Prayer for missions took center stage as Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU) leaders and missionaries challenged participants at the WMU annual meeting, held June 10–11 at San Antonio’s Marriott Rivercenter, prior to the Southern Baptist Convention gathering.
In her president’s address, national WMU President Kaye Miller, a member of Immanuel Baptist Church, Little Rock, Ark., cited 2 Chronicles 7:14, highlighting from the passage "humble yourselves" and "pray and seek God."
Miller recounted her experience growing up in Thailand, where her parents were career missionaries. She recalled her missionary surgeon father treating the sores of lepers.
"It took a special kind of man to humble himself before a leper, to sponge out foul-smelling wounds, to carefully wrap bandages around people no one else wanted to be around, to listen, to care, to love in Jesus’ name," she said.
Miller, a nurse, also remembered a motherless 2-year-old with AIDS whom no one wanted to hold or rock and the response to her appeal to fellow WMU members to help. Within hours, volunteers were waiting for their chance to care for the dying youngster, and they were with him when he died.
"What would happen if we, as God’s people, would truly pray and seek God?" she asked. "Often in our churches and in our personal lives, we spend much more time talking about prayer than actually praying. Let us, as Woman’s Missionary Union, keep calling ourselves by His name, keep praying and seeking His face so that we will keep reaching and teaching the generations."
Miller was re-elected president and Kathy Hillman of Waco, Texas, was re-elected recording secretary.
Mark Edworthy, International Mission Board (IMB) associate for Central and Eastern Europe, related a story about his experience serving in Poland when he was discouraged and received a letter from a man in jail who had heard him preach several years prior. Though the man had not made a decision to follow Christ at that time, he wrote Edworthy to thank him for sharing the gospel because he had later made the commitment.
Rebecca Hogg, who serves with her husband, Bill, as regional associate for Central Asia, said WMU prayer advocacy is the "backbone" of the region’s ministry with Muslim groups. "Over 99 percent of our region is Muslim," she said. "But don’t be despairing. I’m here to tell you, the church is alive and well in central Asia. Growth may be slow, but it’s steady."
She asked WMU members to pray for persecuted believers in churches in Iran, Uzbekistan and southeastern Turkey.
A missionary couple serving among Muslims in the Middle East and north Africa, who cannot be identified due to security reasons, shared its call to a dangerous, difficult field of service.
The wife told how her husband was called to international missions three years before her call.
"He knew he was called, and I knew I wasn’t," she said. After resisting for a couple of years, she agreed to begin the application process with the IMB. She asked God to either shut the door to missionary service or change her heart.
"In a 20-minute interview, God changed my heart," she testified.
Her husband said the IMB sends missionaries into the dangerous place they serve because "people are dying in that place without a witness," because of the love God has for those people and because they are victims of Islam.
"They’ve been taught who God isn’t," he said. "They need to know who God is through Jesus."
Debbie Carter, a North American Mission Board missionary to Topeka, Kan., told how Girls in Action, Young Women’s Missions Auxiliary and WMU set the foundation for her to hear God’s call to full-time missionary service. She and her husband heard the call at about the same time.
But during a counseling session, Sue Rader, then a missionary to Zambia, urged her to be sure her call was strong enough and clear enough that she could go alone to the mission field. Three weeks later, her husband was killed in a car accident.
Left alone with two children, Carter struggled to make sense of God’s call. But eventually she remarried and now serves as a NAMB missionary with Kaw Valley Baptist Association, encouraging 40 churches in 14 counties to "get outside their four walls, get outside their comfort zones … and get outside of the normal routines of church programming" to take Christ to the world.
Participants also marked the 100th anniversary of the WMU Training School and the 10th anniversary of Christian Women’s Job Corps. The program that teaches job and life skills to low-income women has 168 sites serving 2,134 participants and involving 13,163 volunteers. (Editor’s Network)
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