Conference track provides ministry resources

There is a word that will save your soul, but what if you couldn’t read it? There is a place that will tell you about it, but what if you couldn’t read the directions about how to get there?
   
For the one out of four Alabamians who are functionally illiterate, this is a daily dilemma, said Gena Heatherly, literacy missions coordinator for the office of associational missions and church planting of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM).
   
“If they can’t read, they don’t go to Sunday School because they’re afraid they’ll be called on to read (out loud),” she said. “Church is about reading. Those people who can’t read are locked out of that.”
   
But through literacy missions ministries, Heatherly and others are working to make sure those who cannot read have a chance to learn that skill as well as a chance to hear about Jesus Christ. 
   
“People feel comfortable coming to a church where they have taken part in learning to read or their child has been taught to read,” Heatherly said.
   
And literacy missions ministries goes beyond illiteracy, she noted. Literacy ministries teach English as a Second Language and English as a Foreign Language as well as offer tutoring for children and youth.
   
Through these ministries, 130 men, women and children in Alabama found their Savior as well as the skills of reading and learning this past year, Heatherly said.
   
“Literacy missions is about building relationships,” she said. “It’s a way of bringing people in and discipling them.
   
“(Literacy missions) is not another program; it is a ministry,” Heatherly explained during a session of the Great Commission Ministries Track of the Alabama Baptist State Evangelism Conference Jan. 23–24.
   
Heatherly’s presentation was one of 20 offered each day alongside the morning and afternoon sessions of the Evangelism Conference, held at Dauphin Way Baptist Church, Mobile. 
   
Leaders reported 326 participants in track seminars. This includes people who attended more than one session, said Max Croft, director of the SBOM office of discipleship and family ministries. 
   
Croft said with the current state convention focus on Intentional Evangelism, the Great Commission Ministries Track made sense. 
   
“We say we have one mission, the Great Commission,” he said. “The Great Commission involves both evangelism and discipleship. You evangelize then you follow through to make sure they’re discipled.”
   
Croft noted that several church leaders had expressed a need for help with discipling and assimilating new Christians into long-term membership in their church.
   
While a project is under way to develop a statewide guide to address that issue, the track seminars were a way to meet that need immediately, he said. 
   
“It (was) a good opportunity for pastors, staff members and leaders to look more closely at what can be done in discipleship to follow up on the Intentional Evangelism emphasis.”