HeartCall training begins to multiply in Missouri
By Allen Palmeri
Staff Writer
May 17, 2005
JEFFERSON CITY – Something beautiful occurred April 28-30 at the Ramada Inn when 42 women came together for a HeartCall evangelism training conference. Missouri Baptist Convention (MBC) State Evangelism Director Bob Caldwell, who did the opening and closing prayers, sensed it.
“I left out of there Saturday so encouraged,” Caldwell said. “There was electricity in the room that you don’t sense very often. I could tell that God had been there. Those women had experienced something in their hearts that really moved them.”
The designer and director of HeartCall, Jaye Martin, felt the same thing that Caldwell felt. Martin, who is the women’s evangelism strategist of the Family Evangelism Unit of the North American Mission Board, said the Missouri women were very teachable and dynamic.
“You’ve got a lot of sharp women in Missouri who are ready to go and make a difference,” Martin said. “Those women came anticipating what God was going to do. There had obviously been prayer beforehand. All we did was focus on that this was God’s priority. We prayed, and we gave time for training, and we let them network with other people, and then we just watched God mobilize them.”
Martin and her co-leader for the Jefferson City conference, Sharon Beougher, focused on helping the ladies see their purpose as believers—to know God and to share Christ wherever they are. Beougher is a national HeartCall leader whose husband, Tim, is professor of evangelism at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Louisville, Ky.
“It was just a focus on what the Word of God says, and a focus on the fact that it is the Holy Spirit who brings people to Himself,” Martin said.
HeartCall seeks to find women with a passion for God, train them to make a difference, and network them to carry out the task of, not bringing the world to Christ, but bringing Christ to the world. To the degree that Martin and Beougher were able to inspire those women who were already sharing their faith to do even more, to prompt those who were not sharing their faith to begin anew, and to motivate those leaders who can take the material and train others at future HeartCall conferences, the April 28-30 time was a success, Caldwell said.
“I’m hoping we can get 10 or 12 women saying, ‘I can go and train,’” he said. “We’ll put them into groups of two and have them ready to go out as churches call.”