Tony Mathews
Dozens of missionary families gathered for a meeting in South Africa, but missions volunteer Jacquie Collins didn’t see any African American families among them. That struck the heart of Collins, an African American, because she hadn’t considered going overseas herself until a few years ago.
“I never personalized it. I never thought that it was applicable to me,” said Collins, a member of North Garland Baptist Fellowship, a predominantly African American congregation within the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
“I always thought it was somebody else’s responsibility,” Collins recalled. But “it’s not somebody else’s responsibility, it’s all of our responsibility.”
Collins joined the missions team from the North Garland congregation to lead activities for the children of missionaries serving in Africa while the parents met together. This overseas missions experience gave the North Garland team a different view of missions and their role in it — personally and as African Americans.
Prior to this experience Collins said she thought, “I’m an American, and I go to church here [in Garland]. Me witnessing would be to somebody in Wal-Mart, not necessarily in South Africa.”
After her missions trip, her perspective broadened: “God can use whoever He wants to, in whatever situation He wants to, to go wherever He wants to, to do whatever He wants to, so it became more personal for me.
“There’s probably a lot of people like me who made it to 40 and had never gone overseas on any mission trip, had never even considered it,” she said. “But I think the more we share our stories and our experiences and our take-aways from those trips, I think that might encourage more people.”
African Americans are underrepresented on the missions field, Collins realized. Though she did not encounter any African American missionaries at the meeting in Africa in 2012, currently there are six African American couples serving in sub-Saharan Africa through IMB. They are among the 28 African American Southern Baptists serving internationally as full-time missionaries.
But that’s less than 1 percent of IMB missionaries, though African Americans consist of an estimated 6 percent of Southern Baptists, said Keith Jefferson, IMB’s African American missional church strategist.
While commonalities like shared ethnicity can open doors to sharing the Gospel, “African Americans can serve God all around the world, not just in places that have people of African origin,” Jefferson said. “It’s not optional. … It is an obligation; it is a commandment, and no child of God can get around the Great Commission that Jesus gave us — preaching the Gospel to all peoples.”
It wasn’t just Collins who felt like God had lit a fire inside her to tell others, near and far, about Him after experiencing overseas missions. North Garland pastor Tony Mathews says he had “his world rocked” by talking with the missionaries in Africa and hearing the opportunities and challenges of reaching people groups with the Gospel.
“God did something in my life there in Africa,” Mathews recalled. “The Lord began at that moment to break me, to do a work in my life.”
Mathews said he feels called to encourage other pastors and church leaders to “step up” their commitment to missions and make it a personal commitment as well as a corporate one.
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SOURCE: Baptist Press
Kate Gregory
