As Native American Baptists are playing a greater role in sending missionaries to evangelize the world’s native peoples, the International Mission Board (IMB) is helping train those missionaries for maximum effectiveness.
More than 50 Native American pastors and lay leaders gathered at Alameda Baptist Church, Albuquerque, N.M., for the New Mexico Native American Mobilization Conference. Hosted by the Baptist Convention of New Mexico, attendees represented the Navajo Nation and multiple Pueblo and Apache tribes.
Participants studied people group engagement and the role worldview plays in sharing Christ cross-culturally, in the first training of its kind by IMB for Native Americans.
Daniel Clymer, Native American strategist for the Baptist Convention of New Mexico, said the conference was part of an effort to mobilize Native American Baptists by building what he calls “Mission Response Team” churches. Such congregations become prepared for local and global missions through training in four key areas: prayer, evangelism and discipleship, leadership development, and missions and multiplying.
“There are requests coming in for Native American Baptist mission teams to come and help with other people groups elsewhere in the world,” he said, noting their ethnicity makes them uniquely effective at reaching other native tribes.
“Native American people have very much in common with other aboriginal peoples around the world,” Clymer said. “There is an instant connection.”
For Edna Romero of Taos, N.M., the Oct. 3–4 training was a confirmation of the new direction for Native American Baptists in New Mexico. Romero is the missions leader for the Native American Baptist Partnership of New Mexico; her husband, Bennie, is pastor of First Indian Baptist Church, Taos.
“I’ve been trying to encourage our churches to do local missions so that they get hands-on experience, and when the opportunity presents itself, they’re better equipped in reaching out to another community, another state or even outside of the United States.”
“We’re emphasizing to go beyond our own Jerusalem,” she said. “If you can’t go the first 12 miles, how can you go 12,000?”
The training was the brainchild of Randy Carruth, who partnered with Clymer and IMB to organize the conference. Carruth leads I Am Able Ministries in Forrest Hill, La., and has championed a vision for Native American Christians to take a greater role in fulfilling the Great Commission.
“All the way from Northwest Territories, Canada, to the Mayans in Chan Chen, Mexico, God is opening up the hearts of native people everywhere,” Carruth said. “Our vision is this: If we can get our native people trained, they are the one people group that is accepted almost anywhere in the world. And if we can encourage churches to get behind them and send them into the world, they’ll go.”
(BP)
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