By Diana Chandler, Regional Reporter METAIRIE  – Celebration Church blends long-term discipleship with the New Testament model of church planting: Opening extension campuses and nurturing them towards optional independence. With campuses in Metairie, LaPlace and Arabi, Celebration is studying the possibility of opening a site on the West Bank of Orleans Parish, said Multi-site Coordinator Craig Ratliff, who leads the Arabi congregation. “It’s always been a personal call for us, for our lead pastor and our staff,” Ratliff said. “Dennis has always had a citywide view of New Orleans.” Lead Pastor Dennis Watson said the model is in response to a vision from God. “A number of years ago the Lord gave me a vision of planting 15 healthy churches locally that would partner with Celebration Church and other local Baptist churches in reaching the people of our city and region,” Watson said. He describes Celebration as a “church-planting church” that has birthed seven congregations locally, five in other U.S. cities, and 25 internationally. But the traditional mission church model didn’t accomplish Celebration’s goals in the local community. “Some of our local church mission plants didn’t thrive, and some didn’t survive,” … [Read more...]

By Karen L. Willoughby, Managing Editor JONESVILLE – “What missions project could we do in our association?” That’s the question then-director of missions Ralph Webber asked in 1984 of Jennie Belle White, an active member of Utility Baptist Church and Ouachita Baptist Association. “Tutoring,” she responded. An elementary schoolteacher, White was aware many students were not able to read and write at grade level. The association rented a building, churches donated tables and chairs, and volunteers came “from everywhere” to help in the fledgling ministry that today is known as Breadcrumb Baptist Ministry Center. White was honored one recent Sunday at Utility Baptist Church for 25 years as director of the ministry center. During the same event, two coworkers were honored for their first 15 years of volunteer work at Breadcrumb. Marie Towell and Hazel Chapman have worked at Breadcrumb for 19 years, but their fifteenth anniversary slipped by unnoted. “Jeannie Belle is known throughout the Louisiana Baptist Convention for the lives she’s touched,” said Wayne Sheppard, LBC partnerships strategist, who led in the celebration of her 25-year ministry at Utility Baptist. “She’s done so with one goal: to help other people … [Read more...]

MOORINGSPORT – The WMU of Mooringsport Baptist Church in Northwest Baptist Association recently began a project of making Witnessing Dolls to be given to children by workers on the mission field. [img_assist|nid=6201|title=Witnessing dolls|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=75]After reading about these dolls in the February Mosaic magazine published by the national WMU, the ladies decided to take this for a project. Under the leadership of Ann Ryals, the patterns were passed out and the sewing began. At one point, members brought sewing machines with the necessary supplies to the church and had a time of working on the dolls together. After the dolls were made of colorful fabrics and yarn, their faces were hand-painted. On one side their eyes are closed, representing a lost person’s spiritual condition; on the other side the eyes are open, and the lips are smiling. A beaded witnessing necklace is on each doll. Also, the plan of salvation is inserted in the doll’s pocket. The language of the plan of salvation will reflect the doll’s destination. Twenty of the dolls are going with a neighboring church’s mission group to Nicaragua so the plan of salvation in those dolls’ pockets is in Spanish, as it will be in … [Read more...]

By Diana Chandler, Regional Reporter ST. GABRIEL – Love was a long time coming for 66-year-old Mary Riley. When she should have been sheltered from harm at age 7, her grandfather fed her Four Roses Bourbon and molested her, and her mother beat her repeatedly under the guise of love, the prison inmate said.[img_assist|nid=6203|title=Christian inmates at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women listen to Henry Blackaby|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=67] Broken, Riley ran away from home at age 13, suffered alcoholism, married six men by age 40, shot one husband to death, and is serving a life sentence at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women (LCIW) after fatally stabbing her landlady in a fight more than 26 years ago. She’s among the 200 or so Christian inmates Henry and son Tom Blackaby taught during the Called and Accountable weekend March 19-21, the second Blackaby seminar in two years at the only women’s prison in Louisiana. “I just always related to the down and out, the broken,” said the elder Blackaby, founder and president emeritus of Blackaby Ministries International. “My daddy, who was a businessman, picked up all the broken people. I grew up with that, with my daddy touching the most … [Read more...]

By Karen L. Willoughby, Managing Editor SWARTZ – Carol Dark ran into Melissa, an old acquaintance, some time ago while on a church visitation at another person’s home. At Dark’s invitation, Melissa attended First Baptist Church of Swartz with Carol a few times, then faded away. But she came to a visitation service in January after Carol’s dad died, and Melissa now says words Carol said to her then – “I want to see you back here” – rang in her ears. “We became friends on Facebook,” Dark said. “Then she asked for my cell phone number and I kept inviting her to church. She came with me one Wednesday night, and Sunday, and again on Wednesday night, and she asked me, ‘Have you ever felt you needed to do something, but didn’t know what to do?’” Melissa made a profession of faith that night in mid-March. It was less than a month after Dark had signed a pledge card committing to finding one person to lead to the Lord. This is what ONE Focus is all about, said Bob Chambless, a consultant with LifeCatalyst, which is advocating ONE Focus in churches across Louisiana and the South. “ONE Focus is a one-year, missional movement that helps to grows Christians into disciples and non-believers into Christians,” Chambless said. … [Read more...]

By Karen L. Willoughby, Managing Editor JERUSALEM – Now that I’ve been to Israel, I wonder why I waited so long.[img_assist|nid=6218|title=Scale model of Jerusalem before its destruction by the Romans in 66 AD|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=75] Next time I plan to stay longer and not have such an ambitious agenda. I didn’t realize Israel would be as much a spiritual as it was an historical journey. Next time I want to spend an entire day on the hillside where Jesus gave the sermon on the mount, to ponder with Bible open what He said and why He said it the way He did, to imagine myself one of the crowd of 5,000 clinging so intently to his every word that we don’t even think of food until the disciples begin passing some out.[img_assist|nid=6206|title=With hands bound Jesus walked up these steps on his way to Caiaphas|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=75|height=100] Next time I want to “watch with Him” one entire hour in the Garden of Gethsemane. And, okay. To be totally honest, next time I want to get slathered with Dead Sea mud. Don’t ask me why. I guess because it’s just part of the adventure![img_assist|nid=6207|title=One of the possible crucifixion sites of … [Read more...]

By Philip Timothy, Message Staff Writer ‘Give honor to whom honor is due.’ – Romans (13:7 NASB) OIL CITY – Deserving or not, Chad Mills didn’t want to leave his mother’s side last November to receive an award, even if it was for “Small Church Pastor of the Year for 2008.” His mother Sharon was dying.[img_assist|nid=6222|title=Chad Mills receives Small Church Pastor of the Year Award from Eddie DeHondt|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=75] Diagnosed with lung, bone and liver cancer on Oct. 27, her health was deteriorating as the cancer spread quickly. Mills, pastor of First Baptist Oil City since October 2007, moved his mother from Natchitoches to Oil City to better care for her. Within a couple of weeks, he was forced to move her to a hospice. Added to his burden were his pastoral duties as well as his responsibilities as vice president of the rapidly approaching Pastor’s Conference. “It was a very tough time for me. I felt overwhelmed and I struggled with it all on a daily basis,” Mills said. “I was very close to my mother and I did not want to leave her side for any reason.” Therefore, when Gary Mitchell, the LBC’s Smaller Church Consultant for the Pastoral Leadership Team called to inform him of … [Read more...]

By Diana Chandler, Regional Reporter LAKE CHARLES – “Very evangelistic,” is how Alan Weishampel describes East Ridge Baptist Church, a congregation quick to minister at festivals, parades and various special events. Yet, he laments the fact that his approximately 120 mostly white active members haven’t been able to permanently attract the people who live in their increasingly African-American neighborhood.[img_assist|nid=6224|title=Workers pour foundation for East Ridge Baptist Church|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=76] Instead, East Ridge Baptist Church is moving to the outskirts of town and attempting to sell its existing facility to an African-American congregation. “We were saddened by it, but we had to deal with the reality of it,” Weishampel said. “We haven’t been able to reach our real neighborhood.” The difficulty of reaching a changing demographic is one of the reasons East Ridge is building a new facility at 5400 Hwy. 397 in a developing, mostly white area of Lake Charles where there are no churches. Two years ago, East Ridge met with the pastors of several African-American congregations and concluded the area could best be evangelized by people of the same culture. “In a way, it’s kind of … [Read more...]

By T. Preston Pearce, Missionary-in-residence Louisiana College Editor’s Note: All Scripture references are from HCSB unless otherwise noted. The second section of Article VI of the Baptist Faith and Message (2000) says: All true believers endure to the end. Those whom God has accepted in Christ, and sanctified by His Spirit, will never fall away from the state of grace, but shall persevere to the end. [img_assist|nid=6226|title=Cord of three strands stands for eternal security, peservance and assurance|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=67]Believers may fall into sin through neglect and temptation, whereby they grieve the Spirit, impair their graces and comforts, and bring reproach on the cause of Christ and temporal judgments on themselves; yet they shall be kept by the power of God through faith unto salvation. This statement reflects what I have long believed that Scripture teaches, and what I had thought was a near-universal belief among Baptists around the world. When our family began serving in Eastern Europe in 1994, however, we were surprised to encounter the typical Eastern European Baptist belief in both their confessions (that is, their “BFM”) and in preaching, that salvation can be … [Read more...]

By Bill Warren, Ph.D NOBTS Professor of New Testament and Greek Question: What is the importance of Palm Sunday and what was the chronology of that week? [img_assist|nid=6120|title=Bill Warren NOBTS Professor of New Testament and Greek|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=75|height=100]Bill Warren responds: As the start of Holy Week, the last week of Jesus’ ministry before the crucifixion and resurrection, Palm Sunday marks the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem. But it is more than just the entry story, for some events in the life of Jesus are “parabolic” events. They are not parables in the sense of stories like the Good Samaritan, but rather are events that carry meanings beyond the physical event itself, much like the “sign” miracles in John (i.e., the wedding at Cana). In the Synoptic Gospels, such events are marked with indications in the text about a larger meaning, like with the triumphal entry. With this in mind, the triumphal entry is a street play that communicates that the king has come into his own city. Jesus had already walked all the way from Galilee to the Mount of Olives, so he could have walked the last downhill distance without any problem at all, but instead he rides down on a colt, like a … [Read more...]