Lessons in a Winter Wonderland

With a desire to make some meaningful contribution to our partnership with the Baptist Convention of New York, I recently flew to the Empire State to spend three days with J. B. Graham, executive director of our sister state Convention to the north. The flight to Rochester was on a cold, wintry day, but basically uneventful except for having to circle the city of our destination for over an hour due to a poor visibility factor.

The 80-mile drive to Syracuse, the home of the BCNY, was stress-free until the snow began to fall about 20 miles west of the city. I had flown into Rochester instead of Syracuse because it made sense from an economic point of view. Now I was beginning to think it made sense to have rented a four-wheel drive vehicle from a safety point of view.

After a brief meeting with J.B., and being introduced to most of the Convention staff, the Executive Director and I were off to visit Bruce Aubrey, pastor of the Northside Church in Liverpool. Aubrey, a former president of the BCNY, is providing marvelous leadership to a dynamic and growing church. He is a faithful servant of God with a clear, heaven-sent vision for his church.

Northside recently expanded their facility and is using FAITH as their tool for evangelism. They are well on their way to their goal of baptizing 100 new believers this church year.

By the time we left the church the snow was falling in a fashion unknown to most Southerners, adding even more beauty to the already existing winter wonderland. I am fascinated by cold weather and snow that is measured by feet rather than inches, but I was becoming even more enthralled by what J.B was telling me about the Baptist work in New York.

Graham has strong Georgia ties, having lived in the state for 21 years while serving at the Home Mission Board, now the North American Mission Board. He has been in his position of leadership in New York for 6 years and the Convention has experienced remarkable growth during his tenure of service.

There are 389 churches and missions in the New York Convention and churches are being started on a regular basis. One pastor said, “New Yorkers are not resistant to the gospel; most of them have just never had much of a chance to hear it.” With a statewide population of over 27,000,000 people and few evangelical churches, the field is certainly white unto harvest.

The next day our itinerary included a trip to Watertown for a visit with pastor Stan Gilcash. After breakfast, J.B. and I started on the 57-mile trek up I-81. The snow had continued to fall through the night with increasing intensity. We had traveled less than 10 miles when visibility became a near impossibility. J.B. actually had to roll down the window on the passenger side of the car to get a visual vantage point from which he could direct my driving.

New York’s “Mr. Baptist” said he had never seen such blizzard-like conditions in his 6 years in New York, and referred to the condition as a “whiteout.” We managed to cover 2 miles in 33 minutes and 19 miles in 3 hours. It was really unbelievable, unforgettable, scary – awesome. The next day the newspaper reported that 70 inches of snow had fallen.

We finally got to Watertown and went on to Newton Falls, Lake Placid, Queensbury, Saratoga, and Albany. At each stop we found dedicated pastors, growing churches, and tens of thousands of people yet to be reached with the gospel.

We might think of New Yorkers as sophisticated, cosmopolitan, postmodern, and secular, but in the churches I visited I discovered that FAITH works and that old- fashioned, door-to-door evangelism is an amazingly successful way of reaching the lost. Soul winning is not something that has been tried and failed. It has failed because it has not been tried.

If pastor Ron Allen can plant a church and win the lost in a remote outpost like Newton Lake and if Robbie Lankford can plant a church and win the lost in the upscale section of Queensbury, there is no reason why Georgia Baptists cannot plant new churches and win the lost by the multiplied thousands in our part of the world.

God’s grace covers Georgia and New York like the wintry snow covered my path through the Empire State; and God’s forgiveness is so complete that when the shed blood of Jesus is applied to the sinner’s heart, it is washed as white as snow.