VALLEY FORGE, PA (ABNS 5/16/12)—American Baptist Home Mission Societies (ABHMS) and American Baptist Women’s Ministries (ABWM) are co-sponsoring the 2012 Mission Encounter Tour to Alaska this Friday through May 27. The trip can be followed online via real-time podcast and blog.
“While serving and worshiping with the people of Alaska, participants will experience firsthand how God is working through American Baptist missionaries in our 49th state,” says Victoria Goff, ABHMS national coordinator of Volunteer and Disaster Response Ministries. “They’ll also experience the special bond that develops when sisters in Christ travel and study together.”
Participants will work at the food bank and preschool at Kodiak Baptist Mission, a social service organization that ministers to the unmet physical, social, emotional, spiritual and intellectual needs of children and their families. Other service projects will take place at Alaska Children’s Services and Cordova Community Christian Center. Alaska Children’s Services provides residential and home-based treatment for youth with severe emotional and behavioral disturbances. Cordova Community Christian Center serves people of all ages with social and Christian outreach because the town’s geographic isolation and transient nature contributes to a lack of social connections, loneliness, depression and alcoholism.
The trip will include visits to Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church, First American Baptist Church of Anchorage, Filipino American Baptist Church, Cordova Community Baptist Church and Camp Woody. Offering hiking, adventure-based programming and camps with daily Bible study, Camp Woody is on Woody Island, where the first American Baptist mission in Alaska was founded in 1893.
As with all ABWM mission encounters, this trip seeks to provide women with the opportunity to do the following:
- learn about and experience American Baptist mission;
- develop a sense of partnership with national leaders and American Baptist missionaries;
- connect with women in the churches visited, and build woman-to-woman relationships;
- learn about the concerns, needs and gifts of women in Alaska;
- have hands-on mission experiences; and
- share the mission encounter experience with others.
Follow the mission encounter online in two ways:
- “Audioletters from Alaska” podcast with photographs by encounter participant and ABHMS Associate Executive Director of Communications Susan Gottshall at www.abhms.org and
- “2012 Mission Encounter to Alaska” blog of participants’ journal entries and photographs, set up by ABWM, at http://2012missionencountertoalaska.wordpress.com/.
For more information, contact Goff at Victoria.Goff@abhms.org or 800-222-3872, x2449.
American Baptist Women’s Ministries is a Christ-centered ministry with a commitment to encourage and empower women and girls to serve God. Additional American Baptist Women’s Ministries resources are available at www.abwministries.org.
American Baptist Home Mission Societies—the domestic mission arm of American Baptist Churches USA (ABCUSA)—ministers as the caring heart and serving hands of Jesus Christ across the United States and Puerto Rico through a multitude of initiatives that focus on discipleship, community and justice.
American Baptist Churches USA is one of the most diverse Christian denominations today, with 5,500 local congregations comprised of 1.3 million members, across the United States and Puerto Rico, all engaged in God’s mission around the world.