Articles by Guest Author

Once I realized God was doing this on purpose, I tried to discern the best course of action to continue sharing with Ned effectively.

Who am I? What is my purpose? Where do I come from? When will I feel satisfied? How can I know truth? These were the kind of questions I asked myself the year before my first year of college, not knowing that all these questions were about to be answered by someone greater than I, the One whose existence I dedicated myself to disproof. How naive was I?

I shared with some students about how my parents encouraged me to find truth, which that lead to me to following Jesus. It led to some good conversation about truth and choosing to follow Jesus and I thought, "Alright God. Thank you for letting me talk about my parents and their value of truth in our family."

My prayer is that whatever shame or fear they have in either their society or family, would be washed away, that God would find His way into their hearts and give them a willingness to run to Him and not look back. I ask that they wouldn’t just hear the good news, but understand it so that one day they will be the ones bearing a hundredfold and sixtyfold.

After 23 years in ministry, I find churches are still struggling to win. It seems that many are in rebuilding decades attempting to reach the evasive younger generation. For 40 years we have been chasing the young families in our communities. Yet, when we do the data mining in our records, we find that we are still not getting them en masse.

We were only there for a day, but God had gone out before us and had been working there for years. It was truly beautiful to see God on that island.

By Jaclyn Bonner

The traditional American narrative boasts that anyone can make it if he or she works hard. But the social systems and economic stratum one is born into can often exclude a person from having an opportunity to attain the “American dream.”

West Dallas denizens face a challenging situation. Generational poverty is commonplace in the 11 square miles of Zip code 75212. “More than one of every three families lives below the federal poverty level,” reports Brother Bill’s Helping Hand, a Texas Baptist Hunger Offering ministry that has worked in the community for 75 years.

Unemployment in West Dallas is at 10.5 percent, double the Texas unemployment rate, and 45 percent of West Dallas households earn less than $25,000 annually. More than half of West Dallas adults did not complete high school. The average pre-K child has a vocabulary of 1,500 to 2,000 words, compared to the 5,000 to 7,000-word vocabulary of children living in more affluent Dallas neighborhoods.

Moreover, a health crisis, job loss, and/or family tragedy can drastically change a household’s economic status, creating food insecurity and leading directly to poverty.

In 2015, Elaine Rodriguez* took a medical leave of absence from her work. Dealing with health complications and less income, Elaine and her husband, Jacob*, members of Bill Harrod Memorial Baptist Church, had difficulty putting food on the table.

These are our brothers and sisters in need and I am blessed to have spent a week providing them with medical care that they can’t get anywhere else.

"...there's a sense of pride and accomplishment for being at this university, but there's also this loneliness that comes with that. It's not loneliness like I see back at the University of Texas. No, it's loneliness without a purpose."