Not all missionaries are Baptist, but all Baptists should be missionaries, speakers maintain

FORT WORTH—The call to engage in missions is not a distinctively Baptist belief, but devotion to Baptist principles should produce a commitment to missions, ethics professor Bill Tillman told a Texas Baptist workshop.

“You implement those distinctives, and you will go and tell,” he said. “There’s a responsibility on each of us to go and tell.”

Tillman, professor of ethics at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon School of Theology , and Steve Vernon, Baptist General Convention of Texas associate executive director, discussed Baptist heritage and history in missions, as well as current opportunities to cooperate in missions with other Baptist churches through the BGCT. 

Tillman made a distinction between “mission” and “missions,” saying the former indicated God’s charge to all believers, while the latter refers to the working out of that plan—the practical picture of carrying out God’s mission for Christians.

Mission is “essentially … what God has said and done in human history, and what humans are supposed to do in response to that,” Tillman said.

At the workshop, WorldconneX representatives led participants in a demonstration that illustrated proportions of how resources are used to support missions throughout the world. Nametags and props assigned people into groups of “reached” or “unreached” groups throughout the world, and the representatives discussed statistics about imbalanced use of re-sources to reach people without access to the gospel.

For example, eight out of 10 missionaries go to “reached” countries, and a good number of those missionaries go to predominantly Christian locations.

In response to this knowledge, Texas Baptists need to cooperate and focus various Baptist missions efforts to make them more effective, Vernon said.

“Missions is not what we do; it’s who we are,” he said. “It defines us.”