Missions and Texas Baptists
By Charles Wade
Executive Director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas

Editor’s note: This is the message that Charles Wade presented at the Mainstream Baptist Network Convocation in Birmingham, Alabama in February.

When I began to talk with the folks in Texas about coming to serve as the executive director for Texas Baptists, I really didn’t have any idea about what I was getting into and it wasn’t an easy thing to think about leaving a church that was being one of God’s great gifts to my family and me. I said to my wife this morning, “Honey I think that you are happier than you have ever been. Are you as happy as I think you are?” She laughed, “It’s been three years coming.”

I came here because I owe a dept to you and to leaders like David Currie and Bill Wilson and others that have encouraged me and helped me to hear the drumbeat of the Baptist witness. They have been good examples and friends to me. That is why I could not decline the invitation. I am grateful to David and Bill and those of you in this room that lead in this work of Mainstream Baptists and have given financially.

You have prayed and given your time and strength to this task. I said to the committee as they spoke with me about coming to lead Texas Baptists, “I can’t lead from the past. There are a lot of things that have gone wrong over the past several years. It is easy to camp out where we have been and nurse our hurts. There is no future behind us. I can lead to the future but I can’t do it from the past.”

It is now three years from then and I have had the encouragement and faithfulness from hundreds of Texas Baptists leaders that have believed that the future is where God is calling Texas Baptists and we can’t let the critics define our future. Some of those men and women are in this room. Joy Fenner is here. She was the leader of Texas Baptists WMU for twenty years. She will be coming home after helping us in Tennessee. Keith Parks is here. He came back to Texas where he grew up. We loaned him to the Baptist world for a long time, but we’re glad he’s back.

We brought together a committee to do a missions review and initiative study. We put Keith in charge of the initiative part of it. We reviewed the work that Baptists are doing across the world. We had committees and subcommittees that interviewed and traveled and tried to ascertain the state of Baptist missions.

We were told three years ago that the missionaries would never have to accede to the doctrine. That of course changed last year as the initiative committee had already begun its work. We had already begun to hear a new trumpet. We heard it not from our mission professionals or our staff or the missions service core of Texas, but rather from the local churches.

When we invited the pastors and the congregations to come and visit with the committee that Keith Parks chaired, we heard their stories and listened to their vision. We began to believe that maybe we should stand out of the way because there was an awful lot of mission participation in churches across the country—and we found it in Texas in spades.

In one of those sessions, we had the pastor from the Laotian Baptist Church in Dallas to speak about going back to his home village. Laos is still under Communist authority and the gospel can’t be preached in the churches, but he went back and met a woman with a mangled hand.

He had some medication and doctored her hand. He came back with a vision that he and his congregation would go back to Laos and do medical missions and prepare for what God would do in due time.

A pastor from Boerne, Texas, was in the room and heard that account. He went back to his church and challenged his congregation and now there is a partnership between the two churches. That is a simple illustration, but it happened over and over again. At one point Phil Strickland suggested that maybe we should get out of the way, but the people said, “No! We need help.”

So we began to look for ways to help network the churches, to help link mission passion with mission opportunity. Out of this search came the idea that we are calling the World Missions Network. It is being done everywhere and we believe that we have caught the wave of the future. We are challenging people to get on the wave.

Some years ago in my church in Arlington as we began our missions Arlington emphasis, Tilly Bergan came to be our mission’s minister with the help of the Mary Hill Davis offering and the Cooperative program of the BGCT.

They paid 2/3 of her salary the first year, 1/2 the second year, 1/3 the third year, and the church has been paying it ever since. It was a partnership. Texas Baptist Churches gave and our church was one of the key missions churches to receive help.

She and her husband had been missionaries in Korea. They came back for medical reasons for their children. She finally became convicted that if God could use her as a missionary in Korea, why not in Arlington.

This passion burned in her, but we did not know how to make it work. We tried to talk to her about being our single adult minister. If we had called her as our single adult minister we would have had the largest single adult ministry around.

That was not the will of God. He was reserving her to be the leader of the mission effort in our community. Last Sunday in over 250 locations our people and others led Bible studies. Many of them had been won to Christ through these efforts. Over 300 people were in Bible study.

We wondered what to call these locations. We had a name I.S.U. that stood for Indigent Satellite Units. Then we called them missions and then congregations. They are small but most Baptists churches have less than 100 people on Sunday morning.

You don’t have to be big to have church. One day we were talking about what we should call them. She said, “Call them anything you want to, but don’t tell them. They think they are a church.”

At the first, I was baptizing all those Christ won. One day a girl was saved who had a terrible experience in her life and she wanted the Bible study leader to lead her in baptism. Her Bible study leader, her pastor, was a woman who was a student at Southwestern. So we went to the deacons to talk to them.

I believe that churches ought to baptize and authorize it. It was a strange idea, a woman baptizing. Finally after some discussion, Derek Impinga stood up. Derek was a product of the mission field in Zimbabwe and a deacon in our church. He stood and said, “I’m confused by this conversation. In my country Southern Baptist women baptize my people. Why are my people any different than your people?” That ended the discussion. We learned something in all that. The world is too lost and too broken for us to tell people what they can’t do.

When God has called and equipped someone to minister in his name we need to clear as much ground and give him or her as much traction as they can get and see what God can do in their life. After all of our effort we brought our report to the people of the convention and it was adopted.

We just completed naming the first 32- member World Mission Board. Justice Anderson will serve as the chair. Albert Reyes, the president of the Hispanic Baptist Theological School, will serve as the vice chair.

Keith Parks will be on the board. We have Texas Baptist men and women serving on the board. 25% of the board will be made up of minority leaders. I cannot tell you how excited I am. Everyone was interviewed personally just like interviewing deacons. Everyone was interviewed and checked out.

This is serious and it is a moment in time that we will be able to look back and say, “God blessed the willingness of Texas Baptists.” Let us see how much mission passion we can release. Let us see how much mission energy we can turn loose. Let us see how much enthusiasm we can encourage. That is our spirit!

I have learned something over the years. You cannot buy passion. You can pay someone as much money as they think they need and if they don’t have a passion for it, it won’t get done. When you find someone that God has touched and put a fire in their bones, they will do it whether they are paid or not. They are called and they will not quit or stop. They will go until Jesus comes. Help them out. See what God can do with them.

Fred Loper and Jim Williams are here. They lead the Baptist Medical and Dental Fellowship. They came to Texas and we sat down and discussed how to harness the skills, heart, and passion of medical and dental personnel across America. We made a commitment to fund this endeavor together.

If you want a mission project to partner with this is one example. This is a way in which networking links people together so that the mission passion can be released. Do you hear the words connecting, encouraging, sharing, improving, and communicating?

We have people that do not even know that Texas has Baptist churches working in Mexico and that other churches are working a few miles away. We are going to create a strategic way of talking, planning, and sharing our successes.

We will be able to learn from the mistakes others have already made. I think that most wonderful part of this plan is that we are going to listen a lot. We are going to have a mission advisory board. We are going to invite people from all over the country and the world to come and speak about the mission needs and strategy. We are going to listen and learn.

We just started a partnership in Mexico. Our Hispanic Convention is an old convention. It used to be called the Mexican Baptist Convention of Texas. About 40 years ago, we were able to come together and work together but there is still a Mexican Convention. They began to dream about how they could be involved in missions and encourage their churches. They began an outreach towards Mexico.

At the same time God was putting that in my heart. I didn’t know what they were going to do. When I announced my plans, I had to back up and make sure that everyone knew that they had led the way. Now we have a partnership with Mexico. It is not a 5-year partnership. It is a partnership until the Lord comes back.

As far as I know Texas and Mexico are going to be joined at the river forever. There are 100 million people in Mexico. There are 22 million people in Texas. Studies say that by 2030 there will be 35 million people living within fifty miles of that river. We have had a river ministry for twenty years. My thought was why could we not take that passion and push down towards Mexico?

Then I found out some of the churches were already doing it. They are not sitting around waiting for an idea. They are doing it. We went down and spent time with the Mexican Baptist leaders to find out what their dreams and desires were. Then we appointed Joe Bruce, Jimmy Garcia, Dexton Shores, and Carolyn Porterfield as our representatives. Those four people are our coordinating committee working with their counterparts in Mexico. We are going to do great things together.

They want to start 10,000 churches in ten years in Mexico. We have a man who has been building relationships with the Mexican brethren. He is a Dominican. God has put a passion in his heart awakened by David Gale who was one of our church-starting people. He starts churches and trains laymen how to start churches. He has a program where he goes to the pastors and tells them how to teach their people how to start churches.

He can help anyone start churches. A man donated a house in Crested Butte. If you have 2 million dollars we will talk to you. All of this money is to be used to help start churches along the Texas-Mexico border.

When you dream a dream God brings people in to help you with it. People are looking for something to put their money in. We are always worried about money but if you dream the dream and lay out the idea God will bring people to help you do it. What does this have to do with you?

Our mission network is not just for Texas Baptists. If you need a network to help you there are lots of opportunities and we are not the only way. Several members of our board serve with CBF and are actively involved in the global mission effort. That is a wonderful place for Mainstream churches to cooperate together for missions.

We are going to network with Global Missions. We are going to network with Virginia Baptists. We are going to work with anyone who wants to work with us. We are trying to start Baptist churches and that is without apology. That is who we are and that is what we are about. We are trying to help Baptist churches start missions.

It is not about telling people what they cannot do. It is about helping people do what God has put on their heart. That is the key point. You are welcome to be a part of it. We have room to add new members. Our board can be made up of 25% of persons outside of Texas. If you want to be a part of it, start working with us. This is not just for Texas this is the World Mission Network.

I have this feeling, the same one, as when we started Mission Arlington. I could not quite see it. We started out with a dream that wasn’t quite big enough. We were faithful to that dream and God has used it. The power of Mission Arlington is not in the example I gave earlier, but churches that have come from all over America to watch and see what Tilly Bergan and her people are doing in their community for Christ. They have ministries to the homeless, hungry, and those that need medical care. It is a powerful expression of the presence of Christ and I feel that way about this new program.

I think we are on the verge of something that will call us to a mission vision that will set people free in ways that we could never imagine. I want to end by telling you why I think Texas Baptists have come to dream this. I have read our history. If you were to read your state’s history, you would find similar things. In 1936, we consolidated the language and put it into our purpose statement.

I was executive director for two years before I read the constitution. Constitutions are not very inspiring, but the purpose statement was profound. “The object of this body shall be to stimulate among the churches the greatest possible activity in evangelism, missions, Christian education, and benevolent work and enterprises. To cultivate closer cooperation among the churches, to promote harmony of feeling and concert of action in advancing all the interests of the redeemers kingdom.” That is big enough for the world.

It is my deepest conviction that we ought to do evangelism, ministry, and missions the way Jesus did. The only thing that will change this world is Jesus. We are to be the presence of Christ in the world. That is in our mission statement. We want our mission efforts to be incarnational. We want people to have a sense that Jesus is not far away.

One day four men brought a friend to Jesus. Jesus was preaching in his house in Capernaum. The place was packed. There was no more room. All of a sudden Jesus hears the roof caving in. It is his house, but he kept preaching. The friends let the man down through the roof and Jesus seeing their faith said, “Your sins are forgiven.” They said, “What do you mean? We brought him here so he could walk.” The people watching said, “Only God can forgive sins.” Jesus sensing all that was happening said, “So you will believe I can forgive his sins, arise and walk.” The man arose and walked praising God. I don’t know who fixed the roof. No one cares.

The world is a broken place and we will each pick up a part of it we can bring people to Jesus. We are going to pick up part of it and welcome you to help. We will help you too. If God is doing something in your network we want to know. We are not going to quit. We are not going to listen to those that say, “You cannot do that.” Sure we can.

April 2003