Bill Barker, Director of Appalachian Regional Ministry (ARM) of the Southern Baptist Churches of North America will be the guest speaker at the Grace Baptist Church of Tyrone Sunday, February 18 in the 8:15 a.m. and 10:30 a.m. worship services. He will also speak to the Adult Bible classes during the 9:30 a.m. Sunday School.
Grace Church is located across from East End Pizza on Columbia Avenue in Tyrone. A nursery and children’s church is provided for the 10:30 a.m. service.
Barker directs a Southern Baptist North America Mission Organization that responds to the physical and spiritual needs of the people of Appalachia region of the U.S.
\”Appalachian Regional Ministry\” covers an area that starts north of Atlanta and extends as far north as Pennsylvania, covering most of that state except metro Philadelphia. It also includes Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Maryland, Virginia and all of West Virginia.
As the Appalachian Regional Director for Southern Baptist Churches, Barker’s job is to organize and oversee numerous “advance survey teams” who focus on a certain region of a state of the Appalachian Region area; these teams visit an area to access both physical and spiritual needs and then locate the resources to meet that need. These needs range from every day humanity needs for the overlooked of our society, food and hygiene, recruiting volunteers to come into the Appalachian Region to do “volunteer” construction, repair projects and or plant a new church in an area that upon survey shows spiritual need.
In conversation with Pastor Garthwaite of Grace Baptist Church Barker said, “I work with the people in the mountains to help them understand how they can have Southern Baptist Christian volunteers come and help them in numerous areas such as house repairs, build handicap ramps into their homes, construct or fix items around their church facility or even local community improvements in. And then I work with the Southern Baptist churches and associations throughout the rest of North America to help them understand how they can come in and assist these needs by donating their company’s products, financial resources or time and effort to do short-term volunteer missions. In other words my job ranges from finding food for families in McDowell, KY to finding the leadership to begin a new church in Osceola Mills, PA. Working to share Jesus in Appalachia means ministering to millions of people without Christ and to the poorest of America’s poor.”
“As best as we can determine across Appalachia today, there are about 50,000 Southern Baptist volunteers coming to the region on an annual basis,” Barker said. “And we thank God for everyone that comes, though that’s not nearly enough. But we rejoice when volunteers come because for every 10-12 volunteers, there’s one profession of faith in outreach in that community for the Lord Jesus Christ.”
The congregation of Grace Baptist would like to invite the area community to visit and possibly discover as a Christian how you can play a part in serving the Lord Jesus and your fellow man in the Appalachian Region of the U.S. After all, Jesus said \”all men will know we are Christians by our love for one another.\”
