One Royal Ambassadors leader and a few coffee cans was all it took to construct a makeshift feeding kitchen for the victims of Hurricane Beulah in 1967. With his homemade “buddy burners,” made of 10-gallon cans turned into stoves, Bob Dixon and Texas Baptist Men prepared hot meals for the survivors and truck drivers delivering aid in the Rio Grande Valley.
Dixon’s inventive, intentional effort to overcome the obstacles and serve disaster victims sparked a movement. By 1976, four more state conventions followed Texas — Mississippi, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Kansas/Nebraska — and acquired their own mobile feeding units, laying the foundation for what would become Southern Baptist Disaster Relief.
Meeting needs
“For 50 years, Mississippi Baptist Disaster Relief volunteers have hurried help to helpless places: food to the hungry, water to the thirsty, and a path forward in the aftermath of devastation. They have brought hope where there was no hope: a listening ear, a lifted prayer, and a love unlike anything in this world. They have offered healing to the scarred and stranded stranger: restoring what was destroyed, salvaging what was ravaged, and most of all, shedding eternal light into the darkest days of people’s lives through the transformative, life-giving truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ,” The Baptist Record reported.
EDITOR’S NOTE — This story was written by Lindsey Carraway and originally published by Mississippi’s The Baptist Record.
