October 13, 1999

GARY BALDRIDGE cuts the ribbon to open the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship's new missions office in Carrollton.

Dallas-based 'World A' office links volunteers with missions
___CARROLLTON--Texas Baptists can help bridge the gap between godlessness and the gospel, according to a pair of missionaries who are trying to forge a link between U.S. churches and people all over the globe who never have heard about Jesus.
___Texas Baptist volunteers will be crucial to the success of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship's World A Link Office, located in Carrollton, said Beth and Tom Ogburn,

GARY BALDRIDGE, a Houston native who is interim global missions coordinator for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, visits with guests at the World A Link Office open house. Behind him are illustrations of the World A people groups with whom CBF is working to share Christ.

Fellowship missionaries who moved to Texas to create the office this summer.
___The World A Link Office opened with a ribbon-cutting ceremony Oct. 3 at its headquarters on Interstate 35, just north of Dallas.
___"This office symbolizes a shift to take the responsibility for sharing the love of Jesus back to the local church," said Gary Baldridge, who has been nominated along with his wife, Barbara, to be the Fellowship's global missions coordinators. "It is an opportunity for churches to link up with missions."
___The link office houses the Fellowship's Adopt-A-People, prayer and North American mobilization ministries. Its mission is to connect and mobilize individuals, groups and churches with ministry to World A peoples through adoption of unreached people groups, focused prayer and the utilization of individual skills so they have the opportunity to be involved directly in missions.
___"World A" refers to nearly one-fourth of the world's population, about 1.3 billion people, who have not been presented the Christian gospel. An "unreached people group" is a significantly large ethnic, linguistic and sociological grouping of people with little or no Christian witness or presence.
___Through the Adopt-A-People program, churches, groups or individuals commit through a formal process to pray for and become advocates of ministries to a specific unreached people group. Adopters often support the ministries financially and sometimes visit the people group they adopted.
___The World A Link Office will involve Texas Baptists in two phases of ministry, the Ogburns said.
___First, local volunteers will staff the office and help implement its various functions. These people will help set up databases, and they will staff telephones and computers to provide information, ministry support and research for churches and groups that participate in the Fellowship's ministries to unreached people groups.
___Beyond that, Texas Baptists will be encouraged to participate as missions partners.
___"We are excited about the opportunity to help connect the church with what God is doing with people groups in the unreached areas of World A," Beth Ogburn said. "We want every member of a group or congregation to see that their gifts and talents are needed and important."
___"We envision this role as one that stands with one foot in the church and one foot in the field and acts as a bridge between the two," Tom Ogburn added. "Adopting a people group invites the church into partnership with those on the field and calls for them to be involved

VISITORS tour the new CBF World A office in Carrollton.

hands-on through focused prayer, project participation and volunteer involvement in the work among a specific unreached people group."
___The participation of stateside churches and church groups in evangelizing people around the globe is absolutely necessary, Gary Baldridge said.
___"Your church can have as much of an impact on a people group or a city in the world as any missionaries we would put there," he insisted.
___The Ogburns, who returned to the United States this summer after spending five years in ministry to an unreached people group in Southeast Asia, are convinced cooperation for missions is vital to its success.
___"In Southeast Asia, I watched how different missions groups did their own thing" without cooperation across the spectrum of Great Commission Christians, Tom Ogburn said. But when those groups teamed up, their effectiveness was enhanced greatly, he added.
___That's why the World A Link Office "will be proactive in inviting Christians into its ministries and seek to maximize volunteer involvement," he added.
___In addition to linking churches with unreached people groups, the office offers a variety of missions education resources. They include a missions library, costumes, maps and the latest information, videos, texts and articles from the Fellowship and other Great Commission Christian groups, such as the U.S. Center for World Missions, Youth With a Mission and Network for Strategic Missions.
___Missionaries on furlough also will work out of the World A Link Office. And the office will coordinate its efforts with another Texas couple, Fellowship international volunteer coordinators Don and Helen McNeely, who are based in Waco.
___The Ogburns plan to offer video conferencing for churches, using missionaries and other speakers for teaching groups. They also hope to expand the World A Link concept with satellite offices in other cities.
___The Ogburns are following up the Adopt-A-People program previously led by Texas natives Philip and Shantel Vestal, who this summer ended a two-year appointment as coordinators of the program. Under the Vestals' leadership, 67 groups and churches from 17 states adopted unreached people groups.
___For more information about the World A Link Office, contact Tom and Beth Ogburn at (800) 782-2451 or e-mail: adopt@mindspring.com. Online information is available at www.cbfonline.org.
___Reported by Alison Wingfield, a freelance writer in Dallas; Editor Marv Knox; and Robert O'Brien, a Fellowship newswriter.
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