The Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM) and Alabama Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU) have partnered to launch a first-ever state missions offering.
The Myers-Mallory State Missions Offering is being collected all year, with special emphasis during the first Week of Prayer for State Missions to be observed Sept. 11–18.
“Until now, Alabama has been the only state in the SBC without a bona fide state missions offering,” said Rick Lance, state missionary and SBOM executive director. “This is a truly historic year for Alabama Baptists.”
The new offering replaces what used to be an annual offering for helping fund the work of Alabama WMU (the former Kathleen Mallory Mission Offering) and the newer Alabama Baptist Disaster Relief Offering and expands them to include other state Great Commission Ministries (church planting, church revitalization and global partnership missions).
If the statewide goal of $750,000 is met, Alabama WMU and Disaster Relief will receive gifts equal to or more than historically received through their separate offerings.
‘Hallelujah goal’
Candace McIntosh, executive director of Alabama WMU, has high hopes of reaching the goal and even exceeding it to reach the “hallelujah goal” of $1 million.
“Alabama Baptists have a heart for missions,” she said.
The offering keeps the namesake of Kathleen Mallory because of her legacy with missions and missions funding.
She lived a humble lifestyle so she could give as much money as possible to missions, McIntosh said.
Mallory, who served as leader of Alabama WMU from 1909 to 1912 and then head of national WMU for 36 years before she died in 1954, also had an “intense devotion to prayer,” McIntosh noted. All together, “it’s a legacy that inspires Alabama Baptists decades later.”
And it’s a legacy that helped to fund things like the missions ministries in which Martha Myers participated as a young girl.
Myers, who grew up in an Alabama Baptist church, went on to serve 25 years as a medical missionary in Yemen before being killed by an extremist there in 2002.
‘A sterling example’
Lance said, “Martha Myers is the Great Commission literally lived out on two feet. She personifies sacrificial giving. She took the gospel and her ministry to the people who were underserved and unreached, and in that way she is a sterling example of what it means to give sacrificially for the cause of Christ.”
That’s why when Alabama Baptists created the new state missions offering in late 2015, they decided to add Myers as a namesake — in honor of Myers’ sacrifice, Lance said.
“This offering is similar to the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering for International Missions and the
Annie Armstrong Offering for missions in North America in that it is a complement to, not a competitor with, the Cooperative Program,” he said. “It essentially supplements some of those ministries.”
And, Lance added, he hopes Baptists from across the state will join the effort and invest in making a difference together through the offering.
McIntosh agreed.
“We’re the ones who champion the call to missions in our own state,” she said.
“As we support missions here in our state, we can continue to gain traction in the hearts of Alabamians.”
In the coming days, church leaders statewide will receive resource packets with ways to pray for and plan for promotion of the upcoming Week of Prayer for State Missions.
“We hope that as it gets in the hands of our church leaders that they will process the information that is in it and prayerfully consider how they would lead their church to be a part of it,” McIntosh said.
“We want them to go ahead and set that time aside on their church calendar so that they can promote the week of prayer,” she said.
“And set aside a day when they will emphasize the offering and help educate their congregation on how they impact others [when they give to] the Myers-Mallory missions offering here in Alabama.” (TAB, SBOM)
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