nineteen hundred and forty-six - Amazon Web Services

308 SOUTHERN BAPTIST CONVENTION
privileged elevated, the waste places made to bloom, there will result a new
conviction about Home Missions that will forever change our missionary
horizon and will hurl us out into renewed endeavor for the evangelization and
Christianization of our own land.
THE CALL OF HOME MISSIONS
The call of Home Missions is not the appeal of sectarianism; it is rather
the challenge of a great fundamental truth. From the vantage of present
outlook the homeland is not simply the residence of me and my wife, my son,
John, and his wife, us four and no more; it is the familiar base of worldreaching
operations. The task of Home Missions, operating from this base, is
to harness^his spiritual world-energy to a world-need; it is to grasp the leverage
for the world's uplift offered in the evangelization and Christianization of a
great people.
We are thinking now of the kingdom place, task and responsibility of the
Home Mission Board. Southern Baptists are in a great kingdom campaign.
Christ has given them a world task. This task cannot be accomplished by a
series of isolated attacks, nor by a campaign waged by disconnected divisions;
it can be accomplished only by and through the preaching of the Gospel at home
and abroad by the whole denomination. It is the united forces of King Immanuel
carrying out His imperial command to make disciples of all nations.
The strategic point of approach to this world task is the homeland. Keep the
homeland evangelized and mobilized for service and we have the hope and the
assurance of a world's evangelization. Let the Apostolic faith perish from
the homeland and our mission to lands afar will fail.
THE EVANGELIZATION OF AMERICA
To evangelize America means more than sending out missionaries, establishing
mission stations and making and baptizing disciples. These are all
fundamentally important and essential, but they are not by any means all that
we are to do if we would Christianize America. Even though all the places
on the map of America were filled tomorrow with missionaries and mission
stations, our task would not have been completed. Every province of our thinking,
every area of our lives, every region of our relation to others and of
others' relation to us must be taken for Christ. The whole life of the nation
through its entire civilization must be brought under the sovereignty of Christ.
To Christianize America, therefore, means to bring the civilization of
America under the sovereignty of Christ; it means to bring Christian influences
to bear on the emigrant populations in our industrial centers, to help racial
and underprivileged groups to realize the life of Christ; to build virile, vital,
functioning New Testament churches throughout the land; to develop a'Christ
tian community life in cities and in country; to fence against the inroads of
spiritual disintegration; to generate spiritual enthusiasm and to transfuse all
the life forces of America with the spiritual potencies of the kingdom of God.
The Home Mission Board has ambitious plans for the coming century. The
Board believes that there should be no needy micsion field in the homeland
either only partially entered or wholly untounched. It is the purpose of the
Board to completely evangelize the homeland; to fully occupy the fields where
it is now at work and also to enter fields which are now unoccupied.
THE MAN WITHOUT A CHANCE
I am thinking now of the man without a chance—the man where there
are no churches and where the Gospel of Jesus Christ is never preached. There
are millions of these unchurched men and women in our homeland men and
women who live on the outside of the circumference and beyond the reach of
the influence and work of our churches—men and women wholly without a
chance.
Some of these are foreigners cut off by language barriers; some are among
the underprivileged in our cities and industrial centers; some are tenant farmers
who are segregated by poverty; some are migrant workers the nature of whose
work consigns them to spiritual isolation; some who live in sections beyond