Mobile teen makes mark on missions

Some people think 16-year-old Josiah Holmes is too young for overseas missions work. The Mobile surfer admits he’s had the same thought.
   
Just the same, he traveled to Kuching, Malaysia, this summer to share the gospel with everyone from schoolchildren to once-upon-a-time headhunters.
   
“It’s been,” he said, “probably my best summer.”
   
Ordinarily, Holmes would have whiled away his days attending basketball camp, surfing in the Gulf of Mexico and dining out at Taco Bell and Olive Garden.
   
Instead, he went to East Malaysia, where he divided his time between praying, preaching and partaking of python.
   
He also tried a delicacy drink known as “bird’s nest,” which is an actual bird’s nest sans bones and feathers, blended with coconut milk. “I took a couple of sips, and that was about it for me,” Holmes confessed.
   
Next summer, Holmes plans to do missionary work in the Amazon. While he acknowledged some people at home seem put off by his age, he said for many overseas, that’s not the case.
   
Increasingly, individual clergy members and mainline denominations are providing outlets for youths eager to spread the good news on foreign shores.
   
“I think it’s definitely growing,” said Rob Cain, college pastor at the Church at Tuscaloosa, and a project coordinator and worship leader for the Southern Baptist Convention’s World Changers, a summer missions project program.
   
Since Southern Baptist missions agencies made international missions projects available to teenagers and college students several years ago, interest has steadily in-creased, Cain said.
   
“I think today students have become very serious in their faith,” he said.
   
“Even in our society that we’re living in, they have to make decisions whether they’re going to be real or whether they’re going to play church.”
   
In the past, Cain said, many people — including students — attended worship services simply because it was expected. Today, those same societal pressures do not exist.
   
“They’re coming out of a hunger and a thirst for Bible knowledge,” he said. “And they’re wanting to make a difference.”
   
The surfer-turned-volunteer who traveled to Malaysia with an aunt and uncle who is a pastor in Oklahoma, didn’t travel so much to give back as to share knowledge of the Bible, of God and of salvation. At home, he said, it’s more difficult for him to evangelize. Overseas, he said, “People aren’t as skeptical. They received you very well.”
   
Each day, Holmes said, he would rise at 8 a.m., and leave the hotel an hour later.
   
He and his four fellow workers would visit homes of individuals who, upon learning of their presence, would ask them to come by and pray.
   
After lunch, Holmes said, they witnessed on the streets of Kuching. At 7 p.m., they’d begin worship in an area Christian church, where they would remain until 2 or 3 a.m.
   
“Those people are so hungry,” he said. “Their hunger is, like, so pure and deep.” For now, Holmes is home.
   
He and his parents, Randall and Crystal, are members of River of Life Family Church — a nondenominational congregation.
   
Adjustment wasn’t easy, he said, and he’s excited about his trip to Peru next summer.
   
There, at least, his diet won’t include broiled seaweed and sauteed jellyfish — he hopes. (RNS)