March 28, 2023
The Christian Index is so excited to play a part in helping Georgia Baptist churches find pastors when their pulpits are vacated. We’ve heard heartwarming stories of how the Lord has matched pastors to churches via our classifieds section. An important part of that has been a classifieds newsletter we started about a year ago that lists churches looking for pastors or other staff members.
Camp ministries provide campers, and pastors, an important experience that can become a defining part of their Christian lives. The Georgia Baptist Mission Board operates Camp Pinnacle and Camp Kaleo, as well as hosting camps for youth at other locations. Last year alone, Camp Pinnacle in Clayton, Ga., hosted nearly 500 girls at missions camps on its scenic property in the north Georgia mountains. Hundreds more youth visited Camp Kaleo or participated in “Impact,” “SuperWow” and “Surge150” camps. Many of them were called to faith in Christ or to a life of ministerial service through those experiences.
Georgia Baptists pull together through Mission Georgia to share the gospel with some of the state's most vulnerable and hardest-to-reach people. Fueled by the generous giving of Georgia Baptists, Mission Georgia provided nearly $392,000 in 2022 to ministries that provide direct care to children, mothers-to-be, victims of human trafficking and international refugees.
Georgia’s largest religious organization is still growing both numerically and ethnically. In November, 17 new congregations joined the Georgia Baptist Convention, which has some 1.4 million members in about 3,600 churches.
Walk through the doors of Beaverdam Baptist Church on Sunday mornings and you’ll feel the love. You can’t escape the smiles, the handshakes, the hugs. Pastor Chuck Cook says that’s why Beaverdam is going great guns right now. Since Cook became pastor less than three years ago, the 200-year-old church in rural Georgia, an hour northeast of Atlanta, has seen a resurgence in attendance, memberships, and baptisms. The sanctuary and parking lot have been filled with an average of about 130 people, forcing Beaverdam’s leadership to start a second Sunday morning service to better accommodate the crowds.
It’s great to see Georgia Baptist churches getting behind the Mission Georgia offering in a big way this year. And why not? The Mission Georgia offering provides churches a means to make a huge gospel impact in our state. With the pandemic subsiding and worship attendance on the rise, churches are poised to potentially top the $1.25 million given last year through the Mission Georgia offering.
JJ Washington will serve the Southern Baptist Convention well as the new national director of personal evangelism at the North American Mission Board. A fiery preacher, Washington has led the Georgia Baptist Mission Board’s state-level evangelism efforts for the past year. He absolutely shined in that role, especially in leading the annual evangelism conference that drew the largest crowd in years.
Tony Dickerson is an artist of sorts, painting vivid word pictures each time he steps into the pulpit at Pinehurst Baptist Church in Columbus. The Lord has equipped this godly man with the gift of oratory. His flawless diction and smooth cadence have made him one of the SBC’s top preachers. His kind spirit and loving heart have made him one of the SBC’s top pastors.
Community newspapers are dying at the rate of two per week in the U.S. Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, Media and Integrated Marketing Communications delivered that sobering news in a report this week. And it is indeed sobering because newspapers play such a crucial role in our culture, serving as mirrors of sorts that allow us to see ourselves – warts, blemishes and all.
From the uttermost parts of the world to right here at home, readers of The Christian Index see various headlines – some joyful and some horrific – posted daily on the newspaper’s website. In the past weeks, you've read of war and violence, famine and illness, and accidents and disasters. You've read of political division and strife.
