March is for Missions
Each spring, we encourage members of FBC Griffin to respond to the needs related to mission work in North America. We encourage members to read of this work through publications on the credenza near the Welcome Center and in the Church Library, to pray for mission work all across North America and to give to one or both offerings dedicated to this work. Financial gifts may be dedicated to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship Global Missions offering or to the NAMB Annie Armstrong Easter Offering. 100% of what is given goes to support this mission work.
CBF Global
“The Fellowship supports long-term field personnel serving in 30 countries and hundreds of short-term mission teams annually.”
NAMB Annie Armstrong Easter Offering
“Gifts to the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering are used to train and resource missionaries in church planting and compassion ministries. Gifts are also used to create evangelism resources. New churches are being planted, hurts are being healed and lives are being transformed by the gospel because you give.“
More about Missions Month
The CBF Global Mission offering supports the work of personnel such as Jessica Hearne, who is based in Danville, Virginia. Danville is a city in Southside Virginia where 38% of children live below the poverty line, nearly 3 times the average for Virginia. One in 5 people in Danville live in food insecurity, and the median household income there is about half that of the state.
Jessica and her husband Joshua serve with and through Grace and Main Fellowship, an intentional, ecumenical Christian community devoted to hospitality, simplicity, prayer, nonviolent action and grassroots community development. The foundation of their ministry is simple: building relationships and community.
Jessica and Joshua Hearne, Danville, Virginia
In considering your offering to global missions, James 2:8 reminds us:
“Indeed, if you fulfill the royal law in the scripture, ‘Love your brother as yourself,’ you are doing well.”
Meeting Needs Across the Country
This spring, we continue to emphasize mission work in North America and encourage your support.
Faith Garland, as a missionary serving at the Send Relief Ministry Center in downtown Boston, often finds herself in alleyways and near strip clubs looking for women who are looking for help. “In anti-trafficking and sexual abuse awareness work, you have to remember that everyone you meet is searching for Christ’s perfect love,” she says. “They just don’t always know they’re seeking Christ.”
Faith is one of hundreds you can support by giving to either one or both, the Annie Armstrong Offering and the CBF Global Missions Offering. They are our hands across North America.
Partnerships that Work
If you choose to give to the CBF Global Missions offering, you are helping support Kim and Marc Wyatt, who are Cooperative Baptist Fellowship field personnel serving in the Research Triangle of North Carolina (an eight-county region that wraps the capital city of Raleigh).
In October 2015, they established Welcome House Raleigh. Welcome House Raleigh is a temporary reception home for refugees who are resettled in the area and do not have a place to live upon arrival. Welcome house provides a safe home, settlement assistance, and bridges into the community.
This spring, may we all find joy in supporting mission work in our own country.
Noelson & Edna Chery, First Haitian Metanoia Baptist Church
Ministering as the Hands and Feet of Jesus
As we bring to a close our mission emphasis in North America, we feature two other missionaries.
Noelson & Edna Chery live in Philadelphia. Noelson works remotely as an academic advisor and his wife is a respiratory therapist. Noelson and Edna are Haitian immigrants, and in 2019, when they discovered that most Haitian churches in their community worshipped only in Haitian Creole, they become church planters in the most unintentional of ways. “Everything in the churches was done for adults, whether the kids can speak Creole or not,” Noelson says. “So, we started Bible study in English with our kids at home.” Now, they’ve planted a Haitian church that’s making Jesus known and specifically reaching the younger generations.
Four years ago, God told Josh and Beth Glymph, who work in Jacksonville, Florida, to simultaneously do the two hardest things they’d ever done. “Foster care and church planting,” says Beth. “I thought there was no way He’d ask us to do both at the same time.” And yet, everything began to make sense after the Glymphs adopted three children, two out of foster care, while starting Refuge Church in the Jacksonville community of Ortega, where there was almost no evangelical witness. What the town did have was families that looked as eclectic as the Glymphs. Now, the Glymphs share the gospel with families from all kinds of backgrounds. “We didn’t set out to plant a church for foster and adoptive families,” says Beth. “But now that it’s happened, we get to see the Lord working right in front of our eyes.”
