Four couples with Georgia ties headed to distant lands

JONESBORO — David Pope says God used a rough drive home on I-20 to convince him of his new calling.

A member of Glenwood Hills Baptist Church in Lithonia at the time, Pope had been wrestling on God’s plan for his life. Stuck in a jam inside the Perimeter, he gripped the steering wheel not out of frustration, but surrender.

“I’d been saying ‘If You want me to do this, I need to know,’” Pope remembers of that day 22 years ago. “The Lord spoke clearly to my heart. I got home and told my wife I’d accepted God’s call to ministry.

“She said it was ‘bout time.”

Recently the couple received a new calling after years of ministry in the Northeast and Midwest. David and Cindy Pope, who will be serving in Burkina Faso, were among the 83 new missionaries commissioned by the International Mission Board Sept. 10 at First Baptist Jonesboro.

Three other couples with Georgia ties were commissioned for work through the IMB. Pat and Paige Combs will travel to Tanzania, where Pat will work as a logistics coordinator. Danny Hood and his wife Claudia will go to Kenya, where they will serve as church planters. Another couple, Tim and Tina Louderback, was commissioned to work in Panama.

A self-starter who built a contracting and remodeling company from the ground up, Pat Combs admitted that God has been renovating his own life recently.

“My wife and I have been through a tough process for the last year where we had to give control over to Him,” he said. “We had to put our lives and the lives of our kids completely in His hands. As a small business owner, I’m used to making all the important decisions that affect our future.

“All of the decisions made about us over the last year have been from someone else. That’s been the hardest part of the journey.”

Combs’ earliest memories of church came at First Baptist Cedartown. Later his family moved to Atlanta, where they attended Rehoboth Baptist Church in Tucker. After getting married, he and his wife attended First Baptist Snellville and Rehoboth again. They currently attend Truth Tabernacle of Praise in Stone Mountain, where Pat served as student pastor until recently.

As a logistics coordinator, Combs’ role is to take some of the administrative load from incoming missionaries – handle the nuts and bolts of settling in from the States.

“I view it as being a minister to missionaries,” said Combs, who had previously gone on short-term missions trips to Malawi and Mozambique. “Being a business owner prepares you for making sure the logistics are taken care of. You learn to manage time and people.”

Combs will be serving in Mozambique with his wife, Paige, their nine-year-old daughter Madison, and their son Brandon, 7.

A native of Augusta, Danny Hood attended Norman College and Mississippi College before earning degrees at New Orleans Seminary and Luther Rice Seminary. He served as pastor at Fellowship Baptist Church in Rome and First Baptist Kennesaw in the 70s before going to two churches in Florida for separate stints.

For the last three years he and his wife have served in Kampala, Uganda as church planters through the Master’s program at the IMB, which is designed for people 55 and older. With everything else, he’s packing 42 years of ministry for the trip.

For Hood, now 60, age “has nothing to do with serving overseas anymore.”

“My wife and I have always had a heart for missions,” he states, “even as teens when I had gone to foreign missions week at Ridgecrest. Through the years God led us to different churches before taking us overseas. We felt like it was time for us to go minister where there was little access to the gospel.”

Hood admits challenges are waiting. Learning a new language wasn’t easy for someone his age. The dominant Muslim culture also posed difficulties. Still, he’s adamant about the call given to him and others.

“In Uganda, there’s a 71-year-old man from Macon serving with no other missionary close to him,” he asserts. “It doesn’t matter about your age, profession, or education. There’s an opportunity to serve Christ.”

Claudia Hood often walked the streets of Kampala alone, training leaders to establish women’s Bible study groups and eventually lead a church planting movement.

“I had opportunities to begin ministries among women infected with HIV,” she remembers, “seeking to help them make a living with their crafts and learning about needed medical attention. We were active each Sunday with several house churches and usually had baptism once a month in Lake Victoria.

“In Kenya we will focus more on leadership development among missionaries. However, we have also asked to have one or two days a week to be among nationals. There is a huge slum area near Nairobi and we’ll be involved in taking that gospel there.”

The Hoods’ call doesn’t come without sacrifices. At the commissioning service both clung to their first grandchild, Timothy Isaac Hood, 13 months old. In December they’ll be spreading the gospel in Kenyan slums and training missionaries as their first granddaughter is being born at St. Mary’s Hospital in Richmond, Va.

Timothy Isaac is the son of Timothy Hood, who works in the Office of Overseas Operations with the IMB. He and his wife, Janet, both served as Journeymen overseas. Their other son, Jason, served in an orphanage during a three-month stay in Russia as a teenager

Missions is a cornerstone of a strong family, says Tim Louderback, a deacon at First Baptist Church in Thomasville.

“Our church is always giving people a chance to be involved in missions, whether it’s domestically or internationally. I’ve always looked for ways a mission trip can be family-oriented. There are ways to find something everyone can do. At the end of the day we’d share testimonies on what we did and learned.

“In Panama, I’ll be helping launch Bible studies and working with new believers – helping them get connected to a local church. My wife and [four] children will also be working through ways such as Vacation Bible School.”

Before traveling to Panama, the family will spend a year at language school in Costa Rica learning to speak Spanish.

Louderback credits his youngest daughter, Eden, with the drive to international missions. About four years ago he and Tina traveled to China for finalizing Eden’s adoption. Immersed in a different culture waiting for paperwork to go through brought Tim clarity on the urgency to spread the gospel.

“Spending time in the Word for a number of years led us to go through the adoption process. While in China, we were introduced up close to the lostness out there,” he says.

“For three weeks I’d see people going to the temples and bowing down and burning incense. During that time God began working in our hearts. We went back and forth on [the call to missions]. Tina said the struggle was God working on us.

“Through reading our Bible and prayer God shared with us what we were to do. We were called to be obedient and share his message with others around the world.”

He accepted the call last fall. Joining him and Tina in Panama are their children: Trinity, 11; Noah, 10; Gracie Lynn, 7; and Eden, 4.

 

Serving until ‘Stop’

A native of Canton, David Pope grew up at Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Hickory Flat. After graduating from Mississippi State University he worked in public utilities in Texas until his father’s death in 1980, which prompted a move back to Georgia. He and his wife attended First Baptist Woodstock before a job transfer with Georgia Power took them to Augusta.

“My wife had gotten saved, and that change really convicted me,” remembers Pope. “I decided I needed to rededicate my life to the Lord. In Augusta we began attending Abilene Baptist Church and spiritually we took off.”

Another transfer and the couple relocated to Conyers where they attended Glenwood Hills Baptist Church in Lithonia. After his I-20/Damascus Road experience, Pope enrolled at Mid America Seminary, where he surrendered to missions. “For us it was going [on missions] until God says stop,” he recollects.

Pope went on to serve 11 years as a pastor and two as associational missionary for Greater Syracuse Baptist Association in upstate New York. After a ministry stay in Indiana, an opportunity for him to serve in Pennsylvania near his children and grandchildren opened up in April 2006.

“That’s where I thought we’d stay,” he admits. “We were near family. The church was historic – it’s the oldest Southern Baptist church in Pennsylvania and just celebrated its 75th anniversary. It’s a country church but in an area that’s growing.

“I was looking forward to being the pastor there for 25 years or whatever and it being my last pastorate, but God had other plans.”

A little over a year later Pope and his wife were at the Southern Baptist Convention in San Antonio when Tom Eliff of the International Mission Board asked the crowd, “Have you gone as far as God wants you to go?”

“God had clearly said to me he hadn’t said ‘no,’” states Pope. “And here we are, looking at the second half of our ministerial life.”

In Burkina Faso, the Popes will serve on an engagement team researching “micro-groups” and assisting churches in evangelism. Career missionaries are not appointed by the IMB to people groups of less than 100,000. Instead, engagement teams travel to the areas, encouraging and training established churches to reach these smaller groups.

“Many tribal groups aren’t willing to take the gospel to another tribe,” says Pope. “We’re hopeful these local churches will adopt these groups and take the gospel to them. These are mostly non-literate cultures, so a clear oral presentation is crucial.”

For many the call to international missions comes during the formative youth and college years or soon thereafter. The Combs, Louderbacks, Popes, and Hoods testify how that pull can come later. In a few months they’ll scatter with others commissioned at Jonesboro, trading fall football Saturdays and family gatherings for Bible story presentations in the hot, dusty bush of Africa or door-to-door evangelism among Panamanians.

Tough decisions notwithstanding, it’s ‘bout time to answer the call.