Today’s From the States features items from:
The Alabama Baptist
Florida Baptist Witness
The Christian Index (Georgia)
Shoal Creek Baptist reaches out
to community through service projects
By Niesha Fuson
DECATUR, Ala. (The Alabama Baptist) — “Love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s a simple phrase to say but how often do you actually do it?
Shoal Creek Baptist Church, Decatur, put the phrase into action during Love Your Neighbor Weekend 2014.
More than 60 volunteers from the Morgan Baptist Association church worked to replace a roof, trim trees in several neighborhood yards, spend time with seniors at several local nursing homes, paint houses, rake leaves and much more.
The idea started back in May, Pastor Gary Linville explained.
“We want to be a church that makes disciples and in doing so we have to show the love of Christ. And in order to do that we have to be outside the four walls of the church,” he said.
The church plans to do a week-long service project in 2015 so this October’s Love Your Neighbor Weekend was a “trial run” of sorts, Linville said.
The projects were funded by the church’s Great Commission portion of its budget as well as other donations from members. Each project site was found through the church’s benevolence ministry and by word of mouth, Linville said. Widows and the elderly in the community were the primary recipients of the help.
At each project site the volunteers, ranging in age from 14 to a man in his 70s, would pray with the residents, give them a Bible for their home and invite them to attend church.
At the end of the weekend, one church volunteer gave his life to Christ and was baptized Nov. 2. Several people who were the recipients of the help that weekend showed up at Shoal Creek Baptist the following Sunday for worship services.
“I was really blown away by the weekend,” Linville said. “I think there are a lot of great things in store for the church. We [felt] the impact of reaching people and the idea of really helping people. … We saw each other loving and caring and serving.”
The church plans to make the weekend an annual event, Linville said, and plans to include other area churches in the effort.
Shoal Creek members also plan to host a Thanksgiving meal event and a food giveaway for the community in the coming weeks.
During November the church will collect nonperishable food at the church office and at Traditions Bank in Priceville.
Linville said after Love Your Neighbor Weekend 2014 members were blessed by the outcome and the opportunity to serve and that “everyone’s been asking when we’ll do it again.”
This article appeared in The Alabama Baptist (thealabamabaptist.org), newsjournal of the Alabama Baptist Convention. Neisha Fuson is a writer for The Alabama Baptist.
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Marianna children learn life skills
while hearing about Jesus at church
By Carolyn Nichols
MARIANNA, Fla. (Florida Baptist Witness) — Rocky Creek Baptist Church is “always looking for ways to get youth into church,” according to Youth and Children’s Minister Loree Kristoff. In addition to learning God’s Word, teens are offered instruction in cooking and sewing.
“There are so many things now that pull the young people away from church — TV, computers and cell phones — so we have to work hard to pull them back,” Kristoff said. “We can’t minister just to their ears; we have to help the whole person.”
Kristoff and her husband, Robert (Kris), moved to Marianna 10 years ago after long careers with the Air Force. They joined Rocky Creek Baptist about a year later, and she has served as youth and children’s minister for five years.
She said the small Panhandle church is the first church she has become involved in, although she grew up and was baptized at a Baptist church in Michigan.
“At churches before, we would attend on Sundays and go home. I guess there was a need to be helping here,” she said. “I like being helpful.”
Kristoff and a handful of volunteers began offering homework help after school three years ago. She proudly said some students’ grades “have gone from D’s to A’s and B’s.”
Kristoff added sewing classes to the schedule in 2013, and she was “blown away” when 12 youth and two adults came to the first class to learn how to sew on a button. Later, she showed the class how to sew a hem, and then she added quilting to their skills.
“It’s a great way to learn how to sew on a machine because it is sewing in a straight line,” she said.
During class, the students work on five sewing machines donated by church members and a local repair shop. Kristoff said her goal for the sewing class is to teach how to “cut out a pattern and make something simple.”
“If they like doing it, I’ll take them as far as they want to go,” she said.
Kristoff added cooking classes when she noticed children and teens having to fend for themselves at their homes in a nearby mobile home park. She began with simple recipes because “the kids need to know the basics so they aren’t going hungry.”
The class recipes require ingredients found in most kitchens, and the class favorite is “cake in a mug” that can be cooked in a microwave.
Pastor James Swafford said the sewing and cooking classes are ways the church can “serve the needs of our depressed community.”
“They can mend clothes and make meals for their families,” he said. “The homework assistance classes also give the children access to computers.”
Along with teaching skills formerly learned in home economic classes, Kristoff, a 71-year-old great grandmother, is nurturing the creative abilities of the children by asking them to design bulletin boards at church. Eventually, dramatic skits and puppetry may be added to the mix of activities.
“They think that church is just for old people, but I want to make it fun while they are learning about Jesus,” she said. “I wish I could take the children home with me. It is a blessing to see children want to learn. They are more a blessing to me than I am to them.”
This article appeared in the Florida Baptist Witness (gofbw.com), newsjournal of the Florida Baptist Convention. Carolyn Nichols is a reporter for the Florida Baptist Witness.
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Liberian pastor teaches
between two continents
By Scott Barkley
LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (The Christian Index) — Education has been a part of Clifford Hooke’s ministry for a long time.
As a fourth-grader in his native Liberia, Hooke would help out so much he was promoted as a teacher’s assistant. While earning his first of many degrees, a bachelor’s in education, Hooke taught classes of high school students even though he himself was only 19.
A love of learning and teaching continued as he earned his bachelor’s in education and coupled it with one in theology from Liberian Baptist Theological Seminary. Master’s degrees would follow – one in education from the University of Liberia and after he arrived in America on Jan. 9, 2003, another in divinity and one more in counseling, both earned attending Mercer. He’s almost completed his application for doctoral work at New Orleans Seminary.
After arriving in America Hooke, a 48-year-old married father of two, attended First Baptist Church in Tucker. There he helped out with Royal Ambassadors and was a substitute Bible study leader. Two years later he became assistant pastor of Liberian Baptist Mission, a church plant out of Brookwood Baptist Church.
That congregation would later change its name to Bethesda Christian Fellowship and again to Sanctified Bethesda Baptist Church — which it’s known as today and where Hooke now serves as pastor — to reflect a merger with a church born out of Sanctified Inspirational Ministries, founded by Hooke in 2009.
In addition to his pastoral duties, Hooke serves as a literacy trainer for Georgia Baptist Convention Literacy Missions and assists in church planting seminars through GBC Intercultural Ministries. The roles reflect a singular passion he lives out on two continents.
“Literacy is important to me because approximately 70% of Liberians are illiterate,” he explains. “My ministry in Liberia has always centered on pastoral works and education with an emphasis in literacy training.”
The importance of knowing
Attention and focus. These themes weave into Hooke’s philosophy of education. When instructions are presented, one must pay attention. When distractions appear, you must maintain focus.
“How can someone read and understand their Bible, signs, labels, and other items without an education? We want people to be able to vote and make wise decisions for themselves, their church, and their nation,” he explains.
Hooke’s easygoing nature changes almost immediately when it comes to the importance of education — whether it concerns his ongoing pastoral training ministry in Liberia, leading a literacy workshop, or substituting in the Gwinnett County School System. The eyes narrow and his head moves forward as he crosses his arms and leans across a lectern in his Langley Drive office space, lowering his voice and delivering words with precision.
Fighting a culture to save it
Supporting education in Liberia has always been important to him from a ministerial aspect but took on another role with the spread of the Ebola virus this year. He and members of his congregation have lost friends in the epidemic, including the assistant to the country’s chief medical officer in its Ministry of Health.
The welcoming culture of Liberia has played an unfortunate role in the spread of the disease, he says.
“Pastors must be fully educated about the Ebola epidemic. They must realize it is real, and must respond to church members with precautions given by health care workers. They have to stop risking their lives as a spirit of demonstrating love to members.”
Such demonstrations include the laying on of hands, kissing on the cheeks, and not advising members about washing their hands.
“They must adhere to any iota of advice that will keep them and their members safe,” he says.
Hooke is in contact with family and friends in Liberia almost daily and at least twice a week. When it’s safe to do so he looks forward to a personal return to the ministry’s headquarters in Salala, Bong County, about 90 minutes from the country’s capital of Monrovia.
His goal for the Liberian ministry is to shore up literacy but more importantly train pastors in theology through extension classes, ultimately establishing a Christian university by 2020. “Even though the general populace needs to be literate, there are specific needs for church leaders to be trained,” he points out.
Hooke couldn’t have foreseen that his visit in the spring of last year would be his last for a while. Since then he’s been active mentoring from America as well as leading his church in collecting and sending needed supplies for training pastors and ministering to the surrounding community.
Meanwhile, he has become a much-sought-after substitute teacher in Gwinnett County. Students know about Ebola, and when they learn their instructor is from Liberia the questions come.
As long as it doesn’t get in the way with the lesson plans for that class, he’s open to tell his story as he did to a rapt classroom of seniors at Central Gwinnett High School last month.
“They were extremely attentive,” he smiles.
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This article appeared in The Christian Index (christianindex.org), newsjournal of the Georgia Baptist Convention. Scott Barkley is production manager for The Christian Index.
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EDITOR’S NOTE: From the States, published each Tuesday by Baptist Press, relays news and feature stories from state Baptist papers and other publications on initiatives by Baptist churches, associations and state conventions in evangelism, church planting and Great Commission outreach, including partnership missions. Reports about churches, associations and state conventions responding to the International Mission Board’s call to embrace the world’s 3,800 unengaged, unreached people groups also are included in From the States, along with reports about church, associational and state convention initiatives in conjunction with the North American Mission Board’s call to Southern Baptist churches to broaden their efforts in starting new churches and satellite campuses. The items appear in Baptist Press as originally published.
