Jerry Peele preaches at Georgia Baptist Convention

I grew up in a small town in South Georgia. At least if you live in the Atlanta area you would consider Eastman to be in South Georgia. We called it Middle Georgia. And in all fairness you've still got a good hour and a half to two hours of driving from Eastman before you get to Florida, so maybe it is in the middle of the state. I think we called it Middle Georgia more because we got our newspapers and all of our TV stations, and many of our radio stations out of Macon, an hour to our north. You don't get much more central to Georgia than Macon, but we were an hour further South.

When I first moved away from Eastman, people would ask me where I was from, and when I told them I'd always get a "Where's that?" response. I used to be able to tell them our claim to fame was being the home of Stuckey's fine pecan candies (pronounced PEE CAN if you are actually from Eastman). Twenty years ago that struck a cord with people no matter where they were from, as Stuckey's stores used to dot the highways all over our nation. Although candy is still being manufactured in the same plant in Eastman, it no longer carries the Stuckey's brand and the generation after mine has no recollection of those ubiquitous highway stores.

So now when I try to tell people where I'm from I have a hard time coming up with much that Eastman is known for. Don't get me wrong. It's still a fine community and a great place to raise a family. I love going back there to visit family and friends. But if you get more than 30 or 40 miles away, it's just not really well known in other parts of the state. The most painful response I get when trying to tell people about Eastman is when they respond, "Is it near Cochran?" How absurd! Eastman and Cochran are only about 17 miles apart, but anyone can clearly see that Cochran should have to use Eastman as a reference point and not the other way around, after all, the folks in Cochran have to drive south to use OUR Walmart! (We conveniently forget to mention that Eastmanites have commuted north the 17 miles to Cochran to attend Middle Georgia College for decades now.)

Tonight I was very proud to be a small town boy from Eastman. Dr. Jerry Peele, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Eastman, brought the mission sermon at the Georgia Baptist Convention in Augusta. (You know Augusta. It's near Hephzibah. I think they have some kind of golf tournament up there each year.) Dr. Peele did an excellent job. He even managed to get in a good plug for the local high school football team. Go Indians!

Dr. Peele spoke from Psalm 67, demonstrating that we don't have to wait until we get to the New Testament to find the call to missions in the gospels. He talked about verse 3 where the Psalmist says, "May the peoples praise you." Being that so many of us were educated in Georgia public schools, Dr. Peele explained why "people" which is already plural, needed an "s" on the end.

You see, we think people just means more than one person, but here it means an ethnically distinct group of people. So the psalmist was saying, may people of all different ethnicities, from all the different cultures, praise you in all the different languages on the earth. We know that Jesus told us to take the gospel to all the nations, but here, centuries before, God speaks to his people Israel and tells them that all the nations should be praising him. But the other nations didn't know him. The only way the nations, the peoples, the other ethnic groups of the world could praise him would have been if Israel had told them about him!

All the people in other nations had god's they worshiped, but they were not worshiping the one true God. They had not heard of him. This is the part where Dr. Peele got very brave. He actually said that all religions are dangerous, deadly, and diabolical except for the one true faith. The next thing you know he'll be saying that Jesus is the only way to heaven, and that only by faith in him can we ever be rightly related to God! How exclusivistic! How arrogant! How Biblical! The heart of Dr. Peele's message was this. The reason many of our churches aren't reaching people, the reason that they aren't "doing missions" is that we don't really believe. We don't really believe that Jesus is the only way to salvation. If we did we'd be shouting it from the rooftops. Far too many of us have bowed at the altar of the gods of acceptance and tolerance, and we have demonstrated by our silence that we believe one faith, and one god, is as good as another. Thank you Dr. Peele for not being silent. Thank you for challenging us to believe again.