At the end of July, 38 people from eight churches in Cherokee Baptist Association took a missions trip to help a Baptist church in Kalamazoo, Mich. The effort was Cherokee Association’s first associationwide missions trip.
Director of Missions Wendell Dutton said the idea was sparked when he learned about the partnership between the Baptist conventions in Alabama and Michigan at the Alabama Baptist State Convention missions summit last September.
“I felt like this was a project we could do,” Dutton said. “There are 10 million people in Michigan, and Southern Baptists have a limited presence there. It has the fastest-growing Islamic population. They (Southern Baptists in Michigan) need for us to partner with them and help.”
He mailed a letter to all of the churches in his association to let them know about the twofold missions trip, which would include construction and backyard Bible clubs. The team Dutton gathered was a mix of adults, teenagers and children with one person from a Calhoun Baptist Association church and another from a Methodist church.
The team split its time between two sites in Kalamazoo — Trinity Baptist Church and an inner-city homeless shelter.
Team members put a new roof on the church and painted two Sunday School rooms and the kitchen. A group led a backyard Bible club at the church in the mornings and another at the shelter in the afternoons. There were four professions of faith from the club held at the shelter.
Al McMullan from Pine Grove Baptist Church, Centre, helped with the roofing project, and even though he didn’t know all of the people on the team, he said he wasn’t worried about how they would work together. “I know He always puts the right people together to get the job done,” McMullan said. “We had faith and He did it. The work went smoothly.”
Helping the effort
Reggie Quimby, director of the office of global partnerships and volunteers in missions for the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions, said the partnership between Baptists in Alabama and Michigan officially started in January 2007 and will continue through the end of 2011.
“Associations and churches are forming partnerships under the umbrella of this state partnership,” he said, adding with only about 300 Baptist churches in Michigan, that leaves a lot of room for help from Alabama churches.
“I appreciate Wendell’s leadership to mobilize his association to step up and make a difference,” he said. “My plea would be that more associations and churches would consider mission projects in Michigan.”
Dutton said he’s looking forward to getting the new catalog of missions projects in the coming weeks. “I’ll pray over them again and see what looks doable, and hopefully we’ll be back in Michigan next summer helping again.”
For more information about missions projects for 2008, call Quimby at 1-800-264-1225, Ext. 239, or visit www.alsbom.org.
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