A group of pastors recently traveled to Ethiopia through the International Mission Board, aimed and growing efforts toward international missions in their churches. – BP photo / provided by Quintell Hill
RICHMOND, Va. (BP) – Community missions is well known and established in African American churches. Quintell Hill is working to see that passion become just as evident for international missions.
That is taking initial shape through a series of overseas trips sponsored by the International Mission Board, where Hill serves as a mobilizer. As he travels the country, his audience is primarily, but not limited to, African American congregations.
“I want to mobilize them for missions, to support missions and prepare them to give and to go,” he said of trips designed to expose pastors and leaders to Southern Baptist mission work.
“Seeing is better than being told,” he said.
April marks two years in the role. Recently, a group returned from Ethiopia after meeting local pastors, teaching classes in a seminary and traveling into other areas of the country. The trip was in partnership with the Baptist Mission of Ethiopia and included pastors, state convention staff and one Baptist state convention executive.
As of today (March 18), the IMB has 3,529 personnel in more than 120 countries. Twenty-seven of those personnel are African American. More Southern Baptist African American pastors went overseas in the last year than in the IMB’s history, said Hill. The goal is to build up others for missions service.
“They’re on fire for it now,” he said, adding that the strategy “is the secret sauce to exposing more African American pastors to the nations.”
Everyone knew Brian Carmichael’s dad as “H.D.” instead of Horace David. H.D. served as pastor of Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Memphis for 20 years. Brian has now been there for 21, following nine as pastor in Brownsville, Tenn.
His family experience in ministry joins that of a missionary, as his son served two years as an IMB Journeyman.
Carmichael also works with the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board to mobilize African American churches, where missions is typically focused on “local, local, local,” he said.
“We want to show that missions isn’t either/or, but both/and. We’re looking to reach our neighbors and the nations.”
The Ethiopia trip reminded him of “the necessity of teaching the Word of God,” especially due to the prevalence of Islam and the Orthodox church.
“Things can become common. We have to teach the Bible. We also have to be more confident in our faith, our witness.”
In west Philadelphia, he was born and raised, so Jerome Coleman is familiar with the area and its people. Today, he is the pastor of First Baptist Church of Crestmont, north of the city, and serves as vice president of the SBC’s National African American Fellowship.
Coleman joined other team members who taught classes to Ethiopian pastors before flying to other parts of the country, where they met with fellow believers and took part in evangelism.
“We trained pastors in terms of discipleship and evangelism, because the nature of Christianity in Ethiopia is a combination of faith plus works,” Coleman said. “They’re combating an approach where it’s a mixing of religions, like Protestantism and Catholicism.”
The training, he added, makes those pastors “outliers in their theological approach.”
Evangelism in the villages, for instance, didn’t include people who had never heard of Jesus.
“[There], everybody wears a cross. Everybody goes to church. It’s not a lack of familiarity with Jesus. It’s emphasizing that it’s Christ and Christ alone. Mary is not a co-redeemer. You talk to them about confessing Christ alone and moving them into churches that preach it as well,” he said.
One look at Ed Emmerling makes it obvious. He is in the “not limited to” part of Hill’s job description.
The state executive for Michigan Baptists became acquainted with Hill about a year ago, when the latter was in Michigan for a gathering to honor Southern Baptists’ first overseas missionary, George Liele. Hill told him about the effort to encourage more African American pastors to emphasize international missions.
“That excited me,” said Emmerling. “So I jumped on board and volunteered to send some of our pastors with him. … I believe in this mission.”
Three went with Hill to Uganda last year. More are planned for future trips in the coming months.
Emmerling’s trip to Ethiopia gave him new learning opportunities.
“I was able to sit with guys and engage with them about the differences in our churches. It was a wealth of knowledge for me.”
Hill said the mission of the trips is to help others “catch God’s call for the unreached.”
“It’s about exposure, let them see the need. There’s some hard ground out there for the Gospel. Folks over there have been trying to get the Gospel to these others for quite some time, and it’s hard.
“I wanted our group to see the work of a missionary and what is happening on the ground. Then they can resonate with what we mean when we talk about the unreached.”
