Alabama WMU celebration challenges women to focus on relationship with God

If an apple a day keeps the doctor away, then attendees of the WHoly His women’s celebration, probably racked up enough apples of the spiritual variety to enjoy a godly kind of health for a long time.
   
Sponsored by Alabama Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), the statewide event — held March 19–20 at NorthPark Baptist Church, Trussville — drew its theme, “The Apple of His Eye,” from Zechariah 2:8.
According to organizers, more than 300 women attended the conference, which was designed to help them explore their relationships with God and other people.
   
Worship music was led by Not by Chance, a women’s ensemble from Gardendale’s First Baptist Church, and Bible study was led by Rhonda Kelley, New Hope author and director of the Women’s Ministry Certificate program of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary.
   
Kelley — who jokingly confessed to the crowd that her three spiritual gifts were shopping, talking and sleeping — more seriously addressed the uniqueness of women and the fact that God created them equal in worth and value to men but different in roles and functions.
   
“We see things differently. We feel things differently. God created us that way,” she said. “God uses the emotions in a woman’s heart and life to connect us to others. That gives us our identity. He’s given us a job to do and it’s not the same job as men.”
   
She also noted that if women are to minister to others, they must first be able to see the world through the eyes of God, in other words, through eyes of care, concern and conviction. If that is indeed a woman’s outlook, she said, “We can’t see what’s going on around us without responding.”
   
Kelley ultimately challenged attendees to be who God created them to be and to cultivate godly character in their lives.
   
“We need to be godly women of the Word and not gullible women of the world,” she said. “We are bombarded with media that convinces us to try things we shouldn’t and if we don’t build up godliness in ourselves, we will find ourselves being influenced by the world.
   
“Let God’s truth impact your life,” she said. “This weekend, we have learned how much God loves us, but with that love comes a great responsibility to live like Him and to be an example of Him in the world today.”
   
Missionary testimonies were given at the conference by Jeanette Macias, a native of Nicaragua who now serves as the associational Hispanic missionary for the Barbour Baptist Association, and Mary Swedenburg of Birmingham who served as a missionary to Japan for more than 33 years.
   
Macias came to the United States in 1999 to attend seminary. After her graduation last December, she said the door opened for her to begin work in south Alabama.
   
“The Lord is great and the Lord is mighty and He wants to use us,” Macias said. “We don’t have to be perfect, we just have to let Him be the Lord and Savior of our lives.”
   
Macias, a teacher of the deaf, shared a rendition of “We Are an Offering” in sign language.
   
Wearing a kimono made and given to her by a friend upon her departure from Japan, Swedenburg declared, “I am a product of WMU. Thank you, Alabama WMU.
   
“Thank you for praying for me all those years as I was proclaiming Christ in Japan. It has given me a joy I could have never had under any other plan for my life,” she said.
   
Swedenburg grew up participating in Southern Baptist missions programs in a small town in west Alabama and credits that background with giving her a heart for international missions. She is now an active member of a Women on Mission prayer group at Shades Crest Baptist Church, Birmingham.
   
Also featured at the conference was a selection of breakout sessions with apple themes and a variety of exhibits. These “Marketplace Ministries” provided information and resources for getting involved in ministries such as Christian Women’s Job Corps, Sav-A-Life and others. A booth manned by members of the Parish Nurse program of First Baptist Church, Trussville, offered blood pressure checks and blood sugar testing.