The ripple effect of a pastor’s mission trip to Thailand reached the Southern Baptist Convention in June.
Volunteers from Friendly Avenue Baptist Church and from across the Southern Baptist Convention helped build a Habitat for Humanity house during the Crossover evangelistic outreach prior to this year’s SBC meeting in Greensboro, N.C.Pat Cronin, pastor of Friendly Avenue Baptist Church in Greensboro, N.C., participated in a volunteer building project at an orphanage in Chiang Mai in August 2005, and, upon his return, he helped with the “clergy build” construction of a Habitat for Humanity house.
“Last year’s Southern Baptist volunteer construction project in Thailand combined in my mind with the Habitat project and the SBC’s upcoming annual meeting in Greensboro,” Cronin said of the idea to build a Habitat house during the annual Crossover outreach in the SBC host city.
Cronin first pitched his idea at a Piedmont Baptist Association meeting when options were being discussed for pre-SBC Crossover events. Cronin’s idea became one of 24 evangelistic initiatives slated in conjunction with the SBC’s June 13-14 annual meeting in Greensboro.
Roughed in and roofed by SBC volunteers during the week of Crossover, a four-bedroom, two-bath Habitat house is to be home for a family of Sudanese refugees – a forklift-driving dad, mom, three sons and a daughter.
Just as the Cooperative Program provides a tangible expression of the unified mission of Southern Baptist churches, Cronin, in promoting the Habitat project at his church, emphasized that a Habitat-type project tangibly blends ministry and evangelism in the community.
“It’s not enough just to support the Cooperative Program and missions projects like a Habitat house financially and prayerfully,” Cronin said. “Once you incarnate missions and the gospel, it keeps the fires of missions glowing; it puts flesh and blood to your missions giving.
“You can’t spend all the money on yourself,” added Cronin, now in his 12th year at Friendly Avenue Baptist. “We have to be kingdom-minded; scripture teaches it, and the Cooperative Program makes it possible.”
Known in its association and across North Carolina as a missions-minded church, Friendly Avenue is involved in several local and regional missions endeavors and averages two short-term mission trips each year in conjunction with the SBC’s International Mission Board and North American Mission Board. The congregation also gives 15 percent of the undesignated offerings it receives each week through the Cooperative Program, the SBC’s channel for supporting global missions, while also allocating 2 percent of its receipts for Piedmont Baptist Association ministries.
“We decided years ago to give those percentages,” said Doris Henderson, a member for 30 years and retired elementary school principal who serves as the church’s outreach director. “We believe in the Cooperative Program and the programs it finances. Our people feel very strongly about that.”
Among the church’s various local initiatives, a “Cooler Ministry” focuses on the needs of people waiting for news of their loved ones at a local hospital. Friendly Avenue members take a cooler two or three times a week filled with soft drinks and snacks, offering the items at no cost to people in the hospital’s waiting room.
“We’ll ask them if we can add their loved ones to our prayer list and pray for them at church,” Henderson said. “In our prayer room, they’ll contact the people (the Cooler Ministry group met at the hospital) to see how they’re getting on, and we also have a prayer line.”
A jail ministry team is active every Saturday. So far this year, more than two dozen inmates have made professions of faith. The new believers are discipled for as long as they stay in contact with a member of the Friendly Avenue team.
The church’s disaster relief trailer is equipped with tools for most any type of assistance: construction, mud-out, chain saw. In addition to the Gulf Coast, the church’s disaster relief volunteers have ministered throughout North Carolina and in South Carolina and West Virginia.
“Our theme is ‘Bringing all people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ,'” Henderson said. “We can do so much more if we join with other people; that’s where the Cooperative Program comes in. I think it’s important we be united as a Baptist organization and that we contribute jointly to do missions.”
Henderson continued, “We’re the role models for the rest of the world. If we’re not united, we don’t set a good example.”