Australia/Oceania Archive

My wife, Vinnie, and I started sending our only son, Tim, to church on a church bus when he was six years old. When he was eight years old, he made a profession of faith. Because we later moved to a different area near First Baptist Church of Milford where Dr. Charles Keen served as pastor, we sent Tim to First Baptist on one of their buses. Vinnie and I, however, did not attend. When Tim was in sixth grade in a public school, the school planned to pass him to the next grade even though he had failing grades. As a result, we removed him from the public school system and enrolled him in a Ca...

PASTOR TIMOTHY BUNCH What a wonderful opportunity this is for me to be able to introduce myself to the folk here at First Baptist Church! My name is Tim Bunch and I am Pastor of the Garden City Baptist Church, Toowoomba, Queensland, Australia. Together with my wife Gweneth and our four children, we have served in this church since its inception. My personal upbringing was in a Christian family; my father was a Navy man who had spent time in Vietnam. He suffered a major head injury during a rest period back home, leaving him both medically unfit to serve and an epileptic for the rest of hi...

Growing up at First Baptist Church of Milford and Milford Christian Academy was quite a privilege. It seemed as though there was always something going on in which to be involved. For me, times and seasons were usually gauged by what sporting event was going on at the time. However around February, everything, including youth activities, was put on hold, at least for a week. All sports games were canceled or rescheduled and homework was minimized. Nothing was to interfere with the highlight of the year, our annual Missions Conference. Students spent many class periods converting our gymnasi...

I would like to introduce you to Bro. Sam Caudill, my friend and colaborer for many years. Whether it is the steady drum of the Heidelberg Harris press or the roar of a diesel truck leaving with another Scripture-filled container, such are the background sounds heard by printer/pressman, Sam Caudill, on any given day at Bearing Precious Seed in Milford, Ohio. Bro. Caudill has told me that he was an unlikely candidate to have seen this phenomenal work of God grow from the early days of manually binding individual Scripture portions with a soda bottle to producing a semi-truck load of Scriptu...

As we reflect on our arrival in Australia in 1986, Juanita and I remember it as a wonderful time. God blessed and showed us His goodness in so many ways to get us there. We worked with another missionary, Sid Hunter, the first six months to become used to the culture. Then we started our first church, Victory Baptist Church. I also started a small Bible college class to train some of our men who wanted to learn more. Wayne Sehmish was one of those men, who later became the pastor of Victory Baptist Church. During those ten years, we started two more churches, Fellowship Baptist Church, whic...

In Mark 1:17, Jesus says to His new disciples, “Come ye after me, and I will make you to become fishers of men.” With that statement, Christ shared His desire to train disciples to fulfill His heartbeat of world evangelism. These disciples needed to spend their time in training so that they could effectively achieve all that Christ had called them to. It is with that Scripture in mind that the ministry of Bearing Precious Seed in El Paso, Texas strives to achieve its vision--to train Biblical, mission-minded servants for all levels of ministry. Christ desires that all Christians become fish...

My name is Wayne Sehmish. In the past, I worked with Bro. Hershel Case as assistant pastor of Victory Baptist Church in Brisbane, Australia, and later became pastor there. I married my wife, Suzanne, in 1988. We have three children: Sarah, age twenty-four; Justin, age twenty-two; and Curtis, age thirteen. Justin and his wife are expecting their first child in January. In 1993, I became senior pastor of our sending church, Good Shepherd Baptist, until the Lord called us to Thailand in 2007.

Oceania is not a continent but a vast collection of islands shared by fourteen countries. There are differences of opinion as to the boundaries of this particular area of the world, but for the most part, it is south of the equator in the central and southern Pacific between the two Americas and Asia. Oceania is divided into three regions: Melanesia (“black islands”), Micronesia (“small islands”), and Polynesia (“many islands”). Australia, the only islandcontinent, is the largest island in land mass. Papua New Guinea, the world’s second-largest island, is the most populated with six million...

In order to answer that question, we should first ask ourselves this question: “What is a missionary?” If the definition is “a Christian who tells an unbeliever about Jesus,” then this article could be the shortest in this magazine because the answer to the original question is so simple and direct: “Yes!” Jesus commanded us in Mark 16:15 to “go . . . into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” That statement was made and then recorded in Scripture for each of us, regardless of our age or where we live. We can be missionaries today in our schools, our neighborhoods, our fa...