With a stuffed, pink Energizer Bunny in hand, Barry Bledsoe, president of The Baptist Foundation of Alabama (TBFA), said TBFA endowment funds “are investments that keep giving and giving and giving until the Lord returns.”
These funds provide monies for Alabama Baptist entities such as the colleges and universities, Bledsoe told messengers during the Alabama Baptist State Convention annual meeting.
During his report Nov. 15, he said the endowment funds also provide scholarships for Alabama Baptists going into a ministry-related vocation. “More than $800,000 is distributed annually in scholarship money,” Bledsoe said.
Chip Colee, minister of music for First Baptist Church, Montgomery, is one who benefited from a TBFA scholarship.
“I am thankful to Alabama Baptists for their contributions through The Baptist Foundation of Alabama,” he said, noting he started receiving a TBFA scholarship after his father died during his sophomore year at Samford University in Birmingham.
“It was a great help. I went on to seminary, and there again was The Baptist Foundation of Alabama to help me continue (my education),” Colee said. “God used people and churches in the state convention to affect my life. As I see that ripple in the pond, I look for an opportunity to gather my own pebbles to make ripples that will affect generations to come.”
Bledsoe hopes all Alabama Baptists will make ripples, realizing that “the effects of these gifts is beyond anything we can imagine.”
He also encouraged Alabama Baptists to “consider how estate planning is an act of stewardship.”
Along with scholarship administration and estate planning, TBFA — with $148.7 million held for trusts and agencies in 2005 — also provides investment management, charitable gift planning, estate settlement planning and eldercare ministry.
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