March 1, 2000
RIBBON-CUTTING PARTICIPANTS celebrating the opening of the Connally Missions Center at Hardin-Simmons University included Donald Tittle, president of the university's Baptist Student Ministry and statewide BSM president; Virginia Connally, retired Abilene physician; Tina Hunter, trustee chairwoman; and Palmer McCown, director of the campus BSM program. (Photo by Charles Richardson)
Humility brings change, missions speakers explain
___By Marv Knox
___Editor
___ABILENE--Humility has power to right wrongs, span cultures and shape hearts, according to speakers at a "Missions in the 21st Century" conference sponsored by Hardin-Simmons University's Logsdon School of Theology.
___The speakers didn't set themselves up as models for humility. But Rob Sellers, organizer of the conference and the Connally professor of missions at the school, noted thetheme of power through humility that characterized their presentations.
___An apology transformed a friendship with a Muslim businessman for John Jonsson, professor of world religions at Baylor University and formerly a pastor and professor in South Africa.
___The Muslim businessman, a man of color without rights when apartheid gripped South Africa, faced economic devastation. Another businessman, a white Baptist deacon at a church where Jonsson had been pastor, arbitrarily doubled the Muslim man's cost of doing business.
___When Jonsson heard about the wrong, he visited the Muslim man, a vendor with whom he traded and a person he considered a friend.
___Jonsson entered the room and immediately dropped to his knees. He grabbed the Muslim man's feet and expressed his shock and deep sorrow at the wrong that had happened.
___His Muslim friend lifted him up, and their friendship grew.
___Soon, the man began to allow Jonsson to teach him about Jesus, at first studying all the passages where Jesus is mentioned in the Koran, the Islamic scriptures. Later, he asked Jonsson to teach him about Jesus from the Bible.
___At the man's funeral, Jonsson told family and friends that this man, born and raised a Muslim, had come to "know Jesus better than most of the people of our church."
___The simple act of calling someone by name provided the platform for a strong and loving relationship with a Muslim bus driver in the Middle East, reported Mark Long, a former U.S. military analyst and Middle East specialist.
___During a bus tour of Syria, Long used his knowledge of the Arabic language and his love for Muslim souls to strike up a friendship with the driver of the bus. They talked about family and common interests, and Long called the man by name.
___At the end of the week, when the tour ended and passengers got off the bus, the driver wept as he hugged Long goodbye.
___"We should learn their language and tell them our names," Long said in a small-group session on relating to Muslims. "We as believers have a message that redeems lives," and it is best received when it spoken in the person's native language and presented lovingly.
___A.B. Short recalled being "made whole" during a night spent making sandwiches for prison inmates.
___He told about growing up in Mississippi in the 1950s and '60s. "I lived in a society where injustice was alive and well, racism was alive and well, and the institutions--family, church, the police and the legal system--were silent," said Short, who helps operate church-based ministries to the homeless in Atlanta.
___He particularly felt alienated when he tried to help a middle-class black man get medical attention at a Baptist hospital in New Orleans, which was "set up not to admit him," he said.
___"I went through a period of being very angry at the institutions, at God," he recounted. "I tried to do social work without a faith base. I sought the 'American Dream.' But I couldn't replace my calling with material wealth and couldn't embrace the church."
___He rediscovered redemption on a night when the Pearl River threatened to flood Jackson, Miss. He responded to a plea to help with sandbagging efforts and was dispatched to make sandwiches for prison inmates who were stacking sandbags on the levee.
___In that effort, race did not matter, he said. Neither did degrees, wealth or social standing. God spoke to him through that night of hard labor alongside black and white workers who laid aside their differences to save their city, he reported.
___He returned home exhausted, but changed. And through the effort, God renewed his commitment to minister through churches to express God's love to people.
___The role of humility is a key to faithful mission work, Sellers observed. It places Christians in the role of a servant, a position adopted by Jesus, so they can credibly present the gospel to unbelievers.
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Missions model changing, HSU conference told