Htoo Lay Dwe (too-lay-dwee) started several churches in his native Burma. Later soldiers who persecute the Karen people burned the churches and the 37 villages from which they drew their members, including Dwe’s house and everything he owned.

He became a refugee, and landed in New Bern where there is a significant community of Karen refugees. He began attending Temple Baptist Church and before long had established a worship service and then a Sunday School class for the local Karen. Temple brought him on staff as the Karen pastor and the church meets in Temple facilities.

You helped get the new Karen church started with your gifts through the North Carolina Missions Offering (NCMO). Karen church members support the offering because they know it was a missionary who brought them the news of Jesus.

Shelton Daniel at Greater Joy Baptist Church in Rocky Mount considers his to be a ministry of restoration, working among those who have fallen on hard times and who feel forgotten by God and their fellow man.

With help from the Baptist State Convention and from the NCMO, Greater Joy has grown from 12 to 850 in two years. It actively gives people a hand up and shares the love of Christ.

As you consider your gift to the NCMO, remember that your dollars carry representatives of Jesus to places no one else goes. Most ministries of the Baptist State Convention are funded through your gifts through the Cooperative Program. The NCMO extends and expands the ability of servants to serve.

Dwe is serving in the face of life-threatening cancer. He trusts God completely to heal him — either in this life or the next — and is not seeking medical solutions. Far from the reach of those who would take his life in Burma, he is willingly laying it down for Christ in New Bern. 

Messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) in June approved the Great Commission Resurgence (GCR) Task Force report, only hoping it could gain traction.

Nothing says the GCR has found its legs like the election of Kevin Ezell as president of the North American Mission Board (NAMB) in a special called meeting Sept. 14. For fans of the GCR that is great news; for doubters it signals a more disconcerting trend.

Ezell, pastor of a fast growing church with satellite campuses and partnerships with church plants in major cities outside of Louisville, has been described in discussions leading to his election only as a godly man of high integrity and Christian character who possesses vision, energy and commitment to evangelize North America.

Several denominational executives, most visibly David Hankins from the Louisiana Baptist Convention, affirmed that character, but noted that Ezell’s church meagerly supported the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering and the Cooperative Program that undergird NAMB, the work of Baptist state conventions, and the Southern Baptist Convention.

Why elect a man to lead an important missions organization for which he has demonstrated little support previously, they asked. Here is where the GCR legs start to churn and its toenails get a grip.

In a statement to his church responding to the questions of his suitability for the NAMB post, he said the NAMB search committee, on which sat GCR task force member Ted Traylor, considered Highview’s direct funding of missions an asset rather than a liability.

One of Highview’s members is Al Mohler, who drafted the GCR task force report. A pastor of one of Highview’s satellite campuses is Jonathan Akin, leader of the young Baptist group B21 and son of Danny Akin, also a GCR Task Force member whose “Axioms” address at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary lit the match for the GCR. Former SBC President Johnny Hunt who named the task force has said if denominational processes don’t change, the SBC would lose people like him.

Denominational leaders long accustomed to having their voices count challenged Ezell’s nomination but their protest amounted to little more than a pot stirring behind closed doors at the NAMB meeting. Ezell answered the questions with enough sincerity and transparency to satisfy 37 of the 49 voters.

North Carolina’s trustees on the NAMB board said Ezell’s election is a direct reflection of the GCR and a step toward fulfilling its goals. That must mean the new president of NAMB strikes a positive chord when he models mission funding that sidesteps denominational channels because he finds it more effective. That must mean such action was preferred by the search committee looking for a man who will be “unConventional.” 

Was the search committee saying it did not want a man satisfied to massage the current relationships; to energize the current structures; to do what we’ve been doing only do it more, better, faster? Um, yeah.

Ezell, who called his critics “bloggers who live with their mother and wear a housecoat during the day,” was brought in because he will do things differently. He will need a little more diplomacy than the blogger comment shows, because criticism is sure to come as he goes sacred cow tipping in the SBC pasture.

Todd Garren, NAMB trustee and pastor of Piney Grove Baptist Church in South Fork Association, said Ezell should not be called a maverick or an independent just because he felt it was more effective to directly fund missions and contribute little per capita to denominational efforts.

Garren and Bruce Franklin of New Sandy Creek Baptist Church in Henderson, implied sea change is coming in a new way of doing things in the SBC, courtesy of the GCR.

“What’s happening is going to be good for the Kingdom,” Garren said. “Will it be good for those who work at NAMB or at the International Mission Board under the former model? Maybe not so much.”

Just a word of reminder as GCR finds its legs. Component No. 2 of the task force report says, “If we are to grow together and work together in faithfulness to the command of Christ, we must establish a culture of trust, transparency, and truth among all Southern Baptists.”

Ezell must establish an atmosphere of trust with state conventions with whom NAMB will do much of its work and with churches, which he will ask to support NAMB at a level he did not demonstrate.

He faces an enormous task, but he is not alone. The GCR leadership cadre is fully in his court, and he appears to have the skills and spirit to win over the doubters. As the task ahead is large and worthy, God bless him.      

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Each North Carolina Baptist college was invited to submit an article for a feature package in the Sept. 11 issue of the Biblical Recorder. Scroll to bottom to find links to all the stories.)  

I attended a Baptist college because that’s where my friend was going, and the school offered a journalism degree. Those probably are not great reasons, but they were mine and it was a decision that shaped my life ever since.

No way around it, college shapes lives. Young people are at a curious, exciting, inquisitive, vulnerable, experimental, preparatory period. Professors teach knowing they can reach into that maelstrom and shape lives.

Knowing that, where do you want the life of your student to be shaped?

What potters do you want at the wheel, molding and influencing your student? I’m not talking about insulating and protecting your student from “evil influences” of academic investigation, or even from fellow students with negative lifestyles. You as parents need to be preparing your children to face those issues from their earliest years.

But in the fulcrum of academic investigation, in the formation of worldview, in the frizzy context of connecting the dots between the Lord, life and learning the Christian faculty and staff at your North Carolina Baptist colleges can guide your student in a way he or she will not receive at public schools. Their concern is for life, not just the next grading period.

At North Carolina Baptist schools you will find full professors in classrooms small enough that they know students’ names.

They may share tables in the cafeteria. I was in professors’ homes as a student for special study periods and events.

Chowan, Campbell, Mars Hill, Wingate and Gardner-Webb are thriving in a difficult social and economic context, evidence of commitment to their mission. Their price tag is typically higher than you can find at a nearby public university, but so is their ability to help with scholarships to defray expenses. Don’t dismiss them because you assume they are out of your price range. They cannot be out of the price range of typical Baptists or they would be out of business, because students from North Carolina Baptist churches are their bread and butter.

The five schools did North Carolina Baptists a huge favor a few years ago when they offered to give up their Cooperative Program support in exchange for the right to select their own trustees. They believed if trusted with the privilege to cultivate and name to their board Christian friends who might not be Baptist and alumni who have moved out of state, they could replace the mission funds they would lose and gain access to a broader base of leadership and resources. That move has proven advantageous for both the schools and the Baptist State Convention, which continues to experience decreasing gifts from churches.

They are still our North Carolina Baptist schools. They claim and cherish their Baptist identity and covet students from North Carolina Baptist churches. They merit serious consideration by any North Carolina college bound student.  

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A father and son walked along the beach following a vicious storm that washed thousands of starfish onto the sand, where they would die in the summer sun. As the son bent to fling first one, then another starfish back into the sea, his father said, “Son, I appreciate your efforts, but you’ll never make a difference to all the starfish stranded on the beach.”

Bending yet again and tossing another starfish to the safety of the water, the boy told his father, “I’m making all the difference for this one.”

As North Carolina Baptists travel team by team to Haiti, a disaster before the Jan. 12 earthquake that drove the desperate nation to its knees, the weekly question of volunteers has to be, “What difference are we making?”

North Carolina Baptists, organized by N.C. Baptist Men disaster relief efforts, have responded to the immediate need. They’ve beat a steady path to Haiti, staying in a compound about 15 miles north of Port-au-Prince and they work in communities outward from there, holding medical clinics in tent cities, villages and orphanages. Construction crews can build 20-25 prefab, tarp wrapped shelters in a week.

Medical teams no longer face the massive amount of blunt injuries and broken limbs they saw immediately after the quake.  Instead they treat skin infections, tropical diseases, hypertension, worms, burns and things more typical of a regular medical practice in the area — if there was a regular medical practice. When volunteers are not available, Haitian doctors make the rounds, but they can see far fewer patients in a day than can a volunteer team.

Without the Haitian teams employed with funds from Haiti relief giving, and volunteers, there would be no medical care in the tent cities and villages these teams attend. What care will there be when Baptist efforts in Haiti wind down, as they are anticipated to do in August of next year?

The 12 x 12 shelters are temporary, with a life expectancy of two years. The framework is treated 2x4s, which could provide the structural underpinnings of a more permanent shelter, should the owner be able to scrounge up some siding to replace the tarp.

Samaritan’s Purse, which designed the shelters and is building the frames in two large fabrication stations on the island, is nearing its goal of erecting 10,000 of them with its partners, such as N.C. Baptist Men. Already villagers in Titanyen, where North Carolina volunteers are concentrating, are getting nervous as they sense construction crews getting ready to move on to another town.

How would you feel if you were on the list to get a shelter, but you didn’t make it to the top of the list before the construction crew moved on to another village?

As N.C. Baptist Men’s onsite coordinator Scott Daughtry says, Haiti was a disaster that had one.

“Recovery” in Haiti would be restoration to a state of affairs unacceptable to any North Carolina Baptist, but one in which Haitian Christians have learned to survive and even thrive.

The only sign of a government infrastructure operating for the benefit of its people that I saw during a week in Haiti was a sanitation truck emptying the port-a-johns that lined an emergency tent city that occupied a central park in the city; a functioning stop and go light, and a policeman standing in the street with the potential to direct traffic, should the mood strike him.

What difference can volunteers make in Haiti? Three thousand volunteer agencies are working there now, without coordination.

It is a hard saying, but they will make no difference in Haiti, the nation.

But they will make all the difference to each Haitian they touch with medicine, with shelter and with an introduction to Jesus Christ.

(EDITOR’S NOTE — Jameson wrote about his experience while in Haiti. Follow his daily blog by reading the first entry.)


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