Kristi Moore has vivid memories of growing up in Mission Friends, Girls in Action and Acteens at her home church of First Baptist, Amarillo, Texas.
Those experiences “really immersed me into this missions atmosphere,” she said, crediting her involvement in Woman’s Missionary Union-related programs with “creating and molding my heart to love missions and to love service in the community.”
When she moved back to Amarillo after college, Moore longed to be part of WMU again, but a missions group option wasn’t available at First, Amarillo, for her young adult age group.
As a former National Acteens Panelist, a dream was born to help start a young women’s WMU group, but her plan didn’t materialize right away. Instead, she put her energy into volunteering with high school Acteens on Wednesday nights. After getting married and becoming a mom, she shifted to teaching first grade GAs.
Whispers from God
But her dream persisted. Eight years later, “I still felt God whispering like, ‘Kristi, you need to start this younger WMU group’ and then I heard Him get a little louder in my head,” she said. By the summer of 2019, “He was really just shouting at me,” she admitted.
Contacting Angie Graves, First, Amarillo’s WMU director, Moore recalled, “I told her I felt like God was leading me down this road and she was just ecstatic. And it was really easy from that point on. The church was excited that someone was leading this and they basically said, ‘Whatever you need, we will do.’ So, we just started pretty fast. We really started planning in August and then our first meeting was a few months after that.”
Intentional about missions
Graves said identifying someone to organize such a group “has been my prayer since becoming director because there was a gap” in actively involving that age group in missions support and discipleship.
“I think it will help those young women get a better understanding of what other people are going through,” Graves said. “It can also help them be more intentional about teaching their children about how they can help others and how they can be a missionary in their own hometown.”
With those goals in mind, SALT was launched as a Women on Mission group for young women from their mid-20s to early 40s. While the new group got off to a great start with the support of church and WMU leaders, some challenges were still ahead.
When the group’s inaugural gathering in early 2020 attracted 34 women, no one anticipated the impact of the COVID-19 crisis in the coming months. Although meetings moved online and in-person missions projects were put on hold for several months, the group has continued to seek out creative ways to maintain its missions focus.
SALT, based on Matthew 5:13, encourages participants to be spiritual salt and light in their community and world.
Describing the group’s focus as “purposeful and meaningful,” Moore said, “We’re driven with the foundation that we’re sisters in Christ, and we all are yearning and desiring to practice servanthood and missions.”
The group’s basic strategy involves meeting together every other month to pray, study missions and plan future service projects. The following month, they go out into the community to serve such groups as homeless women and children, battered women, orphans, widows, veterans and the elderly.
“It’s been a wonderful experience,” Moore said. “I’ve had a lot of good feedback from it.”
During the time they were unable to meet and serve in person, SALT members sent handwritten notes of encouragement to 80 church members who are homebound or in nursing homes, as well as 161 inmates in area prisons. Those projects provided an outlet for them to continue to serve the community from their homes, Moore said.
“Our group’s purpose is still shining through even in this cloud of COVID that’s over everyone’s lives,” she said. “I think there’s this need, especially in 2020, for younger people to take a stand and to show Christ’s love because our world can seem so dark and gloomy.”
‘Come together’
Reflecting on SALT’s transformation from dream to reality, Moore said it is humbling to help her peers “come together for the sole purpose of being Christian missionaries in our own city.”
Urging other young women and local churches to pursue similar goals, she said, “Just have the courage and listen to the Holy Spirit. If He is calling you to start a younger WMU group, then just go for it and take the leap.”
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