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BOB BURGIN baptizes a new believer in a portable baptistry. (Photos by Toby Druin)
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Mission Arlington does missions impossible ___By Toby Druin
___Regional Correspondent
___ARLINGTON--It's 4 a.m. on Dec. 16 at the Mission Arlington office at 210 South Street in downtown Arlington. Tillie Burgin already has been there half an hour. She has completed her morning quiet time and has put on the coffee pot, and now she is
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TILLIE BURGIN tells her volunteers at Mission Arlington to "hover around John 3:16."
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writing on the message board.
___"Every one of us tell the story to someone," she writes. "Don't fall into the trap of them saying they've already heard it."
___The "story," of course, is the gospel, the "Jesus story." And the plan is that everyone who comes through Mission Arlington will hear it and have the opportunity to respond to
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EDNA GOODYEAR has directed the medical clinic for 10 years.
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it.
___"Everyone" in the case of Mission Arlington is a lot of people.
___During the 1999 Christmas season, 12,768 people representing 3,766 families came through Mission Arlington's Christmas Store to get items for their families--tens of thousands of toys and other items donated by Arlington people and businesses, almost all of them new, but used "if it is a toy you would give to your grandchild," Burgin says. More than 2,000 families got Christmas trees cut in East Texas by men from First Baptist Church of Arlington.
___Before the people got the toys and trees, however, they got the gospel, sitting usually 25 to 30 at a time as a volunteer told them the Christmas story.
___Every Sunday morning at 215 to 220 locations in the city--most of them in apartment complexes--an average of 3,700 people hear the story in Bible studies led by Mission Arlington volunteers. Every month, more than 5,000 people are assisted with food. Other assistance, including furniture, is given to 3,500 families monthly--an average of 42,000 families and 189,000 individuals annually.
___Each weekday morning, 2,000 people are taken to work and several hundred children are given rides to school in the motley array of 35 to 40 vehicles operated by Mission Arlington and Mission Metroplex, a separate non-profit corporation supported by many Metroplex churches and other individuals and entities.
___Monday, Wednesday and Friday from noon to 1 p.m. or later, if a volunteer doctor can give more time, dozens of people crowd into a medical clinic. Many more get dental care from dentists who give their
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JACK LONGGREAR leads an apartment complex Bible study.
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time in a state-of-the-art dental clinic. Dozens are cared for each night and day in a shelter. Child care is provided during the day.
___Although Mission Arlington occupies many buildings around the city, and a new Mission Metroplex facility is nearing completion at Randol Mill and Thannisch, most of the day-to-day ministry is carried on in a complex of buildings almost at the back door of First Baptist Church.
___It's messy because of the sheer magnitude of what goes on, but Charles Wade, longtime pastor of the church who became executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas Feb. 1, said he wouldn't have had it any other way.
___"I don't care where it is, as long as our people can see it from the church house, where it will never be forgotten in the sense that it is 'us,'" he said. "Having it close means we pray every time we drive by it--every time we come to church."
___The swirl of activity and numbers of lives touched are mind-boggling, and most of what happens swirls around Burgin, who is in almost perpetual motion,
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IMOGENE LONGGREAR works with children in a Bible study at an apartment complex.
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walking constantly through the sprawling complex, talking on a cell phone or on one or two radios clipped to her belt.
___Burgin is 63, thin, white-haired and almost frail appearing. But she is indefatigable. Her day starts at 3:30 a.m. and ends somewhere around 10 or 11 p.m.--seven days a week.
___During the day, she oversees the operation just as any executive would. But if the area around the trash dumpster requires cleaning, a floor needs mopped or a pile of orange peels needs to be scooped up near the doorway of the medical clinic, she does it.
___Every day, she meets and talks with hundreds of people, many of them in great need and under great stress, and she deals personally with as many as possible with a hug, a smile or an encouraging word--or all three. "No one you pass today will be of no significance," she says at an 8 a.m. staff devotional time.
___Mission Arlington/Mission Metroplex are models that are being copied, as much as is possible without a Tillie Burgin, by church groups and others across the state and nation. Observers come to the office daily to see how it's done and go home to try to replicate it.
___God has put it all in place, Burgin said. "The only idea I ever had was, 'Let's start a Bible study.' Everything else has come because of a need."
___Arlington is home for Burgin. She and her older sister grew up in a home only a block from where her Mission Arlington office is located.
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TILLIE BURGIN leads a morning staff meeting of Mission Arlington workers, encouraging them to see every person they'll encounter that day as someone valuable to God.
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Her father, Erman Lester, operated a Gulf service station in the city seven days a week for 40 years; she credits him with her work ethic.
___"He was a servant," she said. "When he would come in late at night, he would explain it with, 'There's always one more to fill up.' He knew and took care of everyone. When he died, his pallbearers were six former mayors of Arlington."
___Tillie is a nickname that was given to her by her father when she was about 4 years old, she said, and came from the cartoon series "Tillie the Toiler." Apparently her industriousness was obvious from the start. As a youngster, she worked at the service station, filling cars with gas, cleaning windshields and fixing flats.
___"He believed everyone should work for a living," Burgin said of her father. "When I was about 15, the owner of the 5 and 10 cent store, Mr. Caton, called and said he wanted me to go to work for him. I didn't learn until five years later that my dad was paying my salary."
___She grew up in the shadow of First Baptist Church of Arlington, which stood across the street from her home. At 9, she made a profession of faith in Christ, at 15 recommitted her life to Christ, and in a Girls Auxiliary meeting felt a calling to be a missionary.
___Burgin met her husband, Bob, in a history class at what was then Arlington State College (now the University of Texas at Arlington). They were married within a year.
___When he was called into the Army in 1957, it opened the door for her to answer her
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TILLIE BURGIN speaks to a group of fourth graders at an Arlington school who took up a collection to help Mission Arlington.
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missionary calling. She couldn't accompany him as a military dependent, but while he served with the Army at Inchon, Korea, she served as a teacher with the Methodist Mission in Seoul. When his military tenure ended, they returned to school teaching positions in Arlington.
___Bob Burgin, who earned a degree in secondary education at North Texas State University, never had an inclination to be a missionary. But after a few years he, too, felt God's call to missions. The Burgins, this time with two young sons, Jim and Rick, returned to Korea in 1966 as Southern Baptist missionary teachers. On her application form, Tillie Burgin had listed Korea as her first choice for a place of service and Arlington as her second and third choices. She was convinced if she couldn't serve in Korea, she should be a missionary in Arlington.
___After five years in Korea, the Burgins came back to Arlington on furlough. During their year in Arlington, their younger son, Rick, had brain surgery, and the furlough was extended until 1973. They went back to Korea, but Rick's health problems persisted, and they returned home.
___Both Tillie and Bob took positions with the Arlington school system, he as a principal and she as director of personnel. They both were active at First Baptist Church, where she led a Wednesday night Bible study group.
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SIGN inside the reception area of Mission Arlington's offices.
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___Her move back to an active missions role began in 1986 when Wade, her pastor, attended a "key church" meeting in Dallas. When he heard Lewisville pastor Ben Smith tell of starting an apartment ministry with seminary students, he said, "I thought, 'We can do that,' and I thought of Tillie."
___The "key church" program offered Baptist General Convention of Texas financial assistance to any church that would hire a minister of missions and commit to starting six missions. ?
___"The key church minister of missions program was perfect for Tillie," Wade explained. "We had to come up with $14,000 to complement the BGCT's commitment, and I offered to cancel our radio program, which cost exactly the amount we needed.
___"The missions committee members looked at me and apparently thought if I believed in it enough to give up the radio program, they should approve it. They certainly all believed in Tillie."
___Today, the church budgets $100,000 for salaries for Mission Arlington and another $30,000 for programs, and Mission Arlington participates in the church's world mission offering.
___Burgin left her school job to become minister of missions, but after a few months accepted an offer from the school district to be its personnel officer and operate Mission Arlington at the same time. That worked for two-and-a-half years, until she came back to the ministry full-time as both director of Mission Arlington/Mission Metroplex and minister of missions at First Baptist Church.
___Operating with church benevolence funds, the original plan was to establish Bible studies to draw people to the church and do benevolence and apartment ministry, Wade said. A phone call rewrote the plans and was the beginning of Mission Arlington.
___The call was from a woman in an Arlington apartment complex who needed help paying her electric bill. Burgin visited her, offered the help the woman needed and asked if she could have a Bible study in the apartment. The woman agreed, but noted she had no furniture. Burgin arranged for her to get it and then realized she had no teacher for the Bible study group.
___"I asked Lauren Musgrave if she would do it," Burgin recalled. Musgrave had come to the church as a college student, and her brother, Tim, had asked Burgin to look out for her.
___"Lauren said she had never taught," Burgin said. "I told her not to worry, probably no one would come anyway."
___But 17 came to the first class session.
___Burgin's office walls are decked with awards from the governor of Texas, local government and denominational agencies, but she may be proudest of all of a photo of that first Bible study group, mounted in a broken ceramic frame.
___The woman in whose apartment the first Bible study was held came to a deacon's meeting with Tillie several weeks later, Wade recalled, and thanked them for what had been done for her and her family. Her two daughters had become Christians and had been baptized in the apartment complex swimming pool.
___"She said it was the first time anyone had ever thought she could help with anything," Wade said. "She said, 'You gave me back my dignity.'"
___Soon, six Bible studies were going, and when word began to spread of the positive impact they had on behavior in the apartment complexes, many more apartment managers began to open their doors to them.
___The Bible study leaders for the most part came from First Baptist Church. "Our laypeople began to do it and found they could teach and could make a difference," Wade said.
___"What we and they found is that people in our churches know a lot more than they think," he added. "They may have been taught the Bible for years, but they have never been given a graduation certificate, and it creates a sense of dependency. But what we do know (about the Bible) is so much more than many others know that to wait to use that knowledge is a sin."
___Ellis Sodd, an older deacon, was one of the first Bible study leaders.
___"One day I said to Ellis that he could be traveling and doing so many things other than staying around Arlington to teach his Bible study," Wade recalled. Sodd replied: "Pastor, in all my life I have never seen lives changed like in this ministry. I'm making a difference."
___Sodd and the many others who have become a part of Mission Arlington have an unusual loyalty to the ministry. More than 2,000 volunteers work in the ministry every year, and many of them have been coming for years.
___Bob Burgin has been involved with his wife in the ministry from the outset and now is pastor of Abram Street Baptist Church, a ministry of Mission Arlington. Their son Rick has worked for the ministry eight years, and both he and his brother, Jim, and their families are involved in leading Bible studies.
___Essentially all they ask of a Bible study leader, Burgin said, is that they be Christians and that they pray.
___"They are to knock on doors, visit the people and hang out on the property until they know their people," she said. "That's our basic philosophy: 'Hang out on the property and hover around John 3:16.'" A children's curriculum has been developed for those who work with the youngsters, but people working with adults are encouraged to start and stay with John 3:16 until they get to know the people and learn their needs.
___Burgin is arguably the best-known person in Arlington. "Hi, Miss Tillie," is on the lips of almost every person she passes and frequently is shouted from passing cars. She is e
| What is Mission Arlington? The whole ministry by the numbers. |
mbarrassed by being frequently introduced as the "Mother Teresa of Arlington."
___If she has a favorite Bible verse, she said, it's John 3:16 because it says "whosoever."
___"That means we are to go to the people wherever they are, to hang out there and tell them about Jesus," she said.
___Her only hero is Jesus--"no one but him," she said. And rather than consider it work, coming to Mission Arlington is "fun," even if it's for an 18-hour day.
___She scoffs at the idea that the ministry revolves around her and dismisses questions about who will direct it when she is gone.
___"There are a whole lot of people here who could manage it," she said. "Besides, I only kinda hang out here. The rest of the people do the work."
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___"The Mission Arlington Story, Tillie's Vision," by Erma Holt Mathis was used as an additional resource for this article.
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