When Doug Hixon, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Pampa, mentioned taking the gospel to a group of bikers who gather by the hundreds of thousands by riding in on their hogs every summer to a small town in South Dakota, several members of his church were worried.

But when the worry wore off, two men who had rarely shared their faith were on board to go.

Once there, the two layman who accompanied Hixon to the 68th annual Sturgis Rally Aug. 4-9 shared their conversion testimonies about 100 times each and were part of seeing a recorded 1,365 professions of faith.

“I took the chairman of my deacons and another one of my deacons. We had been told that they were not going to be open to us being there. But what we found was just the opposite.”

Working with the Dakota Baptist Convention, the men were briefed on how to share their testimony in three minutes or less. The convention hosted a tent on the main street in Sturgis where passersby could register their names for a chance to win a new anniversary edition Harley Davidson motorcycle.

The catch: they had to sit and listen to a brief Christian testimony.

“It’s wasn’t some canned evangelism method,” Hixon said. “They were telling the story of ‘what my life was like before Christ, and what my life has been since I met Christ.’

“It’s been an incredible thing just to watch those men catch that vision for sharing the gospel with others. And not just them, but other people from around the country?retired folks, people who had never sat on a motorcycle. But all of them were used by God.”

Hixon said the three-man team was “kind of a beginning for us,” but he said he plans to go again with perhaps more people from Cornerstone.

“Sturgis has kind of a wild reputation and we didn’t want to get up there and think, ‘Wow, we shouldn’t be here.’ I was prepared for hedonism at its worst. And there are some things there that are not good, but most of that was in another part of town.”

“What we saw for the most part were normal people. And many of them had no clue that they were lost; many of them were hearing the gospel for the first time.”

Hixon said about 5,000 went through the tent and heard Baptists share their stories in a environment “where the Holy Spirit was present in a powerful way.”

Across the street was a “What’s Next?” tent where those who were willing were given an opportunity to connect with a church in their home cities.

“They were told, ‘Here are some churches that are biker-friendly. And if you don’t have a biker-friendly church, ‘here are some churches in your town.'”

The SBTC is beginning a missions partnership with the convention there?something Hixon said he is pleased with.

“One of the things I’m excited about is people who are interested in church planting might be willing to say, ‘Hey, here’s a place where I can go.'”

Evangelist Ronnie Hill of Fort Worth and the Dakota Baptist Convention staff led training each morning at Black Hills Baptist Church in Whitewood, S.D., about 18 miles southwest of Sturgis.

“All of this would not be possible without the volunteers and partners who have taken this ministry from the vision of one leader to a group of leaders to a national level,” DBC Executive Director Jim Hamilton told Baptist Press. “Folks who are physically not able to be at the rally are obedient witnesses by praying and by giving to the Southern Baptist Convention Cooperative Program, which helped fund this through the North American Mission Board.”

“God has called all of us as a family of Southern Baptists to impact the lostness that we see here in Sturgis,” Hamilton said.

Volunteers from 14 states were involved in the effort, including a team of seven chaplains from the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma.

?Baptist Press contributed to this report.

CORPUS CHRISTI?Asian pastors from around the state gathered in Corpus Christi in late July for the fourth annual SBTC Asian Pastor’s Family Retreat.

Some 136 people from 12 ethnic groups attended the conference. Forty-six Asian Baptist churches are affiliated with SBTC.

Speakers at the conference included Mike Gonzales, the director of SBTC’s Hispanic Initiative and Ethnic Ministries; IMB Korean Coordinator Gihwang Shin and pastors from around the world. Programs for youth and children were provided as well.

Speakers at the conference emphasized unity within the Asian community as well as the body of Christ as a whole.

The unity spoken of in the auditorium was displayed throughout the conference as attendees encouraged one another.

“Every year pastors feel renewed of God. They really feel encouragement from one another, and pastors’ wives also really feel the grace of God through the retreat and the meeting. And their children really enjoy it every year,” Hyoung Kim, SBTC consultant for Asian ministry, said.

The encouragement the conference provides is particularly important for Asian church planters; the conference will be the only vacation some of them take this year, Kim said.

Kim said next year’s conference is being planned. The SBTC website, sbtexas.com, will include details when available.

The annual Reach Texas Offering for state missions marked two milestones this year by surpassing $1 million for the first time and exceeding its goal of $1.1 million.

With the Reach Texas Offering week of prayer scheduled for Sept. 21-28 and a new offering year beginning Sept. 1, SBTC Missions Director Terry Coy said the expectations are high for 2008-09.

“We are very pleased with the Reach Texas giving this year, and we are anticipating another generous year as we seek to reach the unreached in Texas, which each year becomes a larger and more diverse proportion of the state’s population,” Coy said. “The challenge has never been greater in our state.”

In 2008-09, the promotional focus is on the Texas Borderlands, an area north of the Rio Grande and south of a line stretching from El Paso east to San Antonio and Corpus Christi.

Although the SBTC state missions offering supports ministry throughout Texas, the Borderlands focus is strategic, Coy explained.

“The Borderlands region of Texas is the most underevangelized area of the state and has the highest rate of unchurched people,” Coy said. “It also has the highest poverty levels and the highest population percentage of Hispanics.”

More than 4 million people live in the Borderlands, and more than 3 million are Hispanic.

Half of Reach Texas Offering gifts fund church planting, 25 percent goes to various missions endeavors, including disaster relief, missions mobilization, and church planter development, and 25 percent funds evangelism events and training.

For example, the SBTC disaster relief ministry this year mobilized trained “yellow cap” volunteers to the Rio Grande Valley following Hurricane Dolly. Reach Texas funds also bought Arabic Bibles for churches to use in reaching out to Muslims in two Texas cities.

Reach Texas helps fund the annual SENT missions conference, Empower Evangelism Conference, the Student Evangelism Conference, and numerous evangelism training events and resources.

Coy said the Reach Texas Offering’s focus on the Borderlands is motivated by the need to remind Texans of the mission field within the state.

“This is a region where the need for reaching people with the gospel is great,” Coy said. “We also wanted to place some emphasis on Hispanic church planting in general, and this goes hand in hand with that.”

The Reach Texas devotional booklet, available to churches for promoting the offering, covers eight days; each one includes a story of how Texans were touched through the ministry provided by the Reach Texas Offering plus a prayer point for each day. Day one, for instance, tells how SBTC disaster relief volunteers ministered to families in the Rosita Valley area of Eagle Pass near the Mexican border after a tornado struck in April 2007.

Day two tells of Jim and Marsha Wilson, planters of Esperanza del Rio Church in Del Rio. The couple met Ana, who like Lydia in Acts 16:13-15, responded to the gospel and then led her household to Christ.

Day five tells of Yorktown Baptist Church in Corpus Christi and their outreach to Muslims in their area following an SBTC People Groups Champion Project training.

The prayer point for day five states: “Pray that God will use your church to minister to the people groups in your area, and pray that the Lord will empower you to live a missional lifestyle reaching the nations right here in Texas.”

Reach Texas promotional resources, including a bulletin insert, are downloadable at sbtexas.com/reachtexas. For additional information, e-mail gharris@sbtexas.com or call the SBTC missions office at 877-953-7282.

BROWNSVILLE?Disaster relief volunteers from the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention were providing meals and assisting in cleanup in the Rio Grande Valley the week after Hurricane Dolly hit the far south Texas coast July 23.

Baptist volunteers were also working in the Mexican border town of Matamoros, across the Rio
Grande from Brownsville.

SBTC feeding units served in Rio Grande City and McAllen, about 70 miles inland, while assessment and cleanup teams were working in the coastal town of Port Isabel. First Baptist Church of
Brownsville was housing the cleanup and assessment teams, with assistance from First Baptist Church of Port Isabel, said Jim Richardson, SBTC Disaster Relief director.

As of July 29, the work had yielded at least two professions of faith.

Meanwhile, the SBTC’s Operation GO Mexico ministry, First Baptist Church of Brownsville, and Baptist Global Response were collaborating in Matamoros.

“Hurricane Dolly brought torrential rains and devastating winds to the area,” Richardson wrote in an e-mail. “Many of the families in Matamoros have been affected. First Baptist Church, Brownsville, and Operation GO are distributing rice and beans to those affected by Hurricane Dolly and sharing the hope of our Lord Jesus in the process.”

SBTC volunteers were cooking 10,000 meals a day for the Salvation Army canteens in McAllen, Richardson said. At First Baptist Church, Rio Grande City, volunteers prepared meals for the American Red Cross the weekend after the storm.

Churches from the Gulf Coast westward toward McAllen were affected by blackouts, falling trees and wind damage. Initially, 200,000 homes were without electricity, news reports said.

The cleanup and recovery work in Port Isabel, across the bridge from the South Padre Island resort community, yielded professions of faith from a husband and wife, said Julian Moreno, who was leading the assessment work there.

“It was our first work order in Port Isabel,” Moreno said. “The young boy in the home has been attending First Baptist Church, Port Isabel, but the parents have never attended the church, which is bilingual. So now the parents have made professions of faith and they plan to be at the church next Sunday.”

Moreno said the greatest needs in the coastal area around Port Isabel, where Dolly hit hardest, are chainsaws and blue tarps to cover damaged houses and businesses.

Janice Young, a member and bookkeeper at Portway Baptist Church in Brownsville, spent the night before the storm hit and all day July 23 at the church, which sheltered about 60 people who rode out the storm there.

Brownsville is about 20 miles west of South Padre Island.

“We had some damage on the steeple and water damage inside the church,” Young said. “We lost a couple of ceiling tiles and the rug was wet from the entrance to about three pews back. It’s a mess around here.”

The storm also damaged Young’s mobile home and knocked out electricity in her neighborhood.

In McAllen, pastor Luis Canchola of Cornerstone Baptist Church said his city was not as heavily hit as Brownsville to the east, but the damage was notable.

“We meet in a plaza, and there was some damage to the roof. The landscaping around it was damaged, trees uprooted, marquee blown out all in pieces this morning. As far as the interior of the church, thank God, it’s OK.”

Canchola said church members placed 50-pound sandbags around the entrances to the space where the church meets to prevent water damage.

BROWNSVILLE?For the third consecutive year, Criswell College sent students to the border town of Brownsville to prayer-walk, witness, distribute tracts, and help the city’s First Baptist Church in a weeklong Vacation Bible School, held July 13-18.

The 11-student team shared the gospel on the street more than 300 times, and their efforts during the VBS helped bring 27 children to faith in Christ from the 243 enrolled.

“We were encouraged to know that the students and members of the school’s administration and the alumni association were praying for us even before the team arrived,” said FBC Brownsville Pastor Steve Dorman.

“As a pastor I can tell you that it helps for our church to have a face-to-face relationship with a school that we and our state convention [SBTC] support. Our people can see where their money is going, and that it helps fund a biblically conservative institution,” Dorman added.

The students’ street ministry garnered the attention of the local newspaper, earning them front-page coverage July 15 in a Brownsville Herald article titled: “Spreading the word: Bible students come to Brownsville for missionary work.”

Criswell College senior Halston Potts shared the gospel with the newspaper’s reporter and photographer, both of whom said they were Catholic.

“They had to listen to me,” Potts said. “I had their attention for as long as I wanted because they were doing their jobs.”

Potts said the photographer actually carried the conversation.

“I could see the Lord was dealing with him.”

The photographer continued asking questions about conversion and salvation, Potts said.

The TEXAN asked Potts if he knew how many people accepted Christ through street witnessing, and he said he didn’t know.

“I’m not really into keeping track of those numbers. I’m more interested in planting gospel seeds,” said
Potts, who believes he is called by God to mission work.

Potts explained that if anyone expressed interest in the tracts’ content, or if he sensed God leading him to press gospel claims to their hearts, then he’d do that.

“I think the trip will greatly improve my witness to other people, mainly Hispanics,” Potts said. “I can identify with that culture a bit better and can now be a better witness to Hispanics.”

Led by Baltazar Alvarez, assistant professor of biblical and theological studies at the college, team members also completed a missions practicum as part of their collegiate studies.

Alvarez said the trip held a four-fold emphasis: evangelism, missions, and sociological and cultural education.

“The entire city was our missions laboratory,” said Alvarez, who noted that students would also write an academic paper regarding the trip.

“While it’s nice to see the lights go on in students’ eyes in the classroom, it’s even better in this open, live lab that is Brownsville,” he said, adding that Brownsville, whose populace is about 98 percent Hispanic, provides students a valuable cross-cultural missions experience.

Dorman said the missions endeavor “helps us understand where and how we can best reach our own Jerusalem.”

“We hope they come back every year, and bring more and more students,” Dorman said. “They’re such a huge blessing to our church.”

Potts is of a similar mindset: “I have a sense the trip won’t be my last to Brownsville. I think God will send me back there to help in some way.”

FORT WORTH?Gene Getz, speaking at the 2008 Real Men of Impact Conference, offered a simple challenge to the men in the audience: love one another.

The theme, “Hold Fast,” comes from Job 17:26 in which Job says, “I hold fast my righteousness and will not let it go. My heart does not reproach any of my days (NASB).” The conference was held at Glenview Baptist Church in Fort Worth.

In his final address to the conference, Getz, the keynote speaker and a noted pastor and author, discussed the process of “becoming men who love Jesus and want to reflect his life.”

This process is not intended for solitary believers but for believers working together within the body of Christ, Getz said.

“We don’t grow in isolation,” Getz added. “We grow as each part does his work within the body of Christ. Anyone who says I don’t need anyone else doesn’t understand the scriptures ? The Bible is very clear that we need each other.”

Men are especially prone to minimize their need for other believers, Getz said.

“I think as men, particularly, sometimes we are guilty of being isolationists, of being those who live in their own world who are afraid to be vulnerable?who are even afraid to become involved in other people’s lives. So I think there’s a particular message to men: We are members of one another.” Getz explained.

Getz offered several “one another” statements from the New Testament that describe how Christians grow together as members of one another within the body of Christ.

The first such statement is found in Romans 12:10 which reads, “Be devoted to one another in brotherly love; give preference to one another in honor. ?”

Brotherly love can be difficult for some men, Getz said, because their fathers were reluctant to show affection.

Getz asserted that the local church can help those men to learn as adults what they did not learn in childhood.

“One of the most exciting things about the church of Jesus Christ is that we can be a reparenting organism,” Getz, pastor emeritus of Fellowship Bible Church North in Plano, said. “We can reparent people. There are people who come to our churches who don’t understand love. They’ve never been loved in a deep sense. They come from dysfunctional families, and they need to come into a family that’s functional, and that’s the family of God,” Getz added.

As men and women are “reparented,” Getz continued, they learn how to parent their children in a more loving and affectionate way.

Brotherly love should manifest itself not only in changed families but in service to one another within the body of Christ, Getz said.

Such love is similar to but distinct from the love commanded in Romans 13:8, the next of Getz’s “one another” statements. That love, Getz noted, is the unconditional agape love that God displays for his creatures, which has a profound effect on the church, according to Getz.

“When we love one another as Christ loves us, it produces unity within the body of Jesus Christ,” Getz said.

Conversely, Getz said, ungodly behavior within the church often has different results. Citing examples, Getz said:

?”When Jesus Christ tells us to honor one another above ourselves and we honor ourselves above others;”
?”When Jesus Christ says be devoted to one another in brotherly love and we focus on ourselves rather than other people;”
?”When Jesus Christ tells us to serve him and we serve ourselves, what does that create?”

“A dysfunctional body,” Getz answered, building to a crescendo as he spoke.

Getz, who called a church that lacks unity “dysfunctional” and a “great tragedy,” challenged the men in the audience to work to avoid dysfunction in their churches and work in unity in accordance with God’s design.

“You men, all of us are to take the lead in creating a supportive community of love,” Getz said.
Getz noted that such a community of love has an important responsibility: restoring those who are trapped in sin.

In Galatians 6:1-2 Paul writes, “Brethren, even if anyone is caught in any trespass, you who are spiritual, restore such a one in a spirit of gentleness; each one looking to yourself, so that you too will not be tempted.”

This process should be restorative and carried out with wisdom, humility and caution, Getz said.

“This is involving someone who is trapped in sin. They’re going in the wrong direction, and we care enough to go after them and do everything we possibly can to restore them and set them free,” Getz said. “That’s a task for more than one person who loves Jesus and loves people. This is a difficult task that should be done with incredible humility considering ourselves as we could also be tempted.”