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AMONG THE ACTIVITIES the churches of Cameron used to take Jesus to the people were Backyard Bible Clubs.
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Mission Cameron unites 20 churches
in ministry and mission to a city
___By George Henson
___Staff Writer
___CAMERON--The slogan was "Mission Cameron--We Believe."
___"We" now includes about 200 more souls.
___Twenty churches in the Central Texas community of about 5,600 people recently banded together across racial and denominational lines to take the love of Christ to their community.
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TEXAS BAPTIST MEN and their wives prepare a meal for the volunteers who worked at Mission Cameron.
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___The scope of the plan encompassed every age group. Sixteen backyard Bible clubs served 200 children. A sports camp for junior high age students was offered at Yoe High School, with Bible teaching a key component.
___Youth met for discipleship classes each morning and hit the streets for door-to-door evangelism each afternoon. Adults did home repairs for those whose needs exceeded their ability to pay for them. The community's two nursing homes also were included in the ministry plan.
___A community rally was held each evening with evangelist Gary Maroney preaching and Christian country vocalist Clifton Jansky leading the worship.
___That far-reaching plan saw more than 200 people profess faith in Christ June 3-6.
___Probably two-thirds of the people making the Christian commitments did so as the result of the door-to-door evangelism by youth, said Pastor Ted Gross of First Baptist Church in Cameron.
___Two people trusted Christ as the result of the witness of the construction teams.
___"One man's wife had been praying for him for 40 years, but when the construction team showed up and was the love of Christ in person, his hardened heart just softened and he prayed to receive Christ," Gross explained.
___Still others prayed for God's forgiveness in the nursing homes. "That was probably the most surprising aspect of it for me," Gross said.
___How does something like this begin? In this case, on a 12-hour flight back from the Ukraine. Or maybe it was with the early morning men's prayer group that began meeting in a Cameron restaurant more than 20 years ago. Or maybe it's something God planned before anyone in Cameron had thought about it.
___In Cameron, the vote is for the latter, because they are sure this venture has been much greater than what any person or group of people could have engineered.
___On that 12-hour flight from the Ukraine, John Wallingford, minister of missions at Macedonia Baptist Church in Longview, rode with Maroney as they returned from a mission trip. Wallingford was thinking about his church's mission strategy.
___"Like most ministers of missions I had my Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and ends of the earth plan," Wallingford explained. "We were doing a lot of local missions and some others that were kind of close, but outside of Longview and we had others in other states and even some international missions projects. But what we didn't have was that intermediate range project, that Samaria project that was about 200 miles away that was close enough for a lot of our people to participate in, but still getting us outside our local area."
___Walllingford shared the need for such a project with Maroney, and the two began to pray that God would show them a city where they could do the multi-faceted type of approach they had used in the Ukraine--"a city we could claim for Christ."
___"Our only criteria was that we be able to find at least one person already there praying, 'Lord, give me my city for Christ,'" Wallingford said.
___Wallingford's pastor, Steve Cochran, also began praying. Then the town of Cameron, where he had served First Baptist Church in the early 1980s as minister of music and youth, came to mind.
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AMONG the activities the churches of Cameron used to take Jesus to the people were home repair projects.
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___"I told John, 'I think our city is Cameron. I know the pastor and I know the town. It's not too big and it's not too small. It's perfect,'" Cochran recalled.
___Cochran said he also knew there were people praying for a movement of God in the community, because he had been part of a men's morning prayer group at its inception 20 years ago. The group was mixed denominationally and its members had changed from time to time over the years, but the group had never ceased to pray.
___As he came to Cameron to make preparations for the mission trip, Wallingford said, he discovered there was not one group praying for God to work there, but many groups of many denominations.
___"As we shared our vision with various groups, we heard over and over, 'This isn't your idea; you're just our answer to prayer.'"
___Macedonia brought 105 people to Cameron for the three days to help in the effort, 57 of those people being adults. Angus Baptist Church in Tulsa, Okla., brought another 27 people. Needless to say, Cameron's motel accommodations are not up to that big of an influx of visitors.
___"We had one guy staying in a pop-up trailer--everyone else stayed in people's homes," Wallingford said. It's estimated that 400 people in Cameron took part in the event.
___The way the community came together will make an impact for a long time, everyone agreed.
___Wallingford said he was at a preparation meeting at a Lutheran church when someone said that if the event was cancelled then, even before it began, Cameron would never be the same.
___"She said, 'We've learned through this that we are not just so many churches, but one in the body of Christ.'"
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