Candace McIntosh said she’s always had a heart for teens and young adults. That’s only grown as she’s listened to Baptist campus ministers talk about what God has been doing recently at colleges and universities around the state.
“I’ve loved to listen to them share the stories of people who have come to know the Lord out of hard situations and others who have found their footing in service to the Lord while in college,” said McIntosh, executive director of Alabama Woman’s Missionary Union.
And as she listened, she felt a burden that Alabama WMU should support Baptist campus ministers with encouragement and prayer.
So at Connect, a leadership training conference held Aug. 2-3 at Shocco Springs Baptist Conference Center, Alabama WMU launched that new partnership.
“We continue to have our partnership with Pakistan; we continue to pray for them,” McIntosh said. “I just also felt compelled that we come alongside our campus ministers and our office of collegiate and student ministries (at the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions).”
The effort is called Cultivate, and it will involve a once-a-week prayer focus along with encouraging people to “adopt” one of the state’s Baptist campus ministers.
To kick that off, three campus ministers and three college students gave testimonies at Connect about how they see God at work on their campuses and the challenges they face there.
“We want to make sure all our campus ministers have undergirding in prayer,” McIntosh said. “Something that hit me as we were preparing for this — we would never dream of sending our international missionaries or North American missionaries to the field without undergirding them in prayer, so we need to do it for our state missionaries as well who are on the front lines.”
Also during Connect, women heard Bible teaching from Andrea Lennon, women’s ministry specialist for Arkansas Baptists, and had the opportunity to attend a variety of breakout sessions offering leadership training and spiritual enrichment.
Gordon Fort of the International Mission Board also shared updates from the missions field.
McIntosh said she heard a number of women say that this Connect had been the “best one yet.”
A group of 15 girls in grades 9-12 also participated in Emerging Leaders, which ran at the same time as Connect. Lauren Dean Sontag, associate minister of children from Crosspoint Church in Trussville and an Emerging Leader alumna, gave leadership to the group.
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This story was first published by The Alabama Baptist.
