nineteen hundred and forty-six - Amazon Web Services

RELIEF AND ANNUITY BOARD 461
ing persistence and faith in God, Livingstone conquered. Your Relief and
Annuity Board has passed through experiences not essentially foreign to those
of Livingstone. Your Board has not advanced through these 28 years on
"flowery beds of ease." Through "good report" and through "evil report" it has
followed a command like unto that which the mariners on the first ship ever to
touch American shores given by Columbus, which command was ever and anon,
Sail on!
And now concerning the days and months and years which lie ahead, it
is not amiss for us to venture some forecasts, for as Edmund Burke declared,
"Futurity is the great concern of mankind." Our futurity is not to be determined
by coincidence on our part or of caprice on the part of God. The Relief
and Annuity Board and Almighty God must continue to be in conjunction. If
this condition is realized, "the future is lighted for us with the radiant colors of
hope." Adopting the immortal saying of William Cary, the great apostle to
India, we are to continue to "attempt great things for God," and "expect great
things from God."
When the Relief and Annuity Board was constituted at Hot Springs in 1918
it was as we have said elsewhere in this discussion, sent on a truly major mission.
The territory of the Southern Baptist Convention was to be its field of operations,
geographically speaking. The ministry and all the laborers supported by
the churches, the conventions and their institutions and agencies, southern and
state, constituted the organisms which the Board, through its benign ministry,
was to constructively serve. A tremendous potential constituency and service
this! Surely, there was something definite for the Board to do. Nothing was
to be its own except it made conquest of it! Someone has said, "When faith
goes to market it always takes a basket."
Here the Board has not failed. -Its basket has gone with its faith, and its
high purpose has ever been to bring that basket ladened with blessed and timely
aid into every state of the convention and to every group and individual needing
its ministry.
As the children of Joseph, Manasseh and Ephraim, took their inheritance
(Joshua 16:4), even so the Relief and Annuity Board has sought ever to
"possess its possessions." We have also been mindful of the exhortation of the
children of Dan recorded in Judges 18: 9, 10, "Arise for we have seen the land
and behold it is very good and are ye still? Be not slothful t'o go and enter to
possess the land; for God hath given it into your hands; a place where there is
no want of anything that is in the earth."
Our forecast for the period 1946 to 1968, when the Board will doubtless
celebrate its golden jubilee, is bound to be on the basis of faith—a faith full
of hope and expectation like in kind, though we dare not say in quality, to that
which is recorded concerning the many worthies of the long yester-centuries
recorded in the eleventh chapter of Hebrews. This great company dared to
trust God to bring to pass the glorious things for which their hearts longed.
The Relief and Annuity Board today, dares to expect a rich return from its
invested energies and an abundant fruitage from its plantings!
Yes we shall continue to go to market, and we shall take along our basket
which shall be filled to overflowing, for that is how God rewards the faith of
his servants.
By 1956, ten years hence, the present assets of the Board of approximately
$10 000 000'shall, please God, have grown to $25,000,000; and by 1968 (our
fiftieth year) these assets shall have increased to $40,000,000. But our faith
objectives reach far beyond the successful amassing of money, important and
imperatively necessary as the amassing of money is. Amassing money merely
for the sake of money is not and never shall be this Board's desire or purpose.
Our chief objective is that we shall be able to "apprehend that for which we
have been apprehended," i.e., that our service to our multitude of preachers
and the widows of preachers together with our thousands of denominationally
employed lay workers shall be equal to their numbers and commensurate with
their needs Our enrolled membership in our several annuity plans, inclusive
of our relief beneficiaries, will make tremendous gains during the intervening
oeriod before we celebrate our fiftieth birthday anniversary. And what does
our faith prompt us to forecast here? It is that no fewer than 30,000 active
members will be of record in 1968. This only means a little more than doubling