Ben Jones
Who would guess that in one moment two Illinois churches deciding to cooperate with IBSA would discover a connection dating back nearly 100 years and stretching halfway around the world? But that is exactly what happened in November at the 2024 IBSA Annual Meeting.
During a dinner for newly cooperating churches, each representative was asked to stand and share a little about his congregation with the audience of IBSA staff and invited guests. I was excited to be introduced to a few new churches and hear a bit of their stories. But what I ended up hearing was something only God could orchestrate, and it illustrated perfectly why we network together.
Pastor Joe Radosevich, from Manchester Baptist Church, stood and began telling what compelled them to become a cooperating church with the IBSA and the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC).
“What do I say to introduce our church?” he recollected. “Sometimes I can nerd out about the history because, I think the history of the church can explain the culture of the church. So I was like, You know what? I think this is a room where people will care about this detail.”
Adoniram Judson, one of the earliest missionaries in the modern missions movement said, “Our prayers run along one road, and God’s answers run along another, and by and by they meet.”
He went on to introduce the audience to the church, in tiny Manchester, a village of about 350 people in west central Illinois. The former American Baptist church was over 190 years old and had a rich history of passion for missions. “We found in our records that our church had supported the mission to the Karen people, which was a part of Adoniram Judson’s ministry in Burma,” Radosevich said, describing the culture that motivated this well-established church to connect with a new network.
“Our church’s history goes way back supporting missions. We are a strong church reaching our own town, but we realized if every person in Illinois, and even around the world, is going to hear the gospel, then we’re going to have to join with other like-minded churches to do that.”
The room affirmed his words with amens and supporting applause. The next man stood, as all eyes trained on the Asian pastor in his gray sport jacket. “My name is Thang Kio. I am pastor of Lai Christian Church in East Moline. And we are from Burma.”
In that moment, the world seemed small, and our shared task of global missions seemed shockingly local. Because our Baptist forefather Judson sacrificed to take the gospel to Burma (modern Myanmar), and because Manchester Baptist and churches like it sacrificed to send finances to support missionary work, nearly 100 years later there is a thriving Christian community among the Karen people of Burma, some of whom are now living and worshipping right here in our Illinois cities.
In one moment our “why” was clearly on display. We can’t reach Illinois on our own. We can’t reach the nations on our own. In Psalm 2, God says, “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance and the ends of the earth your possession.” Through Jesus, he is fulfilling that promise as we work together.