January 7, 2002

NEVER TOO OLD: Senior adults on mission
___By George Henson
___Staff Writer
___"You don't have to sit in a rocking chair just because you are a senior."
___Many retired Texas Baptists obviously agree with Geraldine Beavers of First Baptist Church in Duncanville, since more are becoming vitally involved in international missions endeavors.
___Most of these volunteers became active missions volunteers only in their retirement years. Beavers, for example, made her first trip two years ago

BARBETTA GANZER proudly displays a painting by one of her former students in China.

at age 69 when she went to Brazil.
___Barbetta Ganzer of Denton made her first missions excursion to China in 1990 and just recently returned from another tour of service at age 72.
___Clarence Griffith of Dallas has traveled to 13 countries on five continents during his 30 mission trips. He didn't make the first one until he was 72.
___Griffith owned an electrical business in Dallas for 50 years before retiring. Now he uses his skills as an electrician to wire church buildings, hospitals and orphanages around the world.
___"Some folks will say, 'At your age, why do you keep going over there?'" the 88-year-old said. "At my age, why not keep going? Many times I feel closer to heaven there than I do here."
___Prior to beginning his mission work, Griffith had not been a world traveler; his only trips outside the United States were two excursions to the Holy Land for vacation. "I didn't even know people did things like this," he said. "I wish I had known about it; I would have gone earlier."
___A tour of Cuba after the 1955 Southern Baptist Convention in Miami, Fla., was Beavers' only world travel before she went to Brazil to share the gospel in 1999, followed this year by a trip to Panama.
___As a young woman, Ganzer dedicated herself to Christian ministry, but marriage put those plans on hold until she made her trip to China 11 years ago. She has made many return trips and has accumulated almost six years with the people she has grown to love.
___Beaver's interest in volunteer missions was sparked by meeting a senior adult missionary couple at a church event.
___"I was sitting back there, and they brought in this couple to speak, and they were my age. I thought, 'If they can do that, I can too,'" she recalled.
___What has kept her active in missions, however, is the people she has met.
___"It gives you a desire to do more than just go to church and maybe teach a lesson and fellowship," Beavers said. "When you see people so enthused that you have come to tell them about Jesus, it just makes you feel good."
___While in Panama, she stayed with a family and developed a relationship with the children of the household. "A young boy in Panama now claims me as his adoptive grandmother," she said.
___While she has made two trips to South America, it is not because she knows Spanish. The Alabama belle said the fact that a woman of her age has traveled so far gives her a platform to be heard in ways younger people might not have.
___Ganzer also has been lured back to China so many times because of the people she has met.
___An art teacher in Denton for 23 years, most of her work in China has been as an English teacher. She has been careful to honor the country's laws against proselytizing, but that has not hampered her ability to share her faith in God, she said.
___In the course of teaching English, she shared with her class a list of 100 books that, if read and understood, could make a person as well educated as someone with a bachelor's degree. On that list was the Bible.
___"I told them this was a very special book. After class, a young man asked me if I had any of those special books; he really wanted one," she said.
___Five years later, she met a couple in Hong Kong at a convention. They had met the young man, and he had asked them to tell her that the special book had changed his life and he had become a Christian.
___Events like this keep her going back for more.
___"I've wanted to get back and work with these kids who are going to be the future of China and haven't had the opportunity to know God," she said.
___Ganzer has spent so much time in China that she has made friends with the local officials in the places she lived. While she was not allowed to talk about her faith in Christ, it was so apparent that local government officials in some of those cities provided her a car so she could attend Christian services.
___Her students gave her a name badge written in Chinese script. It read: "Lover of the Chinese people."
___"If you're looking to be blessed, the thing to do is to go and work with college-aged people," she said. "I'm so grateful to just have the opportunity to rub elbows with them."
___Griffith has met people the world over in 16 years of helping wire buildings in South Africa, Kenya, Lithuania, Romania, Kyrgistan, Wales, Germany, England, the Philippines, Peru, Panama, Barbados, Russia and Brazil. He has traveled to many of those countries more than once, including eight trips to Brazil, where much of his time has been spent working on orphanages.
___Griffith cannot choose which place he enjoyed most, he said. It might be the work on the orphanages, or it might be wiring a hospital in Kenya where babies had been delivered for years without water or electricity. It might have been wiring the African clinic so workers there could begin refrigerating vaccines. Maybe it was in Lithuania, where he saw the witness of a family who moved out of their home and into the barn so the team building their community a church could have a place to stay.
___"I love them all," he said. "Everywhere I go, I meet people who love the Lord. Most of the time they seem to love the Lord, or at least witnessing, more than people in the United States."
___Griffith, a member of Gaston Oaks Baptist Church in Dallas who still goes up a ladder like a squirrel, said he would encourage everyone who is able to become involved in missions.
___"It will change their lives to go to some of these foreign countries and see how these people long for Jesus Christ and have no place to worship," he said.
___And despite what some people might think, age is not a barrier to effective service.
___Griffith works with one multi-age group of volunteers that includes many retirees. When they arrived at one Eastern European work site, he noticed the pastor's face read disappointment when he saw the number of senior adults who had come.
___Within a few days, however, the pastor was a believer in their abilities.
___"I went up and said, 'When you saw all us old people, you didn't know whether you should have met us with a bus or an ambulance and paramedics, did you?'" Griffith explained. "He said I was right, but after seeing us work for just a few minutes he knew it was going to work out just fine."
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