Missionary speakers? They’re not just for Christmas or Easter anymore.
That’s the message Jim and Marilyn Oliver hope to convey to Alabama churches. The Olivers serve as speaker coordinators for the International Mission Board (IMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention, helping match international missionaries to churches who seek them as special speakers.
Although Christmas and Easter are prime times for enlisting missionary speakers to promote the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering or the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering, missionaries who are on stateside assignment or are retired are often available year-round to encourage missions awareness and education in the local church.
The Olivers advertise their special services in an attempt to help reach the IMB goal of a missionary in every Alabama church sometime within the next five years. Although a church that hosts a missionary normally provides a love offering and expenses, IMB will even pick up missionary expenses for churches that cannot afford to pay them in order to help make missionaries available to local churches.
Hosting a missionary who has witnessed and worked overseas in the local church is important to the spread of Christianity, according to the Olivers, themselves former missionaries to Colombia for 29 years. They have served as IMB speaker coordinators since 1999 after their retirement two years earlier.
“The best recommendation for enlisting other missionaries is a missionary,” Jim Oliver says. Hearing the experiences of international missionaries firsthand can inspire others to understand their own responsibility, availability and ability to answer the call.
Finding avenues to speak not only aids local churches in their missionary awareness but also directly benefits the missionaries, according to the Olivers, because it opens avenues of getting homeland support for their work. “They want to get prayer partners,” Marilyn Oliver notes. They also often discover people eager to partner with them financially.
Churches may utilize missionaries as special speakers in a variety of avenues, including worship services, supply preaching, interim pastorates, camps, missions celebrations, teaching missions studies, associational meetings and other events. Marilyn says she recently worked on finding different missionary speakers to be featured each day in a Vacation Bible School, noting that no church or group is too small to utilize a missionary speaker.
Although the Olivers hope requests for missionary speakers increase, they acknowledge that circumstances occasionally make meeting the demand difficult. For example, a request for a missionary from a certain country or region or during a particular time may not match up with the missionary’s schedule. “That’s when Jim goes.” Marilyn Oliver often e–mails missionaries while they are still on the field in order to schedule appointments.
Telling the story
Although the IMB does not require missionaries to spend their stateside assignment in speaking engagements, it is recommended, and most missionaries are agreeable. “Most missionaries enjoy talking about their work,” Jim Oliver says. When the Olivers were on furlough from their work in Colombia, they tried to accept as many speaking engagements as possible. They particularly enjoyed speaking at camps because of the bonus of having their own children attend as campers.
International missionaries typically spend four years on the field and then take a year of stateside assignment. The Olivers, who live in Montgomery, also coordinate emeritus (retired) missionaries as speakers. At any given time, missionaries from around the world may be living in Alabama, either because they are from here or have other family ties. For example, just last month there were eight international missionaries on stateside assignment in Alabama and 54 emeritus missionaries in the state. Of course, that number changes as missionaries come and go.
Some missionaries arrive back in the United States with specific plans and responsibilities, possibly to study or work with an association. Many welcome more opportunities to be on mission in their homeland.
And matching up churches and missionaries often are more than fleeting partnerships, according to the Olivers. “Many call back or write a note,” Marilyn Oliver says, showing that the speaker made an impression on the church or vice versa.
To schedule a missionary speaker in your church, contact the Olivers by phone at 334-396-1932 or by fax at 334-396-2236. For best results, try to schedule a speaker well ahead of time. While the Olivers try to find missionaries who are currently close to the local church, they will call neighboring states to fill specific requests if necessary.
For more information on missionary work, check the IMB Web site, www.imb.org.
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