Kate Gregory

NORTH GARLAND, Texas (BP) -- Dozens of missionary families gathered for a meeting in South Africa, but missions volunteer Jacquie Collins didn't see any African American families among them. That struck the heart of Collins, an African American, because she hadn't considered going overseas herself until a few years ago.

LAGARTO, Ecuador (BP) -- Tony Mathews was on a mission. He wanted to find the man he had led to Christ a couple of days earlier. Mathews, pastor of North Garland Baptist Fellowship in Garland, Texas, had met Wiston while walking through the small town of Lagarto on the Ecuadorian coast with a handful of fellow African American pastors and church members from the Dallas area.

RICHMOND, Va. (BP)-- Hardly a day goes by without someone telling Adam Hailes, a Southern Baptist missionary in Madagascar, that he's out of place. In the Malagasy dialect that the Antandroy people speak, the term for white means foreigner. Locals address him by that title. The term isn't used out of disrespect. Their attitude of separation is produced by fear.

NORTH GARLAND, Texas (BP) -- Tony Mathews had thought international missions wasn't for everyone, that as a pastor his focus should be on the local church. North Garland Baptist Fellowship, where he has served for 22 years, supported Southern Baptist missions and ministries through the Cooperative Program. Members of the Texas church had gone on international missions trips, which the pastor had supported -- from a distance.

RICHMOND, Va. (BP) -- After starting a church, the last thing on many pastors' minds would be how that church could immediately have a hand in starting more, especially great distances away. But when church planter Steve Gentry worked with the Southern Baptist Conservatives of Virginia and the North American Mission Board in 2009 to start Village Church at Midlothian, he led the Richmond-suburb church to form a missions partnership with a Southern Baptist couple serving in East Asia within the church's first year of existence.

ROCKVILLE, Va. (BP) -- IMB President Tom Elliff is concerned that Christians have become desensitized to everyone's need for a Savior.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP) -- Scott Holste has been elected as vice president for global strategic mobilization for the International Mission Board. Holste, who was elected during the May 22-23 meeting of IMB trustees in Nashville, Tenn., will direct a new initiative with Christian leaders in business and marketplace professions across the world.

HIGHLAND, Calif. (BP) -- Beyond Beverly Hills' designer-label storefronts and gated estates are apartments and condos filled with people from diverse walks of life.

LAKE CHARLES, La. (BP) -- Within every Southern Baptist church there are people who can take the Gospel around the world -- business professionals, IMB President Tom Elliff said.

TEMUCO, Chile (BP)--After adopting the Mapuche people group in Chile last fall, Second Baptist Church in Russellville, Ark., was planning to conduct first aid training during its first mission trip to the Mapuche. But following the Feb. 27 earthquake and tsunami, the church shifted gears to help build temporary shelters ...