ATHENS—In the early morning of Jan. 12, 2010, Lake Athens Baptist Church in Athens, about 65 miles southeast of Dallas, was one of two churches in that town to burn by the hand of arsonists. The week before that, another church near Athens was torched.

Twenty months later, Lake Athens has new offices, a new auditorium and new education space, all rebuilt on the old slabs.

It is debt free, thanks to insurance, faithful giving of church members, and volunteer builders from numerous churches, Pastor John Green said.

Church attendance is up after Lake Athens held its first services in the new digs on Labor Day weekend. After the fire, the church met in the gym, which survived the fire.

“Our children’s department has grown 400 percent in the last six months. The Lord’s just opened doors,” Green said.

On Sept. 25, Lake Athens was scheduled to hold dedication services and an open house. A dedication theme of “To God Be the Glory” was chosen.

“We are expecting 300-400 people for our dedication service,” Green said on Sept. 21. “We want to dedicate this as a house of worship and prayer to God.”

On Jan. 10 of this year, the arsonists—Jason Robert Bourque, 20, of Lindale, and Daniel George McAllister, 22, of Ben Wheeler—were given life sentences and additional 20-year sentences after pleading guilty in connection with 10 church arsons in early 2010.

Four of the burned churches were Southern Baptist: Lake Athens Baptist Church, Little Hope Baptist Church in Canton, Tyland Baptist Church in Tyler and Dover Baptist Church in rural Smith County.

BASTROP — Raymond Edge, pastor of First Baptist Church of Bastrop, said he had planned to preach from Psalm 46:1-7 — a refuge passage — on the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. But the ferocious wildfires in Bastrop County the previous week left his church feeling far removed from 9/11 remembrances.

“That had become so far away because right now this is what we are living,” Edge told the TEXAN on the afternoon of Sept. 11.

In Bastrop County, 1,554 homes and 35,000 acres had burned as of Sept. 12, with more expected to be reported as authorities allowed displaced residents to re-enter neighborhoods. The fire was about 60 percent contained, the Texas Forest Service reported.

Statewide, 250 or 254 counties remained under burn bans as the extreme drought continues across the southern plains.

Edge said he was able to draw some of his message from the original passage but focus on his church and community. Psalm 31:1-4 became the source of the sermon title, “In you, oh Lord, I put my trust” — a passage in which the Lord is a “rock of refuge.”

Pastor Adam Espurvoa of Iglesia Bautista Emanuel in Bastrop spoke from his own experience and God’s provision. He quoted Psalm 34:7: “The angel of the Lord encamps around those who fear him and delivers them.”

Espurvoa and his congregation mostly live in rural Bastrop County on acreages surrounded by pine trees. All of the 300 pines on his lot burned as the fire circled his house.

“I can touch the [outside] wall of my house and touch the ground where the fire stopped,” Espurvoa said.

River Valley Christian Fellowship Pastor Cody Whitfill, who lost his house in the fire, said 16 families in his church of 400 people lost their homes.

“My thoughts are to emphasize that our hope is Christ,” Whitfill said prior to Sept. 11 services.

In addition to a disaster relief team from the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention preparing meals for emergency responders and evacuees, as well as providing shower trailers and laundry units, members of River Valley also began feeding people the day after the fires began and ended that week serving 15,000 meals.

The affect of the Bastrop County fires on churches was still being assessed, pastors said. Five-thousand people had been displaced, though some of those have returned to their neighborhoods.

Most of the congregation of Iglesia Bautista Emanuel was sleeping in the church building because roads to their homes were blocked by police each night due to looting, Espurvoa said. The area was also without electricity.

The pastor, his wife Eva, and eight senior members of the church, left Bastrop Sept. 12 for the Alto Frio Baptist Encampment in central Texas to participate in an already scheduled senior retreat. Espurvoa, 73, considered staying behind but church members encouraged him to go for some much-needed rest.

Edge said FBC Bastrop spent their usual Sunday School hour in a time of fellowship and prayer. Just having the chance to talk and cry together meant a great a deal to them, he said.

Espurvoa was able to find some humor in the somber atmosphere as he noted, “I’ve been preaching for 49 years. This is the first time I’ve preached in blue jeans and tennis shoes. All my suits are smoked up.”

The pastors said some of their families were away from home when the evacuation alert was given. Other barely escaped.

Edge told of a man from his church who was taking a Sunday afternoon nap when his son, who lived next door, came to the house to get him out. The man looked out the window to see a wall of fire heading directly toward his home. The two families had only time enough to get in their cars and drive away as flames leapt up on both sides of the road to safety.

Edge has pastored at FBC Bastrop for 15 years and drawn close to the families he has watched grow up in the church. The first week of the fires he cried for and with his congregation. Then, he added, God would renew his strength so he could continue to minister to so many who were hurting.

“More than anything else I have asked God to let me help with spiritual needs,” he said.

Redd said the members of Living Stones Church are looking after each other. The church is a 40-member plant less than a year old. Those who worked to plant the church also planted their sister church, River Valley Christian Fellowship.

Redd said it was important for the church to take care of their own membership first before trying to initiate or involve themselves in a ministry project right away. The time will come for that, he said.

At FBC Bastrop SBTC feeding, shower, and laundry units were set up and the congregation worked to clear a church-owned building for use as an evacuation shelter.

Jason Bray, a staff member of River Valley Christian Fellowship, who is coordinating the church’s meal ministry, said Texas-owned H.E.B grocery chain has donated substantially to feeding evacuees.

Espurvoa said he wants to ensure his congregation is cared for so they can help others too. The Austin Baptist Association has delivered water and groceries to the Bastrop churches. He said some of the donations collected by his church members have then been given to their own relatives and neighbors. As his members graciously share their provisions with others, Espurvoa said they will be a witness of the grace and mercy of Jesus.

The SBTC feeding unit at FBC Bastrop prepared 260 meals on Sept. 9 and 985 meals on Sept. 10. The hot meals were delivered via Red Cross Emergency Response Vehicles (ERVs) to people in a shelter in Paige, Texas, and to some people sifting through remains of their homes.

The number of meals prepared declined significantly Sept. 11 as people began to move out of shelters. The feeding crew has not been given new orders but Edge anticipated clean-up crews beginning work soon.

A second SBTC feeding unit was deployed to First Baptist Church of Magnolia, north of Houston, where firefighters worked to get another wildfire under control. That blaze, which covered portions of Montgomery, Grimes and Waller counties, had scorched 22,000 acres and destroyed almost 100 homes. The feeding crew had served about 1,000 meals a day for firefighters and evacuees there.

BASTROP—The Sunday bulletin for River Valley Christian Fellowship in Bastrop challenged those in attendance to number God’s blessings—“a spouse, kids, job, and a roof over your head.”

Within a few days, at least 11 families from that church and 20 from a sister Southern Baptist church, First Baptist Church of Bastrop, had lost their houses in a catastrophic blaze that spread across the county Labor Day weekend and continued to burn the next week.

As of Sept. 8, wildfires in Bastrop County, southeast of Austin, had destroyed nearly 1,400 homes, the Texas Forest Service reported.

Pastor Cody Whitfill of River Valley and his family were among the thousands of residents evacuated on Sunday afternoon of Labor Day weekend. In the next two days church members prepared 5,500 hamburgers and over 1,000 tacos for relief workers battling the most destructive wildfire on record in Texas.

After a long day of delivering meals, Whitfill learned the fire had moved within a half mile of his house but had not jumped the road along the subdivision.

“That was a good report,” he said, recalling that he went to bed with the assurance that his house was fine. By Tuesday morning, Sept. 6, he was standing on his property looking at only the ashes that remained.

Much of the pastor’s focus in the pulpit in recent weeks has centered on “suffering well for Christ,” he said. “When I stand up and preach next Sunday the message will be the same—that Christ really is our hope,” Whitfill told the TEXAN. “But I wonder how well that would have stuck had we not gone through this with people who had lost everything in the same way. It will help our witness.”

When the opportunity arose to serve those fighting the fires, the six-year-old church already had experience grilling 500 burgers each Monday night for the homeless, low-income folks and anyone else who shows up on Main Street. Their work through a non-profit ministry formed by members of the church made it easier to be prepared when the need arose to serve relief volunteers.

Whitfill believes their continued demonstration of concern for physical needs will provide an opportunity to care for spiritual needs as well. In the words of his wife, Melinda, speaking to a reporter from KPRC-TV in Houston hours after learning her own house was gone, “This is our community, where we live and we love them. We’re to be the hands and feet of Jesus.”

CARROLLTON—The school principal spotted the sea of blue T-shirts clustered in the middle section of the bleachers. Hollering above the background noise of cheerleaders and students, Carrollton Ranchview principal David Hicks thanked the 160 or so strangers there to cheer on the Wolves football team. He seemed to marvel at the turnout.

He’d heard they were coming to cheer, but not like this.

There at Carrollton ISD’s Standridge Stadium, not nearly a quarter full, sat the crowd from MacArthur Boulevard Baptist Church in Irving, each person wearing a blue T-shirt bearing the message “We cheer for Ranchview” on the front and “MBBC” and a player’s jersey number on the back.

Ranchview High is just down the street from MacArthur Boulevard Baptist and is just inside the Irving city limits, though it’s in the Carrollton-Farmer’s Branch school district. Much like the Valley Ranch area of Irving where the church is, the school is increasingly diverse, ethnically and by social class.

After Hurricane Katrina, the area drew a number of evacuees, some of whom have since joined the church. The school also drew of number of evacuee students, but attendance at football games has been sparse, the church learned last year from a coach who was visiting the church.

“There is affluence in this area, and there is also a mix of low-income housing, singles, young marrieds, different ethnicities from all over the world,” said Darren Mechling, an associate pastor at MacArthur Boulevard Baptist.

When Mechling learned from the coach last year that at one game only 38 Ranchview fans were in the stands (the coach stopped the tape and counted), he had an idea born from a desire to serve the community around them: Why not provide a cheering section of sorts for the football team?

It didn’t take long before 65 families were signed up to show up at home football games, some driving in 15-20 miles from Keller and Grand Prairie. Also, the church plans to serve a pregame meal to coaches and players at the school before four of the five home games this season.

MacArthur has already served a teacher appreciation luncheon, and it hosted a sports camp this summer for kids in the neighborhood, Mechling said.

“I’ve really been excited about how our church family has stepped up,” Mechling added. “This is an area where we have struggled to know how to reach out and minister, and this helps us to exhibit the love of Christ in a tangible way to our community.”

MacArthur’s pastor, Josh Smith, said his church has slowly grown more diverse in his five years there, and getting outside the church walls can only help as it attempts to minister to the community.

“We’ve tried really hard to be multiethnic, and the Lord has really blessed that,” Smith said.

Jamie Brooks, who grew up attending MacArthur Boulevard Baptist and graduated from Irving schools, brought his family—wife Esther and sons Caleb (6) and Zachary (3)—to the game on Sept. 3 against Prosper High School. The family was wearing shirts with the number 9 on the back, the jersey of wide receiver Chris Wimby.

“This is a good way to meet a practical need that [the team] had and to do it in the name of Christ,” Brooks explained.

Before the game and before the second half, church members raised the inflatable tunnel the Ranchview Wolves run through to enter the field, cheering on the team and offering words of encouragement. They needed it.

Down 37-0 at the half, Mechling and another MacArthur Boulevard member consoled an injured player who stood by as his teammates prepared to rally for another half.
Prosper, ranked No. 6 that week in the 3A/2A area rankings by the Dallas Morning News, prevailed, 54-13.

•••

Bill Liggett, pastor of First Baptist Church of Burkburnett, near Wichita Falls, said such outreach to local schools is a great ministry to school district employees, many of whom have to make do with fewer resources and often need a pat on the back or an offer of prayer if they so choose.

A surprising number, Liggett said, take him up on the offer of prayer.

No stranger to public school outreach—the churches he has pastored have hosted kickoff luncheons for school district employees 20 years straight and eight years at FBC Burkburnett—Liggett said such outreach and kind gestures give him and his staff a rapport with the school district, Burkburnett’s largest employer.

When crisis ensues or a need is felt, he is often the de facto chaplain on the scene.

“We don’t abuse that access, but we do have a relationship with the school system because of the love and care we have shown to the administrators, teachers, even the people who work at the bus barn.”

On Aug. 19, the church, with gifts from businesses and school boosters, gave away about $2,500 worth of door prizes to school district employees who showed up for a simple serve-yourself, cold-cuts sandwich luncheon and a rock-paper-scissors tournament. Grand door prize: $1,000 cash. Second place: $600 package to the Gaylord Texan Resort.

“We take written prayer requests. They know I’m the only one who will see them. It’s not something I’m going to hand out to someone else,” Liggett said.

Liggett said he had the opportunity to pray with several teachers and an administrator the week following at their request. Many school district employees are already members of FBC Burkburnett.

And businesses are eager to contribute prizes. In fact, Liggett said not one business turned them down this year.

Also, Liggett is a big fan of Burkburnett High School athletics, even serving as the public address announcer.

During pre-season football, he calls a local grocer a week ahead of time and orders a pallet of watermelons. When they arrive, they load them in a truck and serve the football team all the watermelon they can eat at the end of practice.

“Those players know when watermelon day is and believe me, it’s a hit.”   

Liggett said the church tries to extend the same support to local firefighters and police.

An early morning trip to the school bus barn the first week of school, two dozen donuts in hand, afforded him ministry opportunities he wouldn’t have otherwise had, Liggett said.

One conversation was with a guy he would have had difficulty connecting with in a different context.

“He spent 30 minutes talking to me about his recent open heart surgery,” Liggett said. Because of such outreach, “we’re the first entity anybody calls when there’s a need.”

GRAPEVINE—Bible drill and speakers’ tournament participants will rely on either the King James Version or Holman Christian Standard Bible when they compete next spring in regional and statewide competition sponsored by the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention. The decision to drop the New International Version as one of the options resulted from concern that the 2011 NIV translation features extensive gender-neutral language left over from the controversial TNIV, published in 2005.

This shift in translation principles sets a potentially dangerous precedent in biblical interpretation, said SBTC church ministries associate Kenneth Priest, who announced the decision in a letter to pastors. After studying press releases from the NIV’s Committee on Biblical Translation and consulting with Southern Baptist scholars and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a recommendation was made against using the new NIV.

The 2011 NIV is an updated translation to both the 1984 edition of the NIV and the later TNIV, which flopped commercially. Messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention in Phoenix last June approved a resolution offered from the floor that discouraged use of the new NIV due to gender-neutral translation methodology.

The resolution criticized the alteration of hundred of verses, “erasing gender-specific details which appear in the original language,” adding that the 2011 NIV “has gone beyond acceptable translation standards.”

Since Biblica, which holds the copyright for the NIV, will no longer produce copies of the popular 1984 edition, orders of new Bibles used in drills would rely on the updated version. Priest said he and other state convention leaders would explore whether to expand to a third option other than the NIV in 2013.

The Baptist Faith and Message confessional statement supports complementarianism—the view that the Bible teaches distinct roles in the home and church for male and female, both bearing God’s image and equal in nature and worth.

“Feminists who claim that women can be pastors and elders will find much to their liking in the 2011 NIV because it tilts the scales in favor of their view at several key verses,” observed Denny Burk, associate professor of biblical studies at Boyce College and a former Criswell College professor.

The new NIV also changes “father” to “parent” even though the Hebrew text clearly refers to a father. In other instances, changes diminish the role of the father in Israelite society, Burk argued. “These new NIV verses are not translated as accurately as possible, but they are consistent with the new NIV’s practice of removing male-oriented details of meaning from the text of the Bible.”

A desire to avoid the words “man” and “son” prompts changing Psalm 8:4 from “What is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him?” to read, “What is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?”

Noting use of the same phrase in Hebrews 2:8, Burk wrote that “the connection to the New Testament and to Christ is obscured with the new NIV, as it removes male components of meaning from verse after verse.” 

Changes to “he” and “him” to “they” and “them” account for the largest category of changes, but causes a difference in meaning. Burk said, “Changing singulars to plurals removes the emphasis in a verse on individual, personal relationship with God and specific individual responsibility for one’s choices and actions.”

While he commends the translation team for changing 933 places where gender-neutral translations were used in the TNIV, Burk said the vast majority of problematic gender renderings from the TNIV are retained in the updated NIV. According to a study by CBMW, 2,766 gender language revisions remain from TNIV to NIV 2011. The complete analysis may be viewed at cbmw.org.

Southern Baptists serving on CBMW include Danny Akin and Daniel Heimbach from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary; Mary Kassian, R. Albert Mohler and Bruce Ware from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; and Dorothy Patterson from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The SBTC’s decision is in line with the findings of the CBMW, Priest said.

“The strongest consideration in weighing the 2011 NIV should be its faithfulness to translate the Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic biblical manuscripts into readable modern language without regarding social or doctrinal trends.”

Louisiana Baptist Convention and Georgia Baptist Convention leaders indicated they are also removing the NIV as a translation used in Bible Drill and Speakers’ Tournament.