by Shelton Miles, 2025 BGAV President

In 1979, after I had dropped out of SBTS and the ministry (quitting ministry is like quitting smoking; it’s easy to quit, and hard to stay quit, especially if the Lord has put fire in your bones), I was called to be the bivocational pastor of a tiny little church near Brookneal, Virginia (Beulah at Hat Creek). My life was a train wreck. I wasn’t much, but I was all they could find or afford. My first Sunday there we had 19 people, only three of whom, including me, were under 55 years of age. Most were over 65. Our biggest demographic was septuagenarians and octogenarians. We were located in a declining rural community, surrounded by larger churches.

It wasn’t long before I had a deacons’ meeting and saw a copy of the budget. We were giving four percent to the Cooperative Program. This was during the heyday of "Bold Mission Thrust," the plan to carry the gospel to the whole world by the year 2000. It was an exciting time to be a Southern Baptist: John Havlik was producing great ideas at the Home Mission Board, the Foreign Mission Board was engaged in a growing missions enterprise that focused on personal evangelism, church planting, medical missions, educational ministries, agricultural evangelism, and hunger relief.

And yet our church was only giving four percent—four pennies out of every dollar. I inquired of the treasurer/deacon chairman as to why we were giving so little to missions. And I shall never forget his answer: “We are trying to squirrel away all the money we can so that we can keep the doors open a little bit longer.”

My impetuous response was: “You are asking the wrong question. It should not be, ‘How can we keep the doors open longer?’ but rather ‘What will we do for the kingdom of God while we are here?’”

And somehow, I persuaded him and the others to start asking the questions: "Why are we here? What should we be doing today?"

And the most remarkable things began to happen.

1.     We increased our Cooperative Program giving to 10%.

2.    One of our deacons, a Vietnam vet, noticing all the news stories at that time about the “Boat People”—Vietnamese refugees fleeing communism—asked, “What can we do to help?” And I answered, "Give me a month, and I’ll research the question and give you some options."

A month later: (1). Pray. (2). Pass a resolution. (3). Write your congressman and Senators for increased immigration quotas to the US for Vietnamese refugees. (4). Special offering for personal hygiene kits to go to refugees in the camps in Thailand. (5). Sponsor some refugees.

So this little small church took that list and did all five, initially sponsoring four young men, then two more, then leading the Appomattox Baptist Association to sponsor about 25 more. A former tobacco farmer donated the use of his migrant labor housing for the refugees. An aged widow drove the four young men to weekly ESL classes in Lynchburg. The church had a pounding for food and collected clothes for these young men who came to us with their possessions in a small paper bag. We used our contacts to get them jobs. We welcomed them into our homes, our church, and our lives. We became a multi-ethnic church of rednecks and Vietnamese people.

3.    Started a community Thanksgiving service with the neighboring African-American congregation, something that was NOT being done in our part of the Commonwealth, even in 1979. The deacons floated the idea of a community Thanksgiving service, mentioning they used to do such a service with the Presbyterian church two miles down the road. I asked if they really wanted a community Thanksgiving service, pointing out that there were three churches on our road and that New Hat Creek Baptist (African-American) was just across the soybean field from our church.

After a long silence, my deacon chair spoke up: “I grew up here [he had never left the farm on which he was born, not for military service nor college nor employment], and I know the way it has always been here between the races, and I have some understanding as to why it has been that way. But I have also read my Bible, and I know that things here are not as they should be and not as they will be in God’s kingdom. I think it’s time—past time—that we do this." And so we did.

It was a little bit controversial. When the Presbyterians found out whom else we had invited, they declined. But the Sunday night before Thanksgiving, we had the first interracial worship service in our area since the early 1870s. There was some fallout in our church; one deacon never attended again as long as I was pastor. But there was also the sense that Jesus Christ was doing something different and real in our midst.

4.    Fifteen members, mostly senior adults, devoted a month of Sunday nights to a workshop on how to share their personal faith with their friends, family, and neighbors.

5.    This senior-adult congregation invested their energies into offering the community a Vacation Bible School for children, the first one they had conducted in many years.

And the most amazing thing happened. When they quit worrying about the church as their institution and started focusing on exercising their priesthood and their priestly calling, this little church began to grow—from an average attendance of 19, to 30, to 40, to 55. All by abandoning the old question, “What can we do to keep the doors open a little bit longer?” and taking up the new question, “What can we be doing for the kingdom of God while we are here, giving ourselves away in obedience and service to God's call?”

Emil Brunner famously said, “The church exists by mission as a fire exists by burning.” If we are not people on mission, then we are not church—we're just a social gathering of homogenous people. So let us burn with a sense of missionary purpose. Let us look beyond ourselves, so whether we live or die, we live unto the Lord and go out in a blaze of glory.  

And let’s be praying, doing, anticipating what "Mission Forward" will look like when we convene as a kingdom of priests in Abingdon this November for BGAV's Annual Meeting, focusing not on ourselves, but on his mission for us.  Let us be living out God stories, doing missions, and then celebrating what God has done, is doing, and will do.

Devotional based on I Peter 2:9 (cf. Exodus 19:5-6; the Church is the New Israel).

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