When Roger White, pastor of Liberty Baptist Church, Crossville, sought a way to kick-start some intentional evangelizing within his community, he discovered he had to do it ALONE.
The ALONE strategy, developed by the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions for bivocational pastors, focuses on involvement in the state board’s Intentional Evangelism emphasis. The acrostic stands for Asking God for direction, Leadership development, Outreach, New units (such as Sunday School classes) and Events (primarily evangelistic ones).
During the Nov. 14 evening session of the Alabama Baptist State Convention annual meeting at Hunter Street Baptist Church, Hoover, White gave a testimony illustrating the convention theme of Intentional Evangelism. "We discovered some things about our church, our community and ourselves," he said. "We discovered some things we needed to be doing and some we needed to stop."
In large part thanks to his church’s participation in the strategy, Liberty Baptist led its association in baptisms last year — at one point, seeing 23 baptisms in 13 weeks. He told of witnessing to a 63-year-old terminally ill man and later his wife. They both accepted Christ as Savior. The man died the morning before being baptized but not before becoming a believer, White said.
As part of his testimony, he also presented a video of himself baptizing an 83-year-old man. Raised in Idaho and Montana, the man never saw a church before the 1950s and attended church for the first time only in the past few years. On a recent Wednesday night home visit, the elderly man accepted Christ.
White said God has worked through the program to reach not only individuals but also to touch entire groups in the community. As a result of ALONE-spurred efforts, a Hispanic program and a new children’s program have been added to Liberty’s ministries with more developments on the horizon.
But as far as White is concerned, the work is far from being finished, and he fully intends to continue working in his community to win souls to Christ. He also encouraged convention messengers to join him.
"Let’s go show them how to know Jesus as their Savior," White said. "And let’s go teach our people how to win others to Christ."
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