As I write this, I’m just coming off my jet lag from a meeting in Hawaii. No, I don’t expect sympathy and yes, it was awesome. Tammi and I wandered about for a few days like the tourists we were, commenting endlessly about how pretty and nice everything was. It was perfect weather, a consistently lovely environment, and a totally laid-back culture. All three of these traits dull in their charm over a longer period of time than I’ve experienced them, I suspect.

That’s one reason (or three) that I looked forward to returning to wintery Texas. A conversation with a local Hawaiian pastor clarified the matter for me. There are some good reasons why every place is not so idyllic as a tropical island.

My pastor friend shared some of his concerns about the way the Polynesian culture tends to affect Christians and harden non-Christians to the gospel. People go to Hawaii or move to Hawaii because they like the easy-going nature of the place. It translates into much more than the use of time. Urgency about temporal and spiritual matters is hard to translate into a culture where seasons don’t change much, where food grows wild, and where the sun always shines. I’m sure there are 100 such places around the world that have similar appeal.

The cultural inertia in paradise tempts people into an easy attitude of tolerance and torpor. The delightful relaxation of the tourist can become the careless malaise of the resident. French expressionist painter Paul Gauguin is an extreme example of how what seems like paradise is found to be less so over time. His distaste for European sensibilities led him to move to the South Pacific region in search of the more perfect primitive life. His best known painting of that era was titled “Whence? What? Whither?” and implied that the answers were: we come from nowhere, we’re nothing, and we’re going to nowhere when we die. Paul Gauguin found the same despair in Polynesia he left behind in Europe. He tried to kill himself but instead died of syphilis and alcoholism at 54 years.

My point is not that the tropics killed Gauguin but that the glory of paradise initially masked to him universal aspects of the human experience. Some, living in a glorious locale, are less sensitive and remain focused on the mask. So these lotus eaters worship the waves or the ski slopes instead of the God who made seas and mountains.

Desert places also show the wonder of God, but in a different way. Anyone who just lies down there will eventually perish from the heat or be killed by the local fauna. The desert inspires more ambition than do tropical islands. In fact most places will make a person very uncomfortable if he does nothing to improve his situation. Heat, cold, fresh water, food, and safety are only rarely balanced for comfort and survival in the places people live. It is easier for us to see the need for spiritual change because we must daily change something physical to provide for ourselves and our families. Reality, to casual observers, is closer to the surface in Texas (or Ohio or Pennsylvania) than it is in Hawaii.

God reveals himself in creation, all of it?even in the physical laws that govern the construction of human designs. That means created things tell the truth about their creator. Hawaii speaks of a God who loves beauty and who has purpose and who sustains lovely created things even as sin eats away at them. Paradise is a place more temporary than the eternal God, though; it is an expression of his but not God itself. I’ve seen places in Iowa and Russia and Africa that bear the same message in their own unique voices.

The temptation of each place is different. In a challenging environment, we may tend to take pride in our accomplishments without regard to the God who blesses us. In a big city we might be cynical toward God’s power or goodness because of the poverty and crime that concentrates in large populations. Some place we consider marvelous will tempt us to worship its sensory glory without worshipping the God of all things. In each place, God speaks to those who have ears.

Some places are God’s art galleries, others grocery stores, lumberyards, storehouses, and so on. I’ve visited a few of those art galleries and each one has a culture that is challenging to Christian ministry in a unique way. People love the art too much. Southern Baptists should do more to export prayer and money and energy and people to those who minister among the art gallery residents, and to millions of tourists each year. These missionaries need more than our respect.

Have you noticed that many of the most popular places people go in the U.S. are in areas where Southern Baptist, even truly evangelical churches, are small and few? We go there in large numbers but spend little time considering the people for whom the hot spots are their year-round homes.

The entire Rocky Mountain range is within what we used to call pioneer areas of missions. The same is true of California and the Pacific Northwest. If you go on autumn leaf tours in Vermont or Maine, you’re way off the beaten path for the SBC. The largest cities of our nation are in New York, Illinois, and California?not strongholds for the gospel. Do you ride a Harley? The largest bike rally in the U.S. takes place in South Dakota each summer. You can ride through a lot of high plains towns without seeing a Southern Baptist church, but people live there after you’ve gone home to Athens or Lubbock.

One great task of our North American Mission Board is to look at the entire map of our continent and strategize church planting and evangelism for the places where the need is greatest and the resources least. It appears to me that the need for gospel ministry and paucity of resources coincide in the same parts of the North American map. That’s why we in Texas emphasize the Annie Armstrong Offering for North American Missions each March.

This offering has a goal of $61 million this year and goes to missionary support, church planting, and evangelism. This year’s theme is “Live with Urgency,” a message sometimes difficult to convey to those who live in the most unevangelized places in the U.S.

Our churches, with their relative wealth, have the obligation to assist with ministry elsewhere without expecting anything in return. In fact, one of the motivating factors in the founding of the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention was the conviction that we as churches have a commission to give and go to ministry beyond our communities and beyond our state. Our continued partnership with NAMB is one evidence of this. The sacrificial involvement of our churches in ministry in new work areas is another. I truly think we should increase this focus.

Churches in the Bible Belt are funded, furnished, and staffed in ways unheard of 20 or 30 years ago. We have orchestras while some Northern and Western mission starts use a boom box or sing acappella. We gripe if we have to wear a sweater to church while in some corners of our nation, new churches use space heaters and wear their coats all through worship. Music programs are fine and so is central air, but you get my point. Missions is something we all do, by some definition, but we take pretty good care of ourselves first.

Surely we can do more than we do. I believe in Southern Baptist missions because this strategic look at needs seems more rational than just an anecdotal one whereby I send to places where I know people.
Southern Baptist missions will send help to places I’ve never heard of to people worshipping in a language I couldn’t identify. It depends less on what I know and care about than a homemade missions scheme does. I think it’s worth supporting in all ways. We who read this have the money to help.

If your church doesn’t do a special promotion for North American missions, go to AnnieArmstrong.com to find out more about the need and ways to help. The stories are heartening and the need is great. There are videos of missionaries from Hawaii, Montana, Oklahoma, Virginia, and other places across the continent. We ought to care without being “heartened,” though. The Cooperative Program and the Annie Armstrong offering provide a way to do this that will make a difference in the place that needs it most right now. It’s like a smart bomb for supporting missions.

Four churches whose affiliations were received by the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention the week of Jan. 28 pushed the convention past 2,000 congregations in its 10th year.

The congregations are Luz de Betel Baptist Church in Austin, Gateway Baptist Church of Big Spring, Calvary Baptist Church of Snyder, and Denton Chinese Church of Denton.

“On average, a church every other day affiliates with the SBTC,” said Troy Brooks, director of Minister-Church Relations. “We are thankful that so many churches are choosing to partner with us as we reach Texas and touch the world. Since we are a confessional fellowship, churches wishing to affiliate with the SBTC complete an affiliation application indicating their agreement with the doctrinal position of the SBTC [Baptist Faith and Message] and make an initial contribution to the Cooperative Program. Frequently we are contacted by churches that have already voted to affiliate but for one reason or another, they have not completed and sent in the affiliation form. For that church to be counted, the SBTC needs the affiliation form.”

“The SBTC is blessed to have reached this milestone in the affiliation of these churches,” Brooks added.

The SBTC will mark 10 years this November when it meets for its annual meeting at Houston’s First Baptist Church. It constituted in Houston in 1998.

DALLAS?There are three competing approaches to the Constitution’s First Amendment, the most valid being the one in which government fairly accommodates the free expression of its citizens’ varied religious viewpoints, Richard D. Land told a Criswell College audience during a lecture series held Jan. 29-31 in Dallas.

Land, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) president and a leading evangelical voice on cultural issues who once taught at Criswell, spoke on the subject “What Does God Have to Do with America?Past, Present and Future?” during the Criswell Theological Lectures.

Land began his three lectures by explaining the context of Thomas Jefferson’s famous “wall of separation” letter to the Danbury Baptists, and ended noting the open religious speech?mostly biblical allusions, quotations and public prayers?of former U.S. presidents while in office.

Of the three approaches championed by First Amendment advocates?the avoidance position, the acknowledgement position, and the accommodation position?Land said the latter most closely honors the American founders’ intent and historic Baptist principles.

“The accommodation position would say, ‘If the people in the community want to have a manger scene on the courthouse lawn, then they ought to be allowed to collect the money and buy a manger scene and the government should accommodate their wish by allowing its display at the appropriate Christmas time, and they should provide police protection for it and the lighting for it and possibly even the storage for it during the Christmas season,” Land explained.

“But that also means that if there are Jewish people in the community and they want to have a Menorah scene at the appropriate time in the Jewish calendar, then they ought to be able to have a Menorah celebrating Judaism as well. And if there are Muslims in that community, then at the appropriate time they ought to be allowed to display a Muslim scene. Accommodation means the government is an umpire. And the government makes sure that everybody plays fair.”

Land said the avoidance position, championed by groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), seeks to keep all religious expression out of the public square, while the acknowledgment position “says that it’s perfectly all right for the government to acknowledge on behalf of the people the majority religion, that, after all, Christians are the majority.”

“What we should want as Baptists,” Land said, “is maximum accommodation. That is your view and my view and everyone else’s view [included] in the public square.”

Land said President Jefferson?perhaps the most frequently quoted advocate of church-state separation?never intended his famous phrase “a wall of separation between church and state” to mean anything but that citizens are free to follow their religious or irreligious consciences without the state’s favoritism or infringement.

Land explained that Baptists such as John Leland championed the First Amendment guaranteeing “a free church in a free state,” and that early American Baptist forebear Roger Williams had written more than a century before Jefferson that “there needs to be a wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the state to protect the garden from the encroachment of the wilderness.”
Land said, “The last thing we as Baptists should want is government-sponsored religion. Government-sponsored religion is like getting a hug from a python.”

Jefferson’s “wall of separation” phrase has been claimed by proponents of the accommodation position and by groups like the ACLU that champion the avoidance position.

But Land said if Jefferson had intended that government avoid religious expression in its domain, it is curious that Jefferson, the Sunday after penning his famous letter to the Danbury Baptists, attended Sunday worship services in the U.S. House of Representatives chamber led by his friend Leland, a Baptist pastor from Connecticut.

Land said the ERLC’s vision statement?”An American society that affirms and practices Judeo-Christian values rooted in biblical authority”?alarmed a New York Times reporter who asked, “What about separation of church and state?”

Land said he answered: “Well, do you see the word ‘church’ or the word ‘state’ in that vision statement? It says an American society that affirms Judeo-Christian values rooted in biblical authority.”

“She said, ‘Well, no.’ I said, ‘See, what we’re calling for is for people of faith to go out and by the way they live and by their sharing their faith, to change our society so our society becomes a society that affirms and practices Judeo-Christian values.'”

“I explained to her that it is the people of faith who are the engine that drives the locomotive of the church and society, and the government is the caboose,” Land said. “It comes along behind. I said, ‘I know you believe in democratic and representative government. So if the majority of Americans affirmed and practiced Judeo-Christian values, you would want to see that reflected in the nation’s laws, right?’ She said she’d have to think about that.”

One of the most egregious examples of the avoidance position being imposed by the courts, Land said, was the 5-4 Supreme Court ruling that a female high school student in Santa Fe, Texas had acted unconstitutionally “because the school district had paid for the microphone [during a public prayer before a football game]. I’m not kidding. I couldn’t make that up.”

When religious speech is challenged, Land said, “Their right not to hear ends with our right to free expression and free speech.”

There is “theological imperialism” in places such as Iran, where every woman must cover her head under penalty of law, Land said, and there is “supreme secularism” in places such as France, where if you are a Muslim girl, “you can either wear your head covering or you can attend public school, but you can’t do both.”

“And then we have what we call in the United States principled pluralism, where in Muskogee, Okla.?about as deep into Red State country as you can get?the decision was made that Muslim girls may or may not wear their headscarves in public school. It’s up to the Muslim parents and each Muslim girl. They are not going to be discriminated against and they are not going to be disallowed from going to the public schools because they are practicing their faith. That is what our Baptist forefathers had in mind, and it is the principle that we should promote in the public square. And if we do so, we will benefit because all that Baptists and Christians have ever needed to flourish is a level playing field.”