Imagine if every person in your church was sharing the gospel and discipling others — how would that change your church?
Sandy Wisdom-Martin, executive director of national Woman’s Missionary Union, said that question is their “why.”
“It’s who we are and what we do, and it’s our joy to do it in partnership with you,” she told messengers to the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting during WMU’s report June 11. “We want to help you keep the Great Commission front and center.”
One way they did that this past year was through a pilot program leading up to Easter that got church members out reaching their community. WMU sent 20,000 copies of “The Good News According to John” to local churches for members to give out to their friends, family and anyone else and invite them to church at Easter.
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Wisdom-Martin told a story shared from a church in West Virginia where a woman who had never shared the gospel before gave a copy of “The Good News According to John” to a man she met. He had a history of drug abuse and had recently been arrested, but he accepted Christ and was baptized on Easter Sunday.
“He will face punishment for his crimes, but he will face them knowing Jesus,” Wisdom-Martin said.
She pointed anyone interested in the outreach project to visit wmu.com/goodnews.
Connie Dixon, WMU president, shared that WMU is also excited to help disciple new believers through the book “50 Steps with Jesus: Learning to Walk Daily With the Lord,” and she and Wisdom-Martin both shared success stories of the book being used in a variety of settings.
Early role
During her report, Wisdom-Martin also shared that WMU was celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Cooperative Program this year by remembering WMU’s role at the beginning.
“Before the CP, WMU women agreed to raise $15 million over the course of five years for the 75 Million Campaign,” she said.
Around 22,000 women promised to fulfill that commitment, and they surpassed their goal.
But when it came time for the SBC to adopt the CP, “there were some tensions because WMU was asked to stop their domestic and global mission offerings,” Wisdom-Martin said.
WMU leaders pushed back, then SBC leadership said they could continue the offerings, but the amounts received would count against the mission boards CP allocations.
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“WMU said, ‘We don’t think that’s a good idea either,’” Wisdom-Martin said. “They really stood firm for the boards. And those offerings later became the Annie and Lottie offerings.”
From there on, the offerings continued, and significant percentages of CP receipts came from WMU, Dixon said. “We have always been committed to fuel the Southern Baptist missions enterprise. We continue to advocate for CP.”
On an ongoing basis they do that through their missions education, and this year they found a special way to emphasize it — through the building of a craft stick houseboat.
Wisdom-Martin said they “wanted to show children what happens when we all work together.”
This past November, children learned about a missionary family who lived in a houseboat in Brazil.
In May 2024, WMU put out a request for churches, entities, missions groups, Vacation Bible Schools and others to put together small square panels with craft sticks, decorate them and send them to the WMU headquarters in Birmingham.
To coincide with the November unit about the missionary family in Brazil, national WMU staff and a team of volunteers from Texas and Illinois worked in early November to construct the boat on a pontoon platform.
“Three-quarters of a million craft sticks were sent in, and we had a blast building a floating house,” Wisdom Martin said. “The missionaries in Brazil even sent in stick units. They used it as a tool to teach their people groups about working together.”
