When Mexican federal police showed up on his front lawn in response to a threat against his family, International Mission Board missionary Douglas Cantu (not his actual name) knew it was time to relocate. The violence associated with the drug cartels in Mexico had been evident in the region?drug-related deaths and gunfire?but there had been no direct threats to the well-being of Cantu and his family until that night.

Escalating violence between the four major Mexican drug cartels has, in some regions, spilled over into the civilian population and is having a chilling effect on mission teams’ travel across the U.S. southern border. But, said missionaries on both sides of the border, with strategic planning, good communications with Mexican nationals, and a healthy dose of common sense, smaller teams can still safely venture into Mexico and continue their ministries with local congregations.

“We don’t want to scare them from what God has called them to do. But be cautious and get as informed as possible,” said Cantu, who now works in the region of Mexico called “the Heart of Darkness” where less than 1 percent of the population is evangelical Christian. God can work amid the drug war, he said.

Terry Simons, chief deputy in the Victoria County Sheriff’s Department and a former Texas pastor, called Mexico a “war zone.” He said the rise in border violence became most evident in 2000 with the emergence of the Zeta gang, the enforcement arm of the Gulf Cartel. The leader of the Zeta gang, Gregorio Sauceda Gamboa, was arrested April 29 in Matamoros, just across the border from Brownsville, according to Associated Press reports.

Simons, who helped coordinate mission trips into Mexico from his church in Quemado, said there is a high risk for the traditional mission teams that populate the Texas-Mexico border each summer. Although mission teams have not been targeted, his concern is with the overall level of violence in some regions.

“You can’t pick where a criminal element will choose to have a gunfight,” he said.

Daniel White, pastor of First Baptist Church, Eagle Pass, just blocks from the border, said the one thing the narcortaficantes (drug traffickers) can’t do is shoot straight. Use of an automatic weapon is not a skill they have honed and much more than the intended target can get hit.

“When you have war in your city there is going to be collateral damage,” White said.

The city of Piedras Negras, he continued, is controlled by the Gulf Cartel and the April 26 assassination of its newly appointed Police Chief Arturo Navarro Lopez is evidence of such Mafia-style manipulations. The city is run by elected officials but many of those authorities White accused of being ultimately beholden to the cartel.

The violence and intimidation tactics are nothing new to Scottie Stice, who served as a church planter in El Salvador for the IMB and is now an SBTC field ministry strategist. Dealing with and avoiding the cartels were part of the landscape of living in Central America.

“It’s not a new concept,” he said. The menace has simply migrated north to the U.S. border.

CHANGING STRATEGIES

With reports of drug-related violence along the Texas-Mexico border, mission teams once destined for their annual cross-cultural ministries are reconsidering their options and sending teams out of harm’s way. Pastors who coordinate mission projects along the border from Brownsville to El Paso report the number of teams they will be working with this summer is down significantly.

First Baptist Church, Brownsville, plans and coordinates mission trips into Matamoros and the surrounding region through its Missions Outreach Center.

Thirty teams filtered through the facility last year but that number, MOC Director Dwayne Spearman said, is down to 10 or 11.

Mike Due, a Port Arthur pastor, said the number of teams he usually directs into Mexico is down by half. As of May 1 only 10 teams are scheduled to venture south. That decline is representative of the decisions being made across the U.S. regarding missions work in

FORT WORTH?Jason was panhandling for beer money outside a gas station one Wednesday night where Damon Halliday stopped to buy a Pepsi.

Hungry, homeless and half-drunk, Jason (not his real name) approached Halliday, pastor of Keystone Community Outreach Church, located in the middle of a Fort Worth housing project. “Jason asked to borrow a dollar, but I told him I couldn’t do that if he’d buy beer with it,” recalled Halliday, who continued talking with Jason and soon mentioned Jesus.

“God doesn’t love me,” Jason barked. “God has abandoned me. God has forsaken me. I have no reason to live. I’ve lost my job and my family.”

“Any time I mentioned God, Jason got irate,” Halliday said. “But I could tell he was an intelligent man, and the Lord showed me how to reach him.”

Halliday said he recalled what Alan Streett, professor of evangelism at Criswell College, taught about two kinds of evangelists: one proclaims the truths of God, which some people debate. The other is a witness: a person who tells others about their personal and undebatable experience with God.

“You can’t tell me that I don’t love you,” Halliday told Jason.

“Well, I guess I can’t,” Jason replied.

“I do, so give me a hug,” Halliday insisted.

The black preacher and white alcoholic hugged.

“Mark, you can’t tell me that I don’t know that God loves you,” Halliday continued.

“You’re getting a little tricky now,” Jason said.

“God told me to tell you he loves you and he wants me to give you another hug,” Halliday replied.

Reticent to elicit a response to the gospel from a drunk man, Halliday gave Jason his business card and said, “I’m committed to help you, and I will as much as I can. But you need to have sober judgment. Call me tomorrow.”

To Halliday’s surprise, Jason called. The men met for two hours, but Jason was still hostile toward God and the church.

“You keep trying to rationalize this thing,” Halliday told Jason. “If you’ll surrender your life to God, I guarantee he will change it.”

Jason prayed penitently and also committed his life to Christ that day.

“The day before, this guy was suicidal and homeless,” Halliday said. “But the next
day, he comes to church to find God, and I find out he’s a computer genius with a four-page resume and a bachelor’s degree in business administration.

Jason is the greatest example of how a commitment to practice and teach evangelism blesses an individual and the body of Christ, Halliday said.

“He has impacted the church with his amazing giftedness, and he is committed to build the body of Christ too,” he added, saying that Jason, within a week of his own salvation experience, brought a friend to church who also became a Christian. The two were baptized on the same day.

Halliday said Jason was just the guy God had in mind to format and operate Keystone’s new audio/visual system.

“God sent Jason to handle that ministry,” Halliday said. “And in 10 weeks’ time, God restored almost every good thing in his life,” including a reunion with his children and a job in the computer field.

“That’s a picture of what God has called us to do. And when we do what we’re supposed to do, God is glorified, people are saved and the church grows,” Halliday said, adding that he wonders what would’ve happened if he just gave Jason a dollar and kept on walking.

Church in the ‘hood

Founded more than 20 years ago, Keystone’s attendance had dwindled to about a dozen. The pastor was in ill health and looking for a successor. Two years ago, Halliday?who had left his mechanic job with American Airlines to attend college and prepare for ministry?met with the retiring pastor. That was Halliday’s introduction to his first pastorate.

Halliday couldn’t think of a better location for a church?in a notorious Fort Worth neighborhood known as Stop 6. Named after a rail-line station, Stop 6 is rife with prostitution, drugs and gang activity.
Additionally, the church sits inside a government housing project. To Halliday’s thinking, the church is strategically positioned for proclaiming Jesus Christ.

“The reason God sent me here is because I’m a product of the same kind of environment,” Halliday said. “I grew up in the inner city of West Philadelphia. It was a lo

NEW BRAUNFELS–Despite the challenging economy, the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention continues to fund Texas missions and evangelism while sending 55 percent of Cooperative Program gifts from local churches toward Southern Baptist missions and ministry worldwide.

That was the message the SBTC Executive Board heard during reports at its meeting April 27-28 at T Bar M Retreat Center in New Braunfels.

Faithful giving, a record state missions offering from 2008, and careful spending priorities allowed the convention staff to report a positive financial picture for the first third of 2009.

“There’s a heightened interest in the Cooperative Program among SBTC churches,” reported SBTC Executive Director Jim Richards, adding that loyalty to the missions giving plan is growing. “We had to rebuild confidence in the Cooperative Program over our first 10 years and now churches are beginning to once again see the validity and wisdom of CP.”

NEW MISSIONARY PLANTER
That cooperative effort of the 2,141 affiliated churches made it possible for the executive board to approve a new church planting missionary associate, Chuy Avila, for outreach through “Project Borderlands Reach.” Avila will serve the highly under-evangelized area of Laredo as a missionary church planter.

Avila has served as a church-planting strategist for Hispanic work at the Tennessee Baptist Convention for the last decade. He has prior experience with Midland Baptist Association and served on the Hispanic Task Force of the North American Mission Board. He will begin Aug. 1.

A native of Juarez, Mexico, Avila said he sensed a call to ministry as a child when he watched the transformation of his father’s life after a medical missionary led him to Christ.

“I’m a strong believer in the Cooperative Program. That was one of your missionaries who showed up in my home and changed my father and my family. He managed to buy a tent, Bibles and pay his expenses because people like you prayed and paid for missions.”

Convinced that he is called to equip church planters, Avila said God had burdened him with the spiritual needs in Laredo where over 95 percent of the quarter-million population is Hispanic.

Board member George Levant described the desperate need to plant churches in the region where he has lived for more than 25 years.

“If we reach 1 percent of the Hispanic population [in Laredo] that would be four times more than we’re reaching now,” he said, describing the conditions in which only a dozen Southern Baptist churches minister.

“Voting is not enough and giving is not enough. We need to pray for him,” Levant said in recommending Avila. “It’s a lot of work to do. I feel with all my heart this is the man for this hour.”

Missions Director Terry Coy said Avila would serve as a catalyst for church planting, developing a comprehensive three- to five-year strategy for starting new churches and training planters. The effort will be jointly funded by NAMB and the SBTC.
Responding to a question about the availability of Hispanic pastors and church planters, Coy said the supply is inadequate to meet the need.

“We’re trying to raise those up, sometimes from the harvest and sometimes from the churches,” Coy said.

Others are being cultivated through SBTC’s Hispanic Initiative coordinated with Criswell College, Jacksonville College and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary to prepare Hispanic pastors and leaders for the next generation of Hispanic ministry in Texas. Seven students are taking advantage of the training through Criswell College.

58 NEW AFFILIATIONS
The board also approved the affiliation of 58 more churches and heard a report from the credentials committee that shows a pace of two or three additional churches per week. Seventeen churches were removed from convention affiliation, 14 of them having disbanded or merged with another church. Two voted to no longer relate to SBTC and one became a non-denominational congregation.

A request by board member Terry Turner of Mesquite seeking consideration of a supportive relationship with a local pregnancy resource center was referred to the Facilitating Ministries department.

The executive committee also reported they had followed through with a request to allocate from the previous year’s surplus a grant of $65,000 for the Dakotas Baptist Convention. As part of an ongoing partnership with DBC, the funds will assist with church planting leadership development and the Sturgis Bike Rally evangelistic outreach.

OPERATING AT SURPLUS
Messengers to last year’s convention approved a 2009 SBTC budget of $23.9 million, which reflected a 14 percent increase over the prior year. Giving through the cooperative Program by local churches had funded around 99 percent of that ambitious goal as of the board meeting.

At the end of April, two days after the board met, Cooperative Program giving was within a few thousand dollars of the 2009 budget for the first four months of the year. Prudent spending has allowed the convention to operate at a surplus for the year to date.

Vern Hargrave of the accounting firm of Pickens Snodgrass Koch reported a clean audit of SBTC financial statements.

You should be proud of the way business is conducted,” he told the board. “It is done in a very professional and efficient manner.”

Addressing the CP giving report after the meeting, Sookwan Lee, co-pastor of Seoul Baptist Church in Houston, told the TEXAN: “Other denominations have a top to bottom” approach for funding while some churches attempt to fund missions “acting by themselves.”

Recalling that the Southern Baptist Convention was formed to fund missions, Lee added, “The most important thing for a church is missions. If we do not contribute to the Cooperative Program, the convention doesn’t mean anything.”

Board member Terry Turner of Mesquite recalled that his church was planted through the use of CP funds.

“We saw the benefit of church planting and how the SBC poured into our ministry,” he said, explaining why Mesquite Friendship Baptist Church values the Cooperative Program.

In a final item of business, SBTC cousel Shelby Sharpe was honored by the executive board for his service since the convention’s founding with a framed copy of Proverbs 3:5.

Bible open on her lap, Ann sits in the same pew of the church she’s attended for nearly 15 years. Distracted about her husband’s joblessness, she hardly hears the pastor talking about meeting others’ point of need, and suddenly that strikes a nerve.

“What about our point of need?” she inquires silently, reflecting on her husband, Fred, who’s been jobless and depressed for months.

She reaches for a prayer request card from the pew rack, but the echo of Fred’s voice in her head grabs her arm. He’d told her explicitly not to tell anyone of his plight.

Meanwhile, Fred, who is not a Christian, sits at home in his recliner, channel surfing. Every button on the remote temporarily blunts his emotions of anger, frustration, despair, shame.

Tom sits across the aisle from Ann. A long-time, active church member, he traces the outline of colored shapes on his pants leg cast from the stained-glass window as he ponders his lack of a job and wonders why all that the church has done is add his name to a prayer list.

“Jesus met people’s needs. Why doesn’t my church help me with mine?” he thinks.

Tom can’t understand why God’s other children aren’t ministering to him. In the midst of a vibrant church family, he feels like a spiritual orphan.

In the current economic downturn, churches across Texas have increasing numbers of members like Ann and Tom, who face the challenges of unemployment?alone.

But there are also increasing numbers of churches responding to the needs of “Anns” and “Toms” and even “Freds” by offering a variety of career helps in addition to adding names to prayer lists.

“Our ministry is still in the developmental stages,” said Derek Rowden, minister to single adults at North Richland Hills Baptist Church. “But we try to encourage and equip the men and women in our community who are experiencing career transitions.”

The church recently began its “Third Thursday at Three” ministry to unemployed people. Meeting at 3 p.m. every third Thursday of the month, Rowden recruits career coaches to speak at the meetings, who offer the gamut of career advice.

“We’ve found that people are looking for all kinds of help in their job searches,” he said. “And this gives an opportunity to minister to those not in our church fellowship.”

Lake Pointe Church in Rockwall has a 12-year track record of ministering to jobseekers, offering much of it online. A couple of clicks on the site’s home page takes surfers to one of the most complete, church-sponsored career search-and-advice sites to be found anywhere on the web.

The “Job Connection” site represents a ministry that is a networking, support and resource group assisting local residents in job searches. The fee-free service entails a five-pronged approach:

?weekly meetings for networking and informational purposes, including resume writing, interviewing techniques, etc.;

?e-mail-based user group offering job leads;

?a job resource room at the church offers job seekers daily Internet access with free coffee, copying and faxing privileges, and also offers free access to Crossroad Career’s subscription-based website (crossroadscareer.org) and direct web links to more than 300 Dallas-area corporations;

?a lecture series aimed at organizing and preparing job seekers; and

?resources from the church’s media library that include CDs and DVDs regarding career-based information and training.

Helpful links at Lake Pointe’s site include the Christian Career Center Website, Making Career Decisions Within God’s Will for Your Life, Exploring Careers to Discover Your Career Niche, The Career Check Up Inventory,

PLANO?Pastors and lay leaders from four states gathered for a conference at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano on April 25 to get equipped with tools to start ministries to some of the more than 13 million unemployed American workers.

“We haven’t seen this many people experience job loss in 25-30 years,” said Lynn Guillory, founder and executive director of Career Transition Ministries Network (CTMN), which organized the conference. “It’s a tremendous harvest field out there and a tremendous opportunity.

“We use ‘job-seekers’ in a rather generic way to mean those who are underemployed, unemployed, misemployed or even nervously employed,” Guillory said.

Since 2000, CTMN, a nonprofit parachurch ministry based in Dallas, has offered free weekly meetings and weekend workshops that go beyond teaching job skills by ministering from a biblical perspective to those in career transition. But as unemployment numbers hit unprecedented levels, CTMN’s leadership became burdened to do more.

“It was apparent to our ministry that we were uniquely equipped to recruit more workers for the harvest field by providing churches with a ministry model to quickly establish a ministry that addresses the needs of the millions who are unemployed,” Guillory said.

CTMN partnered with the Christian Coach Academy, Crossroads Career Network and Crown Financial Ministries to put on the conference. Leaders were given resources to help them create a Christ-centered, biblically based ministry model, where the gospel is presented, believers are encouraged, and job seekers are taught cutting-edge job search skills.

Guillory, a professional in the human resources industry for more than 35 years, opened the conference with an appeal to church leaders to see career transition ministry as a harvest field for the kingdom of God.

“If you’ve looked at people who have experienced job loss, you know that many times they are harassed?harassed by corporate America, harassed by work and the pressures of this world?and many are dispirited because they have never come to faith in Jesus Christ,” Guillory said.

“While we want everyone to be gainfully employed, I think we must focus on the real opportunity. We believe that it is our job to walk with a job seeker through that trial called ‘job loss.’ We believe it’s a faith journey because we’ve seen many people come to faith in Jesus Christ.”

Not only does Guillory see it as a ministry of evangelism to the unsaved, but he also considers it a ministry of encouragement to believers.

“Christians are losing their jobs, as best as we can determine, at the exact same rate as unbelievers, because while the Bible is full of promises, nowhere in Scripture do we find a promise of employment stability,” Guillory said. He said churches must not overlook the opportunity to minister to church members during such difficult times.

Susan Whitcomb, author of “The Christian Career Journey” and president of the Christian Coach Academy, encouraged conference attendees to create ministries that show love to job seekers and help them see their work as worship.

Using the acronym J.O.B., which stands for Journey Of Becoming, Whitcomb said employment is a “journey of becoming more like Christ. It’s a setting for us to know him and make him known even if we’re in secular environments.”

Jim Symcox, a member of Parkhills Baptist Church in San Antonio, attended the conference to gain knowledge for how his church could start a ministry to job seekers. About six months ago, he sensed the Lord was leading him to help create such a ministry. Having nearly 20 years of recruiting experience, Symcox believes God wants to use difficult economic times for his glory.

“I don’t think our recession or depression is by accident,” Symcox said.

“It may be God’s desire to create such hardship in people’s lives that they are drawn to him. They’re in such pain that they start seeking hope, and they start seeking help, and we know that Jesus Christ is the answer to these things.”

Although pastors and lay leaders came from Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana, Guillory hopes to provide the training to more than 5,600 churches across the country. A DVD of the conferen