When you’ve served for more than 26,000 years, you deserve to celebrate. As part of the International Mission Board’s “Year of Emeriti” observance, nearly 1,000 retired missionaries united for the first time at LifeWay Ridgecrest Conference Center in North Carolina, the very location where many of them first heard God’s call to missions.
The retirees who attended the Sept. 10–13 event comprise two-thirds of the approximately 1,400 living emeritus Southern Baptist missionaries and served a cumulative total of more than 26,000 years on missions fields around the world, according to IMB estimates.
Combined with the current IMB missions force of 5,234, they account for more than a third of all the Southern Baptist missionaries who have served abroad during the board’s 162-year history, according to IMB President Jerry Rankin. Five served 45 years on their missions fields. Thirty-eight served 40 or more years.
“As I look at you and realize what has gone before, how grateful we are that it didn’t start with us youngsters. You represent a biblical model of following God as Abraham did,” Rankin said. (BP)
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