New Carey principal Charles Hewlett set the tone for this year’s Baptist Assembly when he spoke about five words: Risk, wisdom, difficulty, extraordinary and community. One of those five words impacted me the most. The word is “risk.”

Throughout the rest of Assembly I was struck at how often that word seemed to apply, often in quite diverse situations.

The next day Chris Sola spoke of his journey with the Hosanna World Harvest churches. All five of Charles Hewlett’s words are more than evident in Chris’ story! And “risk” is certainly prominent among them.

Chris and Seira took a huge risk in leaving the comfort of their Wellington home to move to South Auckland and start a new church. For a time they were living in their church building in Pakuranga not knowing where the next dollar was coming from.

It’s called living by faith, and we all talk about it a lot, but how many of us actually do it?

Chris and Seira do. In fact, their lives seems to be an endless series of risk taking. They believe God will answer their prayers, they believe He will provide, they believe He will make His purposes known to them.

And God does. In fact, it seems that God’s miraculous answer to prayer is inversely proportional to the degree of risk taken by the person doing the praying. The bigger the risk, the greater the miracle. How’s that for a bit of homespun theology!

John Tucker’s history lesson at the Baptist Historical & Research Society dinner was all about risk. He pointed out that the New Zealand Baptist movement has changed since the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Back then we were very vocal on the great issues of the day. We were vigorous supporters of the temperence movement and played a major role in advocating for the rights of workers – both huge social issues at the time.

But John suggested that today we’ve gone into our shell. Our concerns are with issues of personal morality and responsibility and as a movement we tend to remain silent on social issues (although many individual churches are heavily involved).

Ruby Duncan and Nettie Holm pointed out, in their presentation on community ministries, that our churches need to take risks to attract the people who community ministries help (often people who might make us feel uncomfortable). And we in turn need to take a risk by being honest about who we really are when people come into our church.

As the tranzsend missionaries told their stories we were reminded of the huge risks all those in the mission field take when they leave the comfort and affluence of our shores.

They put their health, their comfort and even their very lives at risk to grow the Kingdom of God.

And so it went on. Just about every presentation made at Assembly reminded me of how being a Christ-follower is all about taking risks. Yet so many of us – and I include myself – have either forgotten that, or are not prepared to place the Kingdom of God ahead of our own wants, needs and comfort.

Even Rangiora Baptist Church took a huge risk. They agreed to host Assembly ’09, knowing full well they would need a small army of volunteers to make it work. They took the risk, God answered their prayers, and we the Assembly-goers were the recipients of a wonderful three days of Southern hospitality.

– Duncan Pardon