To our readers:

We'd love to hear from you!

Send your comments, suggestions, and critiques to:

onmission@namb.net

Thanks for your interest! We look forward to receiving your responses.

Letters may be edited for clarity and brevity.

Thanks for the encouragement

I would like to thank you for On Mission. I am a 70-year-old retired pastor, but Im still active in sharing my faith.

Your magazine is an oasis in the desert for me. I do not know many on mission Christians, and many times I get the Elijah complex, as if I were the only one here. On Mission has words of encouragement and insight. Thank you so much.

Bob Freeman
Klamath Falls, Oregon

What a great ministry resource! As the director of evangelism for Totalechurch.com I am constantly receiving email from folks wanting to know how to share the gospel with others. Your magazine serves as an excellent resource for stories and ideas on how to share the love of Jesus. We all have family members who do not have a relationship with Jesus, and the November-December 1999 issue is a must-keep for every Christian!

Phillip Bullard Jr.
via email

Greetings. We wanted to let you know that your magazine is a blessing around the world.

Rev. Emeka Ately
Lagos, Nigeria

I sincerely hope youll take this as an observation rather than a criticism. I was excited to see your magazine and have subscribed, but the people pictured in the first issue I received were all white. I know not all Southern Baptists are white, but if this magazine were my first experience with Baptists I would not know that. Please make a conscious choice to make everyone welcome.

Mark Anderson
Salt Lake City, Utah

Your letter arrived before you would have received our January-February issue in which we portrayed the growing non-Anglo population on at least 15 pages. We plan to continue doing a better job of reflecting our diversity and thank you for prodding us in this important area.

Editor

The ad on the back cover of your March-April 1999 issue has a very startling statistic: "88 percent of kids who grow up in our churches leave at age 18 and dont come back." We have a lot of mission work to do in our own homes. But then what should we expect our kids to do when most adults are more concerned about "having a good time" than living a holy life. Maybe they dont think we really believe what we say we do because we dont live like we do.

Robert Williams
via email

Concerned about content

It is with deep concern that I write to you in regard to the excerpt from Lee Strobels book The Case For Christ, in the November-December 1999 issue. The article is very good, with one exception. The comment on page 51: "Exhibit 4: Communion and baptism." I refer to the following: "Moreland pointed to the emergence of the sacraments of communion and baptism in the early church."

I am greatly concerned when such a comment about sacraments is allowed to stand without any comment from your editorial staff. I believe that we as Baptists are in strong agreement that salvation is by grace through faith, plus nothing! And that belief would exclude sacraments of any kind, which are defined by Websters dictionary as that which saves, or helps to save. True Baptists do not believe in the saving efficacy of sacraments, or anything else, except the saving grace of God.

Art Hays, Pastor
Burden, Kansas

Of the five versions of Websters dictionaries we checked, only one suggests that a sacrament could be considered a means of grace. All of them present the primary definition that a sacrament is a symbol of a spiritual reality, and that is the only sense in which we would use the word. We strongly affirm salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone.

Editor