September 10, 2001

EDITORIAL:
Missions offering creates blessings
___Imagine both receiving and giving a special blessing. You can serve God all across Texas, blessing both others and yourself. Envision helping people come to know Jesus-- from the Panhandle to the Gulf Coast, from the Piney Woods of East Texas to the mountains in the west, from the Red River to the Rio Grande, and even beyond our borders.
___You're not just imagining things. Every September, the Baptist General Convention of Texas collects the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas missions. You and your church can join that effort.
___Your offering can:
___ Assist small churches as they conduct Vacation Bible Schools for poor children.
___ Provide scholarship assistance to help mentally disabled adults live in Breckenridge Village, a Baptist home just for them.
___ Help Buckner Baptist Benevolences supply food, clothing, medicine and even housing for people along the Rio Grande.
___ Enable Hispanic Baptist Theological School in San Antonio to train church leaders for Texas' booming Hispanic population.
___ Strengthen Texas Baptists' efforts to start churches so people everywhere in the state can hear the gospel.
___ Pay for training volunteers who minister to victims of violent crime and other traumas.
___ Help fund River Ministry, which supports agricultural missions, health clinics, training centers, children's homes, student missionaries, evangelistic efforts, leadership development and preparation of mission groups on both sides of the Rio Grande.
___ Support Texas Partnerships, which links Texans with mission needs on fields such as Germany, Spain, West Africa and both the Northeastern and Northwestern United States.
___ Underwrite almost 70 other programs and projects that will provide a vast array of ministries throughout Texas.
___The Mary Hill Davis Offering isn't just about ministry programs and mission priorities, although they are vital. It's about people. It places Baptist servants in the lives of people who need the Lord, who often is embodied by a loving touch, a kind word, a bag of food, a reading lesson, a job skill, a worship service.
___The Mary Hill Davis Offering represents Pastor Larry Mills and Buchanan Street Baptist Church in Amarillo. They reach out to adults wrestling with mental illness, provide training for unemployed women, offer hope to recovering alcoholics and meet needs of some of the state's poorest residents. The offering enables Mills and the church to present the presence of Christ in Amarillo.
___It strengthens the ministry of Omar Nicholas and Tercera Iglesia Bautista in Guadalajara, Mexico. It helps fund an informal partnership with Baptists in central Mexico. And the partnership strengthens the ministry of Tercera Bautista, which has started six churches in 11 years in the predominantly Catholic region.
___It helps support the work of Kelli Ballard, Baptist Student Ministry director at Southwest Collegiate Institute of the Deaf in Big Spring. Since she began her ministry there in 1998, almost 60 students have become Christians.
___The offering has helped Mount Rose Missionary Baptist Church and its pastor, Frederick Mattox, transform East Gladys Street in Beaumont from a rough-and-tumble crime center to an area where addicts recover and drug dealers come to faith in Christ.
___It undergirds the church-starting ministry of Calvario Baptist Church in Corpus Christi, where Alicia Tijerina is minister of missions. Calvario has started 31 mission congregations and three multihousing ministries, which reach 1,420 people with the gospel each week.
___It says, "We love you" and "Jesus loves you" to children in Casa Hogar, the only orphanage serving handicapped and special-needs children in northern Mexico. The orphanage receives financial support from the offering, as well as volunteer labor through River Ministry.
___Indirectly, the offering has supplied Primera Iglesia Bautista in Comfort with a pastor by supporting the education of Luis Sura at Hispanic Baptist Theological School in San Antonio. Sura and his classmates by the score are turning Texas toward Christ, and the Mary Hill Davis Offering makes their education possible.
___If the Red River turned to ink and all of Texas were a page, it could not contain all the stories of redemption made possible by the Mary Hill Davis Offering for Texas missions. The goal this year is $5,750,505, and every cent will be used to spread the gospel and extend the kingdom of God.
___The success of the Mary Hill Davis Offering--and the ministries it supports--is up to BGCT churches. It's too vital to drop through the cracks of denominational discord. It's more important than issues that may divide us. So, we face the challenge as a convention, confident of God's blessing and our opportunity.
___ Marv Knox
E-mail the editor at marvknox@baptiststandard.com


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