A moment of cleansing, a time with God, a stirring of hearts — many of the more than 1,100 people attending the 2004 Alabama Baptist State Evangelism Conference found themselves fervently in prayer.
Whether it was during a discipleship track led by the internationally known prayer warrior T.W. Hunt or during one of the two evening rallies, reconnecting with God surfaced in every session.
The Jan. 26–27 conference, which was held at Valley View Baptist Church in Tuscaloosa, featured three tracks — traditional, contemporary and discipleship — during the day and evangelism rallies at night.
In each of the tracks (see stories, pages 4–5), speakers and preachers attempted to interpret the conference theme, “Intentional Evangelism.”
The theme also permeated the evening rallies where all participants came together in one worship service.
Prior to each sermon, Alabama Baptist evangelist Danny Wolfe led praise and worship with a variety of songs and styles and even garnered a few chill bumps from the crowd with his trumpet rendition of “Amazing Grace.”
Sammy Gilbreath, director of the office of evangelism at the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions (SBOM), said, “God’s showed up over and over. It’s been wonderful.
“God’s been good to us,” he said. “What a powerful demonstration of anointed preaching, men totally submissive to the leadership of the Holy Spirit.”
Rick Lance, executive director of the SBOM, said, “I believe this evangelism conference set the tone for helping us better understand the challenge of the Great Commission with respect to ‘making disciples.’
“The leaders in worship were at their very best and the participants seem to reflect a sense of enthusiasm and joy,” said Lance, noting the conference involved more SBOM representatives than any other year.
“This conference may well prove to be a very good paradigm for the future,” he added.
Gilbreath added that this conference has been compared to what has become known as the “high water mark” of evangelism conferences — the conference at Central Park Baptist Church, Birmingham, in the 1970s.
Otis Williams was director of evangelism for Alabama at that time, Gilbreath said. The preaching lineup included such names as Stephen Olford and E.V. Hill.
“It is quite humbling to be compared to that,” Gilbreath said.
“For weeks, I’ve prayed, ‘Lord, please don’t let (this conference) be just another meeting,’ ” Gilbreath said, noting “there was no assigned text, no assigned sermon to anyone, and it was incredible to see how God just wove them together.”
Both evening sessions offered worshipers opportunities to corporately pray at the altar. During the closing moments of the final session, Alabama Baptists and others gathered at the altar and across the sanctuary.
Families prayed together. Friends prayed together. Some prayed individually.
Ted Traylor, pastor of Olive Baptist Church, Pensacola, Fla., led the closing prayertime. He asked those gathered to examine their own lives to see where they might dispense grace. “[Let’s] come and put our lives before the Father,” Traylor said, “asking Him to bless this time of appointment and commitment.”
The commitment time followed Traylor’s sermon on a “Song of Victory.”
Noting that Christians today need to show the world who God is and why they worship Him, Traylor said recent polls show 92 percent of Americans believe in God. “But when you start picking at that answer, it’s not the God of the Bible they’re talking about,” Traylor said. “People are worshiping the deity of their choice.”
This was the atmosphere in Ephesus when Paul wrote 1 Timothy. The people in Ephesus were worshiping both Artemis, a fertility goddess, and their emperor.
Traylor said Christians should focus on “His royalty and our response” and pointed to the four characteristics of God’s royalty in verse 17.
1. He is King eternal. Not only does God offer eternal life, He also offers abundant life, which should fill Christians and their churches with joy.
“We’ll be hypocrites if we’ll come [to this conference] and hoot and holler [in the services] and then go back to our churches and not say a word,” Traylor said.
2. God is immortal, so He is immune to death, decay and corruption. He passes that immortality on to Christians.
3. God is King invisible. However, He has made Himself known through Christ and through Christians, Traylor said. “If the world wants to see God, they look at us.”
4. God is the only God. “He is the only God available,” Traylor said. “So we might as well get over being tolerant and preach God for Who He is and let the chips fall.”
Christians have two responses to God’s royalty — honor and glory. Traylor said honor is private and quieter. It involves reverence and bowing. Glory is public and louder. It involves majesty and spoken or shouted declarations. Traylor said Christians’ response to God involves both of these, not just one.
Christians’ response to God also involves being His agents to the world.
David Nasser of David Nasser Ministries in Birmingham told how he and his parents fled his native country of Iran just after the Iranian revolution in 1979.
As a 9-year-old boy, Nasser had seen the effects of more than 1 million people being massacred. The revolution left his father, a high-ranking old regime military official, doomed for torture.
The Nasser family gave up everything to get out of the country.
“I’ll never forget the fear of it all,” Nasser said. “We came to the United States, and I was the outcast. I came from wrong country at the wrong time,” Nasser said. “Everybody was watching Iranians burn the American flag on TV and call America the ‘great Satan.’
“On top of that I had the wrong haircut, the wrong clothes and the wrong language,” he recalled.
But Nasser’s life found hope when members of Shades Mountain Baptist Church, Vestavia Hills, in Birmingham Association took interest in him. At age 18 he accepted Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord.
“I’m here to testify that I am a product of God’s truth that even though every single day of my life I have deserved His wrathful left, He has placed me on His righteous right,” Nasser said.
The rest of the Nasser family also has accepted Jesus as Savior and Lord since coming to the United States.
God’s servant
Don Wilton, pastor of First Baptist Church, Spartanburg, S.C., preached during the opening rally of the conference and developed his sermon from Hebrews 11:7.
Molding his sermon around the concept of “God’s intentional servant,” Wilton said Noah accepted God’s command to build an ark by faith.
“In order for God’s servant to be God’s servant he had to accept what God was saying even though he had no human means to understand what God was saying,” Wilton explained, noting three distinctives to Noah’s faith.
Reading from Genesis 6:9, Wilton said Noah was declared righteous by God, considered blameless by the people and was found to be walking with God.
“His faith was absolute and unhesitating,” said Wilton in his distinctive South African accent.
Drawing out the crowd throughout his sermon, Wilton interjected pregnant pauses alongside frozen movements to make his point. Once the crowd realized the magnitude of what he was saying, Wilton chuckled at the moment.
Noah’s intentionality to be a servant was marked in five ways, Wilton explained.
1. By the warning he heard from God.
2. By the fear he experienced.
3. By the work he did.
4. By the message he sent.
5. By the reward he received.
Developing these five concepts, Wilton said the warning Noah heard dealt with God’s judgment on sin, the building of a boat, the coming rain and the making of a covenant.
“We’ve got to listen to the warning God is sending us and fear,” Wilton said. “We stand before our people and explode with self importance, hopes and dreams, and all God wants us to do is fall upon our face in His presence and see the outpouring of the grace of God come upon us.
“When we begin to delve into the depths of the riches of God’s eternal grace, we will discover a God who loves us beyond all understanding,” Wilton continued.
Noah built the ark and preached repentance, Wilton said. Noah’s message came from “what he heard God say, was driven by what he saw the people do and was shaped by what he practiced in his own life.”
In the end Noah’s family was saved and his position was secured, Wilton added. “He became an heir of righteousness.
“What God was trying to teach us was that when we climb into the boat, when we are washed and redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, when God sees us, He sees us through the lens of the Lord Jesus Christ,” Wilton said. “God is saying, ‘You are my servant, and I have called you. I want My grace to be upon you. … When you get into the boat of My grace, My blood will cover you and cover the wages of sin.’”
And once one has been saved by Jesus Christ “we must be willing to tell somebody,” said Johnny Hollis, pastor of Antioch Baptist Church in Pike Road.
“You are to show what great things He has done for you. … Tell them of the compassion He has had and about the mercy that He has shown toward you,” said Hollis during the Jan. 26 evening rally of the evangelism conference.
Tell the story
“We must tell our family and friends that Jesus is a living God, that He came down through 40 and two generations and died for our sins, but He didn’t stay dead,” Hollis said. “That early Sunday morning without human hands intervening, He got up with all power. … We’ve got to tell somebody that He’s able to save.”
Challenging Alabama Baptists to share Jesus with everyone, Hollis preached on “a man in need of mercy” from Mark 5:1–20.
“The text presents a man living in a deplorable condition,” Hollis explained. “He is in constant pain — emotionally, spiritually and physically. … The man was disabled by the demons who possessed his person.
“He stood in need of the Master’s mercy,” Hollis said, noting Jesus still treated him like a human being even though he was an outcast of society. Jesus healed the man by freeing him from the demons that possessed him.
The man wanted to stay with Jesus, but Jesus sent him home to tell everyone what happened to him. The man was to tell the great things the Lord had done for him, Hollis said. Jesus sent this man out “as a duplicate of Himself, an empowered disciple, that he might share this message of deliverance and of mercy.”
Just as Jesus had mercy on this man Christians must show mercy to others, Hollis said. “There are individuals who are living among dead things such as drugs and alcohol, pornography or choosing to kill unborn babies,” he noted. “They have to be reached and rescued. … If we are to be like Jesus then we must care. We must tell them about the saving power of Jesus, the only way they will be saved.
“God has a special affection for mankind, and He will show mercy,” Hollis shared. “We must also be willing to show mercy.” (Erin Webster and Anthony Wade contributed)
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