No matter what the year, it would be a good one for the International Mission Board to bring its commissioning service for new appointees to South Carolina, a state with a consistently strong record of support – both in money and volunteers – for the cause of missions worldwide.
Don KirklandThis, however, was an especially significant time for such an event in our state as the IMB held its trustee meeting in Greenville on March 17-18 followed by the commissioning service for 89 appointees on March 18 at First Baptist Church in Taylors.
On Nov. 14, South Carolina Baptists will commemorate 20 years of missions partnerships through the IMB with a celebration to be hosted by the Riverland Hills Baptist Church in Columbia.
It was in 1989 that the SCBC launched its initial missions partnership with the Carioca Baptist Convention in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, sending evangelistic, medical and construction teams to work alongside Southern Baptist missionaries, often in the slums of a city of nine million people.
The South Brazil Mission (of what then was the Foreign Mission Board) had given final approval to the project on Nov. 10, 1987, just a day before messengers to the South Carolina Baptist Convention voted to accept the partnership at its annual meeting at the Gaillard Auditorium in Charleston.
Damy Ferreira, the executive secretary of the Carioca Convention, compared the decision by South Carolina Baptists to enter the partnership to Paul’s response to a vision in which a man from Macedonia asks the apostle for help in that country.
That vision – providing the “Macedonian call” – had, according to Ferreira, “been experienced by some men and women of this convention in South Carolina.”
The chain of missions partnerships that followed the three-year linkup with Brazil carried volunteers from South Carolina to fields of service in countries such as Kenya, Romania and Taiwan. Currently, the SCBC is in the final year of its first partnership with a region, involving the seven countries of South Asia.
In late June and early July, the area general meeting of South Asia will reconvene in Thailand, offering a time of study, inspiration and fellowship for the missionaries and their families. A team from First Baptist Church, North Spartanburg, and led by pastor Mike Hamlet, will provide leadership and a variety of services for that meeting.
The regional South Asia effort, which had been recommended by the IMB, will bring to an end that type partnership as our state convention begins in 2010 a new missions emphasis called “South Carolina Baptists Touching the World.” It will target areas of “lostness” identified by the International Mission Board as volunteers from South Carolina work with teams from the IMB.
At the commissioning service in Taylors, South Carolina native and new appointee Christine Moffett said in a testimony that she and her husband were not driven by “lofty goals of world success.” Rather, she told the large audience, “Our desire is simply to live through Christ and to proclaim his message of grace and salvation.”
That is true also of every new appointee and the veteran missionaries who remain faithful to their calling. And the same can be said of thousands of South Carolina Baptists who have given and gone – and who continue to go as part of our missions partnerships – in obedience to our Lord’s command to make disciples of all the nations.