INDIANAPOLIS (BP) – During their WMU report for messengers at the Wednesday, June 12, session of the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Indianapolis, Sandy Wisdom-Martin, executive director-treasurer, and Connie Dixon, president of National WMU, used stories to explain what their organization does.
For Wisdom-Martin, her experience with WMU began in college praying for Liberians at the urging of a missionary kid, who taped sheet music of the country’s national anthem throughout the dorm room.
She also remembers Kate, a member in Girls in Action, who wanted to raise money to build a church in Haiti. Explaining she sold enough hot cider to build four churches, Wisdom-Martin said, when asked why she wanted to raise the money for churches, Kate simply replied, “So the children can learn about Jesus.”
And this past April, Wisdom-Martin heard from a faithful missionary woman serving in a slum outside of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who had to travel through children and ski-masked men, both with automatic weapons, to get to her church plant.
She shared an audio clip of the woman describing the experience, “My very first thought was the WMU ladies are praying for me. And I drove into that slum with complete calm.”
“WMU tells the stories of God’s amazing work around the world through our Southern Baptist missionaries,” Dixon affirmed. “WMU teaches your church how to pray diligently and give generously. WMU shows your church the world that they may, or may never, have the opportunity to visit.”
She added, “I know because that is what WMU did for me.”
She went on to share some of her own experiences, such as prayerwalking on the Great Wall of China, dancing with children in Africa and hearing various stories of WMU women who stepped out in faith.
One provided money to put a well on a flood-devastated church property in Puerto Rico, and another ministered through WMU’s Christian Women’s Job Corps to help a formerly addicted woman in New Mexico meet the Lord, get baptized, graduate from the Citizen’s Police Academy, and work toward acceptance to the State Police Academy.
But the stories represent so much more.
“Making disciples of Jesus who live on mission is critical to the success of our Southern Baptist missionary enterprise,” Dixon stressed. “We want people learning, praying and giving. We also want people doing missions and telling others about Jesus.”
Toward that aim, Wisdom-Martin shared WMU’s hope to raise up 1,000 disciplers who will use material written by missionaries Ron and Marsha Harvell, “50 Steps with Jesus: Learning to Walk Daily with the Lord,” as a tool to both lead people to faith and mentor new believers.
“We believe in the restoration of brokenness through hope in Christ. If this Gospel does not have the power to transform – to snatch people from depths of despair, to rescue from the very pit of hell – then our lives have been wasted,” she said.
“But with all our hearts, we believe it does. And we consider it our sacred privilege to journey with Southern Baptists to make disciples of Jesus who live on mission.”
