Ministry awards honor perseverance, empathy & creative care for others

FORT WORTH—The 2008 Texas Baptist Ministry Awards honored a long-tenured small-church pastor, a pioneer in ministry to the mentally disabled and a leader in teaching English to adults.

Baylor University and the Baptist Standard presented the awards during the Friends of Truett Seminary Dinner, held in conjunction with the Baptist General Convention of Texas annual meeting in Fort Worth.

This year’s honorees were Bill Wright, pastor of First Baptist Church in Plains; Joel Pulis, founding pastor/executive director of the Well Community in Dallas; and Robin Feistel of Nacogdoches, longtime English-as-a-Second-Language teacher and author of a new ESL training program.

“Baylor and the Standard present the Texas Baptist Ministry Awards for three important reasons,” Standard Editor Marv Knox explained. “We want to affirm and elevate the ministerial calling. We are blessed to recognize and honor exemplary ministers. And in highlighting those ministers, we also lift up role models for ministry, which can and should be followed by all of us.”

Bill Wright

• Wright, pastor of the Plains congregation since 1992, received the W. Winfred Moore Award for Lifetime Ministry Achievement. Moore was a longtime pastor of First Baptist Church in Amarillo and convention leader who taught at Baylor in retirement.

Wright describes himself as “just a pastor,” Knox told the dinner audience. “But while Texas Baptists who have known Bill Wright through the years would agree with the ‘pastor’ part of his description, they will argue that he’s never been ‘just’ anything.”

Wright was a young businessman in El Paso when God called him to become a pastor 40 years ago. Since then, he has led four small-town churches at one time or another.

First Baptist Church in Plains, where Wright has been pastor since 1992, is known as one of the strongest missions-minded churches of any size anywhere. The church accomplishes so much because Wright’s leadership style convinces laypeople they’re capable of doing anything God asks them to do, Knox said.

The church consistently involves a large percentage of its members in ministries. For example, they provide disaster relief all over the nation, build churches along the Rio Grande, and operate a Wednesday meal program that feeds not only the church, but also most of the poor children and homebound senior adults in their community, about 75 miles southwest of Lubbock. Church members credit Wright and his wife, Linda, as their inspiration.

Before moving to Plains, Wright was pastor of First Baptist churches in Canutillo; Anthony, N.M.; and Gordon. He’s been involved in associational and state Baptist ministries, including River Ministry, the Baptist General Convention of Texas State Missions Commission and the Texas 2000 planning committee.

Wright prepared for ministry at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. The Wrights have three children—Greg and his wife, Debbie; Kay; and Shane and his wife, Julie; and three grandchildren.

Joel Pulis

• Pulis accepted the George W. Truett Award for Ministerial Excellence, which recognizes a Texas Baptist minister for a singular ministry achievement in the recent past. Truett was pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas from 1897 to 1944 and widely recognized as a world Baptist leader.

Pulis launched what became the Well Community in the Oak Cliff neighborhood of Dallas in early 2001. Since then, he has led that ministry, which grew out of Cliff Temple Baptist Church, to become the only faith-based organization in Dallas working to bring recovery services to one of the city’s neediest and most neglected groups—the mentally ill.

The Well focuses on the core issues related to mental illness—isolation, hopelessness, poverty—by providing community members with a healthy environment and access to needed resources. Pulis has compared the Well to a ministry to orphans—psychiatric orphans who have been pushed away by family and spiritual orphans who have trouble fitting into a traditional congregation.

The Well is a church that is about 40 percent Anglo, 40 percent African-American and 15 percent Hispanic, with a sprinkling of Asian, American Indian and other ethnicities. It also is a community development organization, providing resources to neighbors in need—particularly people with bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and other brain dysfunctions.

Pulis grew up in Oak Cliff, and several members of his family have suffered the effects of mental illness. Before he began the Well Community, he served on staff at Cliff Temple Baptist

Church, where he was ordained in August 2000.

He holds an undergraduate degree in sociology from Baylor University, and he has pursued graduate studies at Dallas Baptist University, the Antioch Training School in Waco and Southwestern Seminary.

The Well received the statewide Genesis Award for Innovative Ministry from the Baptist General Convention of Texas in 2004. Last year, the ministry was featured in People magazine.

Both the ministry and its founder have been recognized by the Foundation for Com-munity Empowerment and its Building Capacity/Building Communities program.

Pulis received the Community Support Award from the Dallas chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness in 2005.

He is married to Laura. They have one daughter, Grace.

Robin Feistel

• Feistel took home the Marie Mathis Award for Lay Ministry, which recognizes a Texas Baptist layperson for either recent singular or lifetime ministry achievement. Mathis directed Baylor’s Student Union 25 years and led women’s missionary programs at the state, national and international levels.

Feistel has enabled countless people to speak and read English, and through that association, she has led many of them to faith in Christ.

When the English-as-a-Second-Language program at First Baptist Church in Richardson needed a director, Feistel expanded the ministry. Later, when her family moved to East Texas and their “plan” called for her to get a paying job, she saw another need and devoted almost full time to the ESL program at First Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, at Stephen F. Austin State University and in the community.

When Feistel learned the library at Baylor University’s Center for Literacy needed to be reorganized, she drove to Waco, stayed with a friend and got the job done.

And when she realized the wave of immigration was creating monumental need for trained ESL teachers, Feistel developed Teaching English with Excellence, an innovative training methodology, which was published this year.

“Competent, selfless dedication to the ministry of helping others learn … English is at the core of who Robin Feistel is. No task is too small or price too high to keep her from fulfilling what she knows is her calling by God,” noted Robin Rogers, director of Baylor’s Center for Literacy.

Feistel earned two degrees from Northwestern State Uni-versity and then served five years in China, two as a missionary journeyman and three as a schoolteacher and administrator.

In addition to hands-on ESL work, she has been a literacy missions associate for the Southern Baptist North American Mission Board and trainer/consultant with Liter-acy ConneXus.

She and her husband, Robert, are members of First Baptist Church in Nacog-doches. They have two children, Helen, married to Jason Handlin, and Andrew, married to Katie.