Missouri Baptist Testimonials

John Marshall served for 22 years as senior pastor of Second Baptist Church in Springfield. During his tenure, Second Baptist was annually the highest contributing church in Missouri to the Cooperative Program and one of the state leaders in baptisms. In addition, during his last seven years at Second, the church gave $2.6 million to church planting and started 51 churches. 

Marshall served as president of the Missouri Baptist Convention in 2010-2011, and in 2011 Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary named him Honorary Alumnus of the Year. He continues to serve Missouri Baptists and their entities in a variety of ways: as a board member, interim pastor, guest speaker, and encourager through john316marshall.com. 

“As I gaze down the corridor of 57 years of ministry, I see in the beginning days many things that helped me start right. I see my preacher-dad, Mom, friends, a country-church ordination, a small-town church wedding, and the Cooperative Program.  

Yes, the Cooperative Program. Without it, I would not be where I am today. 

I had already been preaching two years before I started college, but my preacher-dad urged me not to pursue a religious degree. He said if the ministry did not work out well for me, a secular degree would provide me a career on which to fall back.  

So, I earned a math degree – and never used it. 

After college, my dear wife Ruth and I decided to go to seminary. We had no money. Like most young ministry-oriented couples in the early 1970s, we were love-rich and cash-poor. The cost of seminary was prohibitive everywhere, with one major exception: the six Southern Baptist seminaries spread across the U.S. from North Carolina to California. 

Due to generous contributions from Southern Baptists to their local churches and then shared through the Cooperative Program, a Southern Baptist church member like me could readily afford tuition at one of these seminaries. Had it not been for the Cooperative Program, Ruth and I remain convinced we would have never been able to attend seminary. 

At New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary (NOBTS), I earned a master’s degree and a doctorate. The knowledge I gleaned at NOBTS provided the solid educational background I needed to do what God called me to do over the next half century.  

Sermons, Sunday School lessons, seminars, classes I taught — every one of them was affected in some way by my seminary training, and thus, also by the Cooperative Program. 

Another ongoing benefit for me over the years was the way the Cooperative Program allowed our regular church offerings to always include money for North American and International missions through the SBC’s North American Mission Board and International Mission Board. My dear church people always knew a portion of every dollar they gave was being invested in winning the lost in our nation and around the world.  

It has often comforted me to know the smallest church in the smallest association can have a part in worldwide mission advance due to the Cooperative Program. 

Other causes right here in Missouri also benefit by our gifts to the Cooperative Program: Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, three Baptist universities, the Missouri Baptist Children’s Home, Baptist Homes & Healthcare Ministries, the Missouri Baptist Foundation, children’s home, church planting, disaster relief … and on the list goes. 

I have been able to preach, carry out pastoral ministry, and promote many worthy causes without having to host in our worship services a weekly parade of different groups asking for money. I never felt I had to be a fundraiser for many different groups and charities. 

From the beginning of my ministry, and continuing to this very day, the Cooperative Program has been a wonderful contribution to my ministry. Southern Baptists are blessed to have this God-honoring way of giving to the Lord’s work.”

Juston Gates serves as president of the Missouri Baptist Children’s Home. Prior to beginning this assignment in 2024, Gates served as a pastoral staff member, primarily as senior pastor, of churches in Mississippi, Tennessee, Texas, and Missouri. These ministries followed a career in law enforcement, with Gates on the staff of police departments in Memphis, Tupelo, Miss., and Allen, Texas, while also serving as an agent with the U.S. Border Patrol. 

Gates earned a Master of Divinity (M.Div.) from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and a Doctor of Ministry (D.Min.) from Luther Rice Seminary. He served as an adjunct online instructor for Itawamba Community College, as a part of the Philosophy and Religion Department, while also serving as an Associate Professor for College of Ozarks as part of the Criminal Justice program.  

Before joining the Children’s Home, Gates was a member of the Executive Board of the Missouri Baptist Convention. He has been married to his wife, Amanda, for more than 25 years. The Gates are the proud parents of three children: Elizabeth, Caleb, and Leah Madelyn. 

“Having attended Southern Baptist churches all my life, I clearly remember my childhood and Vacation Bible School (VBS). VBS meant summer, cookies, Kool Aid, and friends, especially in a small, rural community in North Mississippi like ours, where the same 150 people had attended our church for what seemed like forever to a child’s mind.   

Yet, VBS also meant Bible story flannel graphs, explained carefully by the devoted older ladies that volunteered their time for VBS to reach children with the gospel. 

One of those stories still stands out vividly in my mind – the story of Lottie Moon and her missionary journey to China.  

I can still picture the flannel graph character of the valiant missionary, standing much lower to the other characters in the story, for apparently Lottie Moon was not very tall.  Yet, in many ways to me as a child, she appeared like David standing against Goliath, for I could not imagine being away from my rural home and living in China for the purpose of sharing the gospel to a group of people who did not think of, or more importantly believe in, the same God that I did.  Yet, despite that, there stood the diminutive Lottie like a giant. 

To the credit of those devoted ladies laboring to teach a rowdy group of church kids, the story did not simply focus on the heroics of Lottie Moon and her unique calling. It also included an explanation of how Lottie was able to be there in the first place to fulfill her calling. In that VBS setting, I was first exposed to the concept of the Cooperative Program.   

At that moment, the seed of cooperation was being planted, wherein I would learn how churches could voluntarily combine their resources, as opposed to existing as an island to themselves, to glorify Christ with a more effective means of propagating the gospel message. 

Although I then possessed a basic understanding of the Cooperative Program and how it worked, it wasn’t until much later in my life that I personally experienced the full benefits of this genius funding mechanism. After two years of teaching high school biology, while coaching two sports, I transitioned vocationally into the realm of law enforcement.  

God was gracious. He not only protected me during that 11-year stretch; he allowed me some measure of success, granting me a federal position as agent with the United States Border Patrol. Yet, after only two years with the Patrol, I experienced my vocational calling into ministry, and at that time, specifically into church-based, pastoral ministry. 

There was only one major problem with this: I had no formal training that would qualify me for such a role. Serving as senior pastor to a small, rural church in West Tennessee, I found myself needing theological training but facing a challenge to afford it.   

In that moment, I discovered that members of Southern Baptist churches whose churches supported the Cooperative Program could attend one of the six SBC seminaries for half the cost that non-members paid for tuition. With that discount, and the help of my local SBC church, I was able to successfully complete my Master of Divinity degree from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in 2004.   

My “Lottie Moon” journey is not yet complete, but I can say that I owe, to some degree, what I have accomplished so far to Southern Baptists’ faithful gifts to the Cooperative Program.”

Cheryl Stahlman serves as executive director of Missouri WMU (Woman’s Missionary Union). She’s founder and coordinator of the I Am God Designed Conference, as well as a sought-after Christian women’s speaker. She’s also a pastor’s wife, mother of four children, and home-school teacher.  

“My husband and I didn’t grow up in a Southern Baptist Church. As a newly married young woman, I was invited to attend a local church in my community by my husband’s family. It was in that church that we were taught what it truly means to live as a Christian.  

Despite being saved as teenagers, my husband and I weren’t discipled in the ways of the Christian life. We still lived for ourselves. Our lives, from the outside, looked the same.  But on the inside, we could feel that something was missing; something was not right.   

Soon, the Lord called my husband to be a pastor. Our lives were enriched by this experience. During our time in the ministry, we have had four amazing children. What a wonderful privilege it has been to be able to raise our children in the church!  

Through the fair ministry in our local association, our family was blessed. Through the training my husband was provided in sharing the gospel soccer ball, our oldest daughter accepted Christ as her Savior while he was practicing the presentation. It was also through this same soccer ball that our third child, at the age of 13, shared the gospel in front of a crowd for the first time while on a mission trip to Wisconsin with our association. He has since shared several times at block parties for our church and even taught other students his age how to do the presentation through our local homeschool group.   

Over the years, my husband has had the blessing of baptizing all four of our children. To watch them serve the Lord on missions alongside us has been exciting. It is through the cooperative work of all Southern Baptists that real missions take shape: evangelism training, fair ministry, mission trips, summer camps, block parties, missions education, discipleship, and so much more. 

It’s through these efforts that my husband and I have been able to guide our children to serve the Lord, to watch them share the gospel with others and minister to younger children at camp. Two of our children have expressed the desire to go into missions or ministry in the future.  

My husband currently serves as a bi-vocational pastor at a small, rural church outside of Union, Mo. It’s there that our family serves alongside one another – from preaching, teaching, leading worship, taking up offerings, and leading in prayer. And it’s through the Cooperative Program that our small church is able to extend its ministry beyond the borders of our community, advancing Christ’s kingdom through CP-supported ministries like the Children’s Home, Baptist Homes, and the International Mission Board. We are grateful for the way Missouri Baptists work together, through CP, for the sake of the gospel.”

Gary and Carolyn Miller are Missouri Baptists who minister to European Peoples through the International Mission Board (IMB). 

“Many people ask me (Gary) and my wife, Carolyn, why we support the Cooperative Program (CP) as well as the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering when we speak at churches. We always explain that the CP funds support our network, functioning behind the scenes and undergirding all of the ministry activity.   

Our appreciation for the CP goes back many years before we were sent out as IMB missionaries, and has had a great impact on us personally. Both of us were raised in strong Christian families and spent our formative years in SBC churches that were active in local associational missions as well as state and national work. We enjoyed taking part in children’s and youth mission activities and got to meet missionaries at church camps. All these things, as well as the Southern Baptist schools from which we received our degrees, receive support from Cooperative Program funds.  Together, all these opportunities have impacted who we are today as we serve from our home base in Debrecen, Hungary. 

As IMB missionaries, we are proud to say that the Cooperative Program covers the administrative expenses of our mission board, so that all of the annual missions offerings can go directly to overseas support of missionaries and their work. How many other mission organizations can say that?  

Most missionaries need to raise their own personal support as well as funds for the administration needed to keep them on the field. What a blessing it is when we speak in churches to be able to share about God at work around the world, and how we as workers in the field are supported by the unified giving programs of the SBC. Through the loving cooperation of the churches, large and small, we are allowed to stay focused on the main task of sharing the gospel with the nations. 

It is the goal of sharing Christ with every person on the planet that keeps the Cooperative Program as relevant today as it was when it started a century ago. We’re thankful that Southern Baptist churches have unified their national giving program to make sure that needs are addressed everywhere, including local U.S. towns, counties, and associations, as well as national and international missions. It is through this combining of individual efforts that each person in our churches can have local, national, and international impact.    

Isn’t it amazing? Every Southern Baptist’s giving can touch others with the gospel, starting at their own door, and, through the Cooperative Program, extending around the world. Working together, we can continue being a witness for Christ in our cities, counties, states, nation, and to the ends of the earth.” 

Dr. Andy Chambers serves as provost and senior vice president for Academic Affairs at Missouri Baptist University, as well as professor of Bible. Chambers graduated from the Missouri University of Science and Technology with a degree in mechanical engineering. He earned an M.Div. and a Ph.D. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and did additional study at Baylor University. Chambers also completed Harvard University’s Institute for Education Management and the Council of Independent Colleges Executive Leadership Academy. He has taught more than 4,200 students during his time at MBU. 

In 2012, Chambers published Exemplary Life: A Theology of Church Life in Acts with B&H Academic. He has presented papers at numerous conferences, including the Society of Biblical Literature, Evangelical Theological Society, and the National Association of Baptist Professors of Religion. He helped found MBU’s faith and learning journal Intégrité and currently serves on its advisory board.  

Chambers currently serves as a peer reviewer for the Higher Learning Commission. He is heavily involved in church and denominational life. He preaches regularly in churches and conference settings and has served on numerous boards and committees. Most recently he chaired the Southern Baptist Convention’s Committee on Order of Business. 

“I’ve been blessed by Cooperative Program ministries my entire life. Raised in a Missouri Baptist church, I learned at an early age that Baptists can accomplish many more things when we cooperate than when we work alone. I learned to give joyfully each year to the annual Lottie Moon and Annie Armstrong missions offerings. However, I was also taught that when churches commit to regular giving through the Cooperative Program, it allows kingdom ministries to plan for and carry out their missions more effectively.  

Whether the ministry is church planting and revitalization, care for children and the elderly, or Christian education on the state level, or whether it’s missions and seminary education on a national level, regular giving through the Cooperative Program helps all of us do more effective work for the kingdom of God.  

 For me, the biggest blessing I’ve experienced through the Cooperative Program was the help it provided me to attend seminary. I remember walking with my wife and some friends around the campus of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary when I was a student there. Southwestern is one of six Southern Baptist seminaries supported by Cooperative Program dollars. Our friends attended a seminary in another denomination and were in town visiting us. They were astonished at the size and enrollment of my seminary. They were even more surprised at the affordable price.  

I grew up in a middle-class home. My brother, sister, and I all took out student loans for college and graduate school. The three of us happened to attend Southwestern seminary together, and we took for granted how affordable our seminary education was. What we did not understand was how much gifts from the Cooperative Program helped to offset operating expenses at Southwestern and the other seminaries Southern Baptists support.  

Today, I serve at Missouri Baptist University, an entity of the Missouri Baptist Convention supported by the Cooperative Program. Every day I get to see firsthand how CP gifts support our work at MBU and help make it more affordable for students. The genius of the Cooperative Program, begun one hundred years ago, is exceeded only by the reach and impact of the ministries it supports and the blessings of God on our work.  

I pray for an even greater vision to dawn on Southern Baptists for what cooperation in kingdom ministries can accomplish. Thank you, Missouri Baptists, for supporting my training. Forty years into vocational ministry, I am still grateful.”