Dear Folks,
This Sunday is CBWC Sunday. A group of churches that began in a preliminary inquiry in 1869 but began with the first service, as we’ve mentioned before in this newsletter, in May of 1873 when Pioneer McDonald began services in Winnipeg. There are now over 700 Baptist churches throughout Western Canada of different types: some a genuine representation of a particular ethnicity, theology, culture or time; some born from the bitter fruits of schism and conflict but most very much attempting, in their own way before God, to honour the resurrected Christ and to practice the life of the Spirit in the communities to which they are called to minister. A little over a quarter of these churches and congregations are part of the CBWC. Many more of them had a relationship or a beginning with this family of churches.
I am celebrating CBWC Sunday with Living Hope Fellowship and Green Hills Christian Fellowship which are multi-cultural churches that reflect Filipino and Korean churches but are very much open to the communities around them. They are also models for many other churches in their youthfulness and sense of purpose and mission.
What follows in today’s newsletter is the story of the many worlds and different layers of the Baptist network we belong to. John Upton is the president of the Baptist World Alliance (BWA) who, along with Neville Callum, provides leadership to over a hundred million Baptists around the world.
We often tell stories about our own family and gathering. I thought it would be important today to share a story of the wider world. Trust you are encouraged and blessed with what follows.
President John Upton at the BWA Executive Committee meeting:
I was visiting with the Baptists in Ghana. Steven Asante, president of the Ghana Baptist Convention, took off a week to travel with me across the country. The majority of our trip was in the Northeastern part of Ghana, in the Yendi region. It is an area that is 87 per cent Muslim. It is also the poorest region of Ghana and an area burdened heavily with malaria.
We traveled each day deep into the bush. Steven said he had never traveled such difficult roads in his life. We were distributing treated mosquito nets to some of the villages in the bush. These were just mud huts with no electricity, no running water, no sanitation, and people with no jobs other than farming yams and abject poverty.
Before we could enter a village we had to visit with the village chief to receive permission to enter his village. All the chiefs are Muslim. We entered one village and visited the chief. We told him what we wanted to do. He gave his permission but he also had a request of us. He asked if we would start a church in his village. When asked about his interest to start a church he said he wanted a church for two reasons. First, Christians, more than any other people he knew, are people full of hope. His people needed hope. Second, Christians are good people and good people have a better future. His people need a future. Would we start a church while we were there? The leadership of the Caribbean Baptist Fellowship (CBF) is committed to effective engagement of God’s mission. However, the level of effectiveness of the mission is reflected in the practice of faith and the level of mission engagement within the local churches of member countries. Would we start a church while we were there? I was very reluctant.
I will never forget: Steven and I standing under a tree singing while people from all over the village came. More than 150 people gathered under the tree with us. He and I, through a translator, shared the basic Gospel in no more than 15 minutes. It was a presentation without all the flare and fluff I normally add. When asked if anyone wanted to accept this Jesus, more than 100 persons raised their hands. We gathered them and from among their midst they identified five who would become their church leaders, three men and two women. We gave each leader a Bible in the local language. Those five have been connected since to a training program where a trainer will travel once a week out to the bush to train the leadership. Steve and I started a church that afternoon and it is doing very well to this day.
There is one other thing I want to tell you about that experience though. After the service a young man pulled on my arm and asked, “How long has this good news of Jesus been known?” I told him about 2,000 years. He said, “Then what took you so long to get here? What of my father and my grandfather, why did you take such a long time to come?”
Good question.
Warmly,
In Christ,
Jeremy