She is known simply as “Ms. Chocolate.” For 40 years, Gwen Williams has worked in youth ministry at Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans.
NEW ORLEANS – She is known simply as “Ms. Chocolate.” For 40 years, Gwen Williams has worked in youth ministry at Franklin Avenue Baptist Church in New Orleans.
Wilson has a simple, yet powerful message for pastors when it comes to winning for Christ a generation poisoned by drugs, gangs, sex and violence.
“We have to love this generation like Jesus did. We are challenged more and more to show this culture that the God we serve works,” she said.
“It is a huge challenge,” Jeff Wallace, youth pastor at Peace Baptist Church in Decatur, Ga., told the group. In a generation in which 38 percent of all new babies are born into single-parent homes, where children spend three hours daily on the internet and the culture is being bombarded by a hip-hop culture, the old methods of doing church will not work. In fact, Wallace said, 60 percent of the youth he sees each Sunday morning are new faces.
“If we think we can sit in holy huddles and reach these kids, we’re fooling ourselves,” Wallace said.
The message of living out an unchanging, transparent and loving gospel was the cornerstone of a two-day pastor’s conference, “Knowing the Times” a two-day symposium sponsored by the National African American Fellowship of the Southern Baptist Convention (NAAF), held on the campus of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary Sept. 25-26.
The goal of the conference was to equip church leaders with strategies to reach an ever-changing culture with God’s unchanging message.
The formula for reaching young people is powerful, yet simple.
“I learned some good strategies here,” said Rev. K. Marshall Williams of Philadelphia, Pa. “In order to win this generation for Christ, we need to show young people the real Christ. They don’t care how much you know, they need to know how much you care.”
Williams is president of the Pennsylvania/South Jersey Baptist Convention, the only African-American state convention president in the SBC. In March 2007 he was elected President of the State Convention Presidents Fellowship of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is pastor of Nazarene Baptist Church in Philadelphia.
Williams also called for expansion of the SBC into the Asian, Hispanic and African American communities, and greater leadership roles for those groups.
Mark Croston Sr., pastor of East End Baptist Church in Suffolk, Va., and immediate past president of the NAAF, electrified an NOBTS audience during seminary chapel services Sept. 25. He encouraged the congregation to persevere when dark days in ministry come. And Croston assured his listeners that difficult days will come even in the life of a believer.
Croston preached from Jeremiah 20, a text that finds the prophet – besieged by death threats, locked away in prison and his work burned to the ground – angry and ready to throw in the towel.
When those times come, Croston said, Christians need to express their anger.
“Unexpressed hurt becomes anger,” he said. “Unexpressed anger becomes bitterness and resentment. Unexpressed bitterness and resentment becomes a destructive act, a psychosomatic symptom or depression.”
Croston added, “Part of our problem as Christians is that we don’t think it is often ‘OK’ to express our hurts and angers, so we end up depressed like Jeremiah. Some of us this morning have painted on a smile like a clown paints on his face at the circus. But inside we’re really hurting and broken and miserable. You don’t have to keep all that stuff on the inside. It really is OK to express your anger.”
The pastor provided scriptural support for his point. Croston reminded his listeners of the time Jesus cleared the Temple.
“[Jesus] expressed what was going on on the inside. He let it out and that’s what we need to do in our own lives,” Croston said. “The Bible says, ‘Be angry and sin not.’ Jeremiah is just taking a moment to vent.”
And while some in ministry may believe that being saved and responding to God’s call makes them immune from hurt, Croston offered a caution.
“I don’t want to burst your bubble, but everything is not always going to end up all right all the time. We just wish that we would be able to go into churches and preach some wonderful sermons and everyone would just fall in line because they had heard from the word of God and just begin to live like godly people,” Croston said. “And when we go out to share the Gospel with somebody, everybody would just get saved. We just wish it worked that way. But the truth is, you go into real churches, with real people who got real issues – the Bible calls it sin – but I’m just saying issues – it never works out that way.
Christ provides hope for the future, even in a life filled with trials and tribulation.
“Think about Jesus, all he ever did was good, right? All he ever did was love people who wanted to be loved and heal people who needed to be healed. And help people who needed to be helped and they crucified Him,” Croston said. “Instead of expecting that life ought to be perfect and everything ought to fall in line. You ought to just come every day fortified with prayer, fortified with God’s power in your life expecting something to go wrong somewhere. And if by chance you get to the end of the day and everything went ‘OK,’ you ought to just lift your hands and say, ‘Praise the Lord.’”
Croston reminded his audience that in Jeremiah 20:8, the prophet took a dim view of life. Croston urged his audience to look at the positive side – to “excogitate a positive future” in life. He went on to explain the word “excogitate.”
“The meaning of the word says, out of your thinking, let something positive come,” Croston said. “Don’t just be thinking about stuff to your own detriment. Don’t think about stuff to go nowhere,” Croston said. “But as you’re thinking about things that are before you, let something positive come out of your thinking. Whenever there’s trouble or whenever there’s adversity, you have to put your mind on and excogitate a positive future for yourself.”
Croston recounted the gospel story of the woman who had suffered from “an issue of blood” for more than a decade.
“She said, ‘If I can just touch his clothes I know I will be made well.’ You know what she did? She started acting on that that she thought about, pressing her way through the multitude. “An elbow over here and a shove over there and she was able to touch the hem of Jesus’ garment and the Bible says that power came out of him into her and she was healed at that very moment. She excogitated a positive future for her life,” he said.
Croston exhorted listeners to “get your mind right.”
“Don’t sit on the pew of ‘do nothing,’ sullen and complacent where you are. God gave you a great mind so you could excogitate a positive future for your life. No wonder Proverbs 23:7 says ‘As a man thinketh, so is he.” No wonder Paul told us, ‘Whatever is true, whatever is lovely, whatever’s right, whatever’s pure, whatever is admirable, if there be anything praiseworthy, think on these things.’”.
And finally, Croston urged the audience to sear the word of God on the hearts and minds, for those times when we are alone with our trials and troubles, not a Bible in sight. Failure to do so, Croston said, is “like putting a muzzle on the Holy Spirit.”
“But if you will put the word of God in your life, God’s spirit will speak to you in your time of trouble,” he added.
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