Great outdoors gateway to witnessing in Michigan

Evangelistic deer hunts. Christian fish fries. Wild game dinners at church.

Ken Wilson has a lot of tools in his gospel-sharing toolbox to win people to Christ amid the thick woods and crystal-clear lakes of northern Michigan.

"Well, our motto is whatever it takes, we get ’em anyway we can," Wilson said. While he actually was referring to deer as he stealthily walked through the woods with his bow — dressed head-to-toe in camouflage gear — he uses the same strategy for winning souls for Jesus.

As an associational missionary for NorthWest Baptist Association based in Mesick also supported by the North American Mission Board (NAMB), Wilson — the fanatical outdoorsman — knows he lives in a hunting and fishing paradise.

"I don’t think God could have called me to a better place than northern Michigan, because outdoor sports are huge up here. We have hunting ministries. The opening day of deer season is a local holiday," he said.

Wilson said he loves to hunt and fish with locals and the many tourists who visit the area because it gives him an opportunity to talk to them in their own language and then minister to them.

"We’ll have dozens of fish fries going on throughout the summer and fall, with several hundred people attending," Wilson said. "We take these and make them evangelistic events. We have wild game dinners with speakers — myself or outsiders — sharing the gospel with hundreds more.

"We even do evangelistic deer hunts. But we invite at least one lost person to go on every hunt and every evening during the hunt, we have devotions, share the gospel and pray that lost hunters come to know Jesus."

But even a hunting and fishing paradise has its dark side, according to Wilson, who came to Mesick from southern Illinois in 2003. Less than half of 1 percent of the northern Michigan population are Southern Baptists. Fifty towns of 3,000 or more in the region are without a single Southern Baptist church. Many northern Michigan towns have a staggering "lost" population of 70–80 percent, according to Wilson.

Within the association Wilson leads, there are only 15 churches and missions, and these congregations have an average weekly attendance of only 30-something people each Sunday.

Wilson and his wife, Cindy, are only two of more than 5,300 NAMB missionaries in the United States and Canada and their territories. With NorthWest Association, Wilson today serves 10 counties in northern Michigan.

Traditionally rural, the 10-county area is growing by 15 percent annually. Leelanau County and Leelanau Peninsula are growing at a rate of 35 percent each year — the fastest-growing area of the association.

"But we have some counties with no Southern Baptist Convention churches," he said. "We have fast-growing areas like Harbor Springs in the Petoskey area with not a single Baptist church.

"We have many church-planting needs," Wilson said. "We need some partner churches to come up here and help us."

Wilson said Mackinaw City — where tourism thrives in the summer — needs a church plant badly. In the summer, Mackinaw grows to 10,000 people or more, but during the winter, it reverts to a ghost town.

"It’s a beautiful area and there are several things we could do in Mackinaw City because of the tourism. But first, we need to reach the indigenous people of Mackinaw, those who live there year-round," he said. "If we could plant a church in Mackinaw, we would have a world-impacting church, because many of the tourists who come to Mackinac (pronounced "Mackinaw") Island and Mackinaw City are from foreign countries."

Wilson believes it’s important to recruit "locals" as pastors and church workers because they know the local culture better than anyone else and know how to relate to the people in the area.

"It gets really lonely up here and really cold by Feb. 15, when the snow’s 36 inches deep, and you’re looking for someplace to go and there’s no place to go. It can get lonely and depressing. So it’s a calling to be here. The indigenous people are here — although they may complain about it — because they love northern Michigan."