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Illinois commits to Texas aid

ib2newseditor —  September 25, 2017

Massive Florida storm stretches Baptist response

FBC Galatia flood recovery volunteers do mud-out work on a house in Vidor, Texas, near Beaumont.

FBC Galatia flood recovery volunteers do mud-out work on a house in Vidor, Texas, near Beaumont. They’re working with eight other teams from several states on a list of 200 area homes that continues to grow. Facebook photo courtesy Butch & Debbie Porter

Illinois Baptist Disaster Relief (IBDR) continues its marathon response in Texas doing flood recovery work in homes drying out after Hurricane Harvey, providing shower and laundry facilities, and preparing hot meals for relief workers and displaced Texans. And a team of childcare volunteers traveled more than a thousand miles to wipe tears away when the response began in early September.

No sooner had the work in Texas ramped up for IBDR when Hurricane Irma swept through Florida. Many wondered if teams would be deployed to the east. Dwayne Doyle, IBDR state director, notified volunteers, “We have made the decision to focus our ongoing work in Texas as a partner with the Southern Baptist Texas Convention Disaster Relief. Many of the Southeastern state Disaster Relief units are leaving Texas to go work with Hurricane Irma victims in Florida.

“We will continue to focus our efforts in Texas because this is where we have identified a specific and strategic need that IBDR can meet.”

Kevin Ezell, president of the North American Mission Board, noted state Disaster Relief organizations have done “an absolutely incredible job” since the landfall of Harvey in Texas on Aug. 25, followed by Irma in Florida on Sept. 10.

“It’s going to be a long-term response in both places and we need help in the months to come….We have a desperate need for more volunteers in Florida and in Texas,” he said.
Mini Disaster Relief training events were hot tickets in Illinois in September. Nine were held across the state, where at least 150 people received flood recovery training.

Jan Kragness

Jan Kragness at the Dallas Convention Center. Facebook photo courtesy Kragness.

Help for hurting families
IBDR Chaplain Jan Kragness served on the 10-person childcare team that deployed to the Dallas Convention Center to work with some 2,500 Houston-area evacuees housed there. She shared glimpses of her experience on Facebook. On Sept. 2 Kragness shared, “It was a hard day. Many people were rescued by boat day before yesterday. They were brought in at 1:30 a.m. The children and parents were sad and tired. My arms were tired.”

Kragness told the story of one family with three young children. The younger brother “was so unhappy, he could not stand the separation anxiety of being away from Mommy. His 5-year-old sister came into his group area, and held him for comfort. He was almost as big as she was.”

Kragness took the younger brother and sister to their mother. “She loved on the children and tried explaining that she had to get the sister registered for school and there was a long line. But she would be back for them. The mommy looked exhausted.”

That was when the woman told Kragness what had happened. “She explained to me that their home had been broken into and the children assaulted and that was part of the separation anxiety. We had prayer with the mother…So when I took the children back to the childcare area, they were more comfortable but would not integrate with the others and could not let go of me.”

About an hour later, the older brother came to check on his siblings. He told Kragness, “Miss Jan, we’ve got trouble at our house. Big trouble.” She told him, “Well, if you would like to talk about it, I would be glad to listen.”

He shared, “Our house was broken into by a bad man. He knocked down my brother, and hurt my sister. Mommy is scared and Daddy is mad. Our house is scary and we have trouble.”

Kragness said, “I am so glad you shared with me. And I am so glad you are safe now. There really are lots of people who are watching over you, but the greatest of all is Jesus. Shall we pray and ask Jesus to care for you and your family and keep you safe?”

“Yes, please pray to Jesus for me,” he said.

She assured him Jesus was listening to him anytime and everywhere. He prayed, “Jesus, please keep my little brother and my sister safe and help Mommy and Daddy to not be so worried.”

Kragness wrote, “He looked so relieved. He hugged me and ran off to play football. My heart ached to follow him and hold him close. But I knew Jesus had that job handled.”

The response continues
More IBDR teams are on their way to Texas. Volunteers trained in mass feeding, shower/laundry, and flood recovery are needed. If you can go with one of these teams, contact the team leader:

September 26 – October 8
Unit # IL RC 005 – Greater Wabash Baptist Association
Team Leader: Donald Ile
Phone: (618) 599-4234
E-Mail: donruthsawdust@gmail.com

October 2-8
Unit #IL25 – Sullivan Baptist Church
Team Leader: Don Lusk
Phone: (217) 232-8880
E-Mail: pastordon@sullivansbc.org

October 7-15
Unit #27 – Harrisburg First Baptist Church.
Team Leader: Joe Jackson
Cell: (618) 841-5015
E-Mail: joeluj@frontier.com

Teams that have already served in the Beaumont area include:

– A 26-person mobile kitchen team based out of Living Faith Baptist in Sherman which prepared nearly 41,000 meals, along with Incident Command leadership and shower/laundry trailers from both Franklin and Macoupin Associations. It was mobilized with volunteers from across the state.
– A flood recovery team with members from central and Metro East Illinois.
– A team from FBC Galatia with members trained in flood recovery, mass feeding, and shower/laundry trailers.

To learn more about the callouts, training, and how to donate, visit IBSA.org/DR.

– Lisa Misner Sergent, with additional reporting by Baptist Press

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Feeding the family

ib2newseditor —  June 29, 2017

‘Generational discipleship’ sets the table for a new approach to family ministry.

Pizza

The fraction 1/168 is a tiny number. It’s hard to grasp what 1/168 of a pie or a pizza even looks like. The pizza would be a super-skinny slice with a smidgeon of sauce and a partial pepperoni. Certainly not enough to satisfy.

“The denominator in the fraction stands for the number of hours in a week,” said Ron Hunter, author of The DNA of D6: Building Blocks of Generational Discipleship. There are 168 hours in a week. “The scary part is what the numerator represents: the average number a student spends engaged in church-related discipleship each week.” In other words, one hour.

Hunter shared this example during the D6 Connect Tour held at First Baptist Church Bethalto on May 24, one of five stops made on the tour.

The 1/168 figure comes from thirty minutes of small group time combined with thirty minutes of a sermon-type message from a pastor or youth pastor. D6—a movement intentional about empowering parents, homes, marriages, leaders and churches to live out the story of Deuteronomy 6—uses this fraction to make the point that time spent in church is not enough time to truly make disciples as Jesus instructed.

A new way to slice it: Families have their kids 168 hours a week. The church has them only one, maybe two. How can churches help parents disciple their own children, rather than outsourcing it to the youth pastor or Sunday school teacher? This movement returns responsibility to the home, with a new kind of help from the church.

Small group ministries are the primary means of discipleship among most churches. This Scripture shows that God’s design for the family is the original small group. Discipleship begins and is sustained at home.

“Generational discipleship means pastors and church leaders are doing less ministry, and are pouring their time and effort into helping others do more ministry… particularly in their own homes,” Hunter said.

That means youth pastors and children’s pastors need to be spending a third of their time or more mentoring the parents of these young people and not just the young people themselves. The church can equip parents to best launch their kids into adulthood as Christ followers.

“Ministers need to de-emphasize themselves as the spiritual leader and be intentional about how they can set mom and dad up for wins,” Hunter said. “The question we ask is ‘What would it look like if our church went home?’”

A better plan
The family unit is God’s intended launching pad for new adults. That means painful conversations and hard lessons will occur during childhood and especially during the adolescent years. Hunter said giving parents tools and guiding them away from delegating these conversations is crucial.

“Deuteronomy’s generation discipleship is not just about the next generation, it’s about every generation working together,” he said.

That means taking a critical look at how church is conducted on a weekly basis. Is the church equipping the saints with the right end game in mind?

“I’ve had the chance to sit down in a number of church staff meetings and 95% of the time is spent talking about church services and how the next Sunday will go,” Hunter said. “Discipleship is not an event to plan or a small group strategy: it’s a way of life.”

“Listen, Israel: The Lord our God,
the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God
with all your heart, with all your soul,
and with all your strength.
These words that I am giving you
today are to be in your heart. Repeat them
to your children. Talk about them when you
sit in your house and when you
walk along the road, when you lie down
and when you get up.”
– Deuteronomy 6:4-7 (CSB)

Generations and gaps
For decades, the church has lost the majority of its children who have grown up in Christian homes. Teenagers get their driver’s licenses and basically drive away from the church.

As the church recognizes that home is the vehicle for imparting faith to the next generation, leaders of the D6 ministry contend parents must begin to own the fact that they are the primary disciplers of their own children.

“Our goal is to revamp the way we do curriculum and create connection points for conversation,” said Brandon Roysden, D6 conference coordinator. “We want to take the philosophy of Deuteronomy 6 and provide a practical way for parents and churches to implement it.”

But how does the church come alongside the child who doesn’t have a support system at home? Brian Housman, executive director of 360 Family Conference and author of several parenting books including Tech Savvy Parenting, said the church should not negate the importance of family-centered discipleship because of the brokenness of sin.

“The church must fill the gap and find a way to partner with that single mom or that grandparent who is raising their grandkids,” he said. “We’ve done a great job of dividing ourselves into different age-appropriate ministries and its time to open the doors and invite each other in. Instead of children’s events and youth events, have family events and family service projects where everyone participates. Let’s all come together and do this thing together.”

No one is meant to be lone rangers when it comes to the support and encouragement of their families, he concluded.

“We are supposed to love and encourage others and others are supposed to love and encourage us. It’s supposed to be a big circle,” said Leneita Fix, author, speaker and missions/training coordinator for BowDown Church and Urban Youth Impact in West Palm Beach, Florida. “We have a young man on our track team and his father was diagnosed with stage four cancer. We asked what we can do to help and the best way we’ve found is to literally run alongside him this summer as he continues his training. It’s volunteering our unique gifts and talents that make the church the church. It’s not programmatic, it’s helping your congregation notice the people around them and love them well.”

For more information on D6 conferences, visit d6family.com.

Kayla Rinker is a freelance writer living in Park Hills, Mo. where she serves alongside her husband, Josh, who is youth pastor at First Baptist Church Desloge. Kayla is also a stay-at-home mom to their four sons, keeping her life full of craziness and joy.

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Briefing: Pro-family champion Phyllis Schlafly dies, missionary arrested under Russian anti-evangelism law

ib2newseditor —  September 6, 2016

The BriefingPhyllis Schlafly, ‘Founding mother’ of the modern conservative movement, dies at 92
Phyllis Schlafly, best known for her tireless work to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, has died at the age of 92. “Phyllis Schlafly courageously and single-handedly took on the issue of the Equal Rights Amendment when no one else in the country was opposing it,” said James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family. “In so doing, she essentially launched the pro-family, pro-life movement.”

SBC leaders grieve court’s expansion of parenthood
The decision by New York’s highest court to expand custody and visitation rights to “de facto parents” serves as evidence same-sex marriage advocates desire to overthrow humanity’s oldest institution and as part of “a major turning point in human history,” Southern Baptist leaders said.

Chicago homicides in 2016 reach 500
Chicago’s 500th homicide of the year happened over Labor Day weekend, according to the Chicago Tribune. That number carries a lot of weight for the city — not just in quantity, but in meaning: 2016 is now the deadliest year in two decades.

‘Sad’ Russian anti-evangelism law ends a ministry
Independent Baptist missionaries Donald and Ruth Ossewaarde always suspected their Gospel ministry in Oryol, Russia, wouldn’t last when they began in 2002. But they did not expect Donald to be among the first people arrested under Russia’s new law prohibiting organizations from evangelizing outside church walls and without a government permit.

Missouri sends first openly lesbian to Miss America Pageant
Miss Missouri, Erin O’ Flaherty, will compete for the Miss America crown this weekend as the first openly lesbian contestant. “Behind the scenes, we’ve been well-represented, but I’m the first openly gay title holder, so I’m very excited,” she told The Associated Press. “I knew going in that I had the opportunity to make history. Now I get to be more visible to the community and meet more people.”

Sources: Baptist Press, Religion News Service, CNN, Baptist Press, Time Magazine

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Turtle on a fence post

Meredith Flynn —  April 15, 2013

Turtle on Fence Post[3]HEARTLAND | Nate Adams

There is an old saying that if you ever see a turtle sitting on a fence post, you can be sure of one thing: It didn’t get there by itself.

As I begin my eighth year with IBSA, I identify very much with that turtle. On one hand, seven years is a long time, long enough for me to write more than 170 columns for The Illinois Baptist. On the other hand, my father Tom Adams wrote at least 850 columns here, over the course of 34 years. Like many of you, I read his insights on church life, Baptist life, and life in general for decades. So I still feel indebted to my dad for whatever perspective and service I have to offer IBSA churches.

It’s hard for me to think about my early days at IBSA without thinking about my dad. My mom tells me he was so excited about my coming back to Illinois, and to IBSA in particular, that he would fall asleep in his recliner with the Illinois Baptist in his lap, open to the article about my selection to serve here. And yet a month to the day after I started at IBSA, Dad passed away.

During these years since then, I have often thought how nice it would have been to have my dad around. He loved IBSA, and the Illinois Baptist, and the pastors and members of IBSA churches. Though he was basically quiet and introverted, he knew many, many people through his writing and ministry roles. He understood a lot about people and churches, how they work together, and why they sometimes don’t. Many times I have wished I could pick up the phone and ask him a question.

But it’s not like I’ve been without his help. Though my dad’s been gone for seven years now, I still rarely go into a church for the first time without someone telling me how much he or she appreciated his wisdom and his writing. Often they have a favorite column or two clipped and in their Bible. One dear lady told me she still has one framed and hanging over her desk at work. As often as not, these folks say they never met dad personally. But frequently they will say they felt as if they knew him.

Of course, if my dad ever heard anyone praising his writing, he would quickly point to Dr. Robert Hastings, who edited the Illinois Baptist for many years, and who was a wonderful writer as well. Dad frequently said that if Dr. Hastings hadn’t “taken a chance” on him as a young writer, he would never have had the opportunities or influence that he did.

And dad wouldn’t want to stop there. He would want me to point out that every column he scribbled by hand on a yellow pad of paper was typed up for publication by my mom, who added her own skilled editing and insight to the final product.

Of course my mom would want to point to her parents, and how they sacrificed for her education, and how their support of her made it possible for her to support my dad with her skills. And if my grandparents were here, well, I trust you get the point.

We are all turtles on our own fence posts, aren’t we? Whether it’s our parents, or the pastor or leader that served before us, or the faithful families that founded or sustained our church or that brought the Gospel to our area, none of us arrived at our places of service and opportunity without the help of others. We would do well to thank them when we have a chance, and to pledge to them that we will do the same for others. From my fence post today, thanks Dad.

Nate Adams is executive director of the Illinois Baptist State Association.

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