Children’s missions education has a rich, enduring history among Southern Baptists. Mission Friends (known as Sunbeams until 1970) is celebrating its 110th anniversary this year, and its sibling programs GAs (Girls in Action) and RAs (Royal Ambassadors) are both in their 90s.
Throughout the last century, Southern Baptist children have benefited from missions training, but to the dismay of many missions leaders, program participation has declined over the last two decades.
The purpose and history of the three programs are deeply intertwined. All were founded on the belief that missions work is a commandment given by the Lord Himself in the final chapter of Matthew. With the Great Commission as its foundation, children involved in the programs learn what missionaries do, about the cultures they touch, how to pray for the advancement of the gospel and why Baptists ought to give to missions offerings such as the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering for North American Missions and the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for international missions.
GA and Mission Friends curriculum, both published by national Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), highlights a country or ministry each month. In February, Mission Friends studied Lebanon. Children heard about missionaries who share the gospel in Lebanon despite persecution. They might have sampled tabbouli, a Lebanese dish, or made a picture out of salt paint to remind them of the salty Mediterranean Sea that hugs the coast of Lebanon.
RAs follow a slightly different format. Instead of focusing on a monthly missionary, the North American Mission Board (NAMB)-produced LAD (grades 1–3) and Crusader (grades 4–6) manuals concentrate on a godly virtue. Missions are taught in conjunction with the virtue.
“These programs put feet to their young faith,” said Alabama WMU Executive Director Candace McIntosh. “The time to build the foundational teachings that God loves them and God loves the world is during the preschool and adolescent years. If we can establish those truths when they are young, a love for missions will naturally become a lifestyle for them when they are older.”
Mitzi Eaker, children’s resource team leader and ministry consultant at the national WMU headquarters in Birmingham, said, “Missions groups give children a biblical worldview through a global perspective and worldview.”
Despite the positive results of missions education, there remains a consensus among both national and state missions leaders that church participation in Mission Friends, GAs and RAs continues to wane.
Marty King, a spokesman for NAMB, sites factors that have chipped away at missions education. The first, he chalks up to a competitive children’s market.
“Group, Gospel Light, Awanas, TeamKIDs — they all compete with RAs (and GAs), and with the exception of TeamKIDs (a discipleship program published by LifeWay Christian Resources), they don’t teach Baptist doctrine, Baptist history or our missions legacy,” he said.
“A lot of churches don’t have Wednesday-night services anymore. That has had a big impact on our numbers because missions education traditionally takes place on Wednesdays.”
Another factor, which seems to plague children’s ministries in general, is a lack of willing teachers. Betty Webb, WMU director for Madison Baptist Association, said one of the main reasons there are not more RA programs in her association is “we don’t have enough men willing to lead RAs.”
“A lot of churches go to Awanas because it is a good program,” she said. “The downside of it is that it doesn’t teach our missions and it requires a lot of teachers and volunteers.”
McIntosh, who also teaches Acteens, points out that another critical strain on missions education comes from churches that fail to grasp the inherent value of missions.
Eaker worries that if churches continue to neglect missions education, then “our kids will grow up not knowing about missions and the Cooperative Program. They’ll miss out on supporting missions foundations, and that will affect missions in the future. They won’t be going and doing if they don’t have a missionary foundation.”
Charlotte Cearley, a missionary in Botswana, believes her time as a GA at Woodstock Park Baptist Church, Jacksonville, Fla., prepared her to accept God’s call to the missions field. “Getting to the heart of a child is critical,” she said. “If in your earliest years you hear God’s call, you cannot get away from it. Whatever our churches can do that gets into a child’s heart that God’s heart is for the whole world — not just for them, not just for America but for the whole world — must be developed and nurtured.”
Steve Stephens, who works with missions education for boys and men at the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, said, “Missions creates awareness in our children. It shows them who their money is going to and the difference it’s making. If they don’t experience that as a child, they will be much less likely to give to missions funds when they grow up.”
“More troubling than that is that prayer support will also go down,” Stephens said. “Missionaries consistently tell us that the specific prayers of people in the (United) States is more valuable than financial support.”
Although missions education isn’t as popular as it once was, there are subtle but sure signs that a revival could be around the corner.
“At last month’s semiannual national WMU board meeting, state directors reported that churches are going back to missions education,” Eaker said. “We are definitely seeing a renewed interest in missions among Southern Baptists.”
The national WMU office is researching ways to make their teacher manuals and children’s magazines as fresh, relevant and as easy to use as possible.
At NAMB, Joe Conway, manager of mission education network development, reported that last year, 100 churches started a RA program, but the rate of attrition was higher, adding to a continued decline in overall numbers.
Yet he, too, is hopeful. Aside from completely revamping the RA curriculum three years ago, Conway’s department is shifting some of their focus to providing supplemental missions material to nonmissions education programs such as TeamKIDs. “We are still fully committed to RAs,” Conway said. “But we want to influence as wide of a range of materials as we can so kids will still be exposed to missions wherever they are.”
Standout programs at Mount Zion Baptist Church, Huntsville, and Westlawn Baptist Church, Huntsville, both in Madison Association; Central Park Baptist Church, Birmingham, in Birmingham Baptist Association; and Mountain View Baptist Church, Wetumpka, in Elmore Baptist Association offer further proof that missions education still matters to Alabama Baptists.
Known throughout the Madison Association as having one of the area’s strongest missions education programs, Mount Zion Baptist’s WMU Director Kenya Jernigan said that a few years ago, the program was suffering and some suggested that it be eliminated.
“The WMU stood up and said no,” she said. “Our missions foundation was too important to lose.”
Situated in a transitional neighborhood in southwest Huntsville, Westlawn Baptist’s WMU Director Lawanda Everage said five years ago, the church’s missions program was on the rocks. “Kids stopped coming on Wednesday nights because they had to wake up for school the next day or they had too much homework,” she said. “So we decided to move all of our children’s programs to Sunday nights.”
After a 2004 block party that drew children from the surrounding neighborhoods, the small church started picking up interested children and bringing them to missions classes. “That is the point of the missions program,” Everage said. “Now not only are we learning about missionaries, we are missionaries to the people around us.”
Diane Sizemore and Debbie LeCroy of Central Park Baptist found that their church was in a similar predicament. Also located in a transitional community, by 1996, the once-thriving congregation dropped to less than 100 members and participation on Wednesday nights was paltry. In a faith-inspired effort to salvage the missions classes, they did what a steadily growing number of Southern Baptist churches are doing — they turned their missions classes into an after-school program. And thus the Music and Missions ministry was born.
By combining music with missions, Sizemore not only gets the chance to share missions stories with more than 100 children, many of whom are unchurched but also the children’s semiannual cantatas are a great way to expose their family to the gospel message.
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