The Evangelistic Vision of our First Black Ministry Team
In recognition of Black History Month, we salute and appreciate the contributions of outstanding leaders in the Church of God.
By Grant McClung
One ministry couple, Edmund and Rebecca Barr, deserve closer attention for the missions lessons emerging from dedicated lives. Significant partnership examples emerge from their stories and give us lessons for the future:
1. A partnership of clergy and lay ministry – Edmund and Rebecca Barr, native Bahamians, were an outstanding lay couple who had immigrated to the United States after the Bahamas had experienced severe recession. Robert and Ida Evans, retired from pastoral ministry in the Methodist Church, had joined the Church of God in Florida. After being baptized in the Holy Spirit, the Barrs were seized with a burden to evangelize their homeland. Soon, both couples made their plans to begin evangelistic work in the Bahamas. Barr was credentialed as a minister shortly before he and his wife returned home where they awaited the Evanses arrival.
2. A partnership of black and white – Edmund Barr was not only the first black minister in the Church of God; he and his wife were, in reality, the first emissaries of the Church of God beyond the United States. Together with the Evanses and Carl Padgett they formed an interracial outreach team in the Bahamas. Now more than 100 years later, more than 80% of our international fellowship is outside the United States and Canada and is more red and yellow, black and brown than it is white.
3. A partnership of women and men – most church and missions histories, written by whites and blacks alike, tend to focus on the efforts of the men: Edmund Barr or Robert Evans. Ida Evans had actually felt called to missions very early in her life. She and Rebecca Barr, along with other faithful women evangelists, stood side by side with the men on the early preaching missions in the streets of Nassau. They were joined in the Summer of 1910 by Flora Bower, a short-term female missionary from the Evangel office in Cleveland. As they continue to do today, women have made significant leadership contributions in our global outreach.
4. A partnership of older and younger – Coming out of retirement, Robert Evans was 63 when he sailed for the Bahamas. Along the way to join the Barrs, he and Ida rested in the home of Pastor Milton Padgett in Miami. Carl Padgett, a young evangelist and Milton’s son, decided to join the missionary team. Later, the young Padgett organized the Church of God on Green Turtle Cay, still an active congregation and the oldest continuing local Church of God fellowship outside the United States. In global Pentecostalism today, the majority of our adherents (especially in the global South) are under age eighteen.
These are four lessons in the “partnership legacy” resulting from the evangelistic vision of our first black ministry team: Edmund and Rebecca Barr. Clergy, laity, evangelists from all races and cultures, men, women, older, younger – all are needed in the continuing evangelistic challenges in our future global outreach.
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(NOTE: This article first appeared on Faith News in February 2008).
Dr. Grant McClung, President of Missions Resource Group (www.MissionsResourceGroup.org, is Missiological Advisor to the World Missions Commission of the Pentecostal World Fellowship and Missionary Educator-at-Large for Church of God World Missions.
