave everything for us – even when we spit in his face – [to go] to people just like us, doomed to an unbearable eternity apart from that message.”
It is a “joyful task to do what God has intended and to give life to people,” Nathan said. “I’m very hopeful and in high spirits to head out.”
Nathan will be blogging about his journey at http://redislandlight.wordpress.com.
– Pfenning is a member of Elko Church and a staff writer at the Barnwell People-Sentinel. Reprinted with permission.