Spiritual markers guide journey for Dixon of Texas Baptist Men

DALLAS (BP)--Bob Dixon looks at marker boards covering two walls of the communications room in the Texas Baptist Men office.

Ongoing examples of the "activity of God" among the group's volunteers fill them: Disaster relief in Texas. Famine relief and agricultural missions in North Korea. Wide-ranging criminal justice ministry opportunities, Royal Ambassador and Challenger programs, church and encampment building projects, and church renewal events. Far-flung assignments from Belize to the Ukraine.

Across the top of one board, Dixon has scrawled Colossians 4:17, "Take heed to the ministry you have received from God, that you may fulfill it."

He sees that verse as a watchword for the missions organization he has served for 29 years as executive director, a post from which he plans to retire in September. It's also been a guiding principle personally for the 70-year-old pilgrim in his journey of faith.

"As believers, we walk forward by faith. But looking back, I can see where God has been preparing me for assignments all my life," he says.

When he came to faith in Jesus Christ as an 11-year-old boy in eastern Tennessee, Dixon's passion was sports. While serving as a mobilization officer for the Sixth Naval District during World War II, he played with a Navy baseball team in Hawaii. Later, he spent two years as a catcher in the Washington Senators AA farm system.

During his time on the armed forces baseball team, Dixon injured his right leg sliding into base. Lying in a Navy hospital, between wondering if he would lose his leg to infection and receiving 98 shots of a new wonder drug called "penicillin," he received his first calling from God to vocational Christian service.

"When I went back to the little church where I grew up on Missionary Ridge and told them I had been called, they asked me, 'Preacher or missionary?'" Dixon remembers replying, "Neither one. If that's all he's got, I must have missed the calling."

After graduating from the Edmondson Business College in Chattanooga, Dixon went to work for the Tennessee Valley Authority. The lucrative job with five weeks of paid vacation allowed him plenty of opportunities to work with youth as a Baptist layman, but he continued to struggle with his earlier calling.

While taking a group of young people to a tournament at Central Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., pastor Wayne Dehoney and the minister of education talked to him about joining the church staff as youth minister.

Recognizing the confirmation of his calling and his need for ministry training, Dixon quit his job, loaded up his wife and their two daughters, ages 4 and 6, and moved to Fort Worth, Texas, to enroll at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s school of religious education. Last year, the seminary named Dixon as a distinguished alumnus.

"I didn't know a soul there," he recalls. In spite of having no local contacts, College Avenue Baptist Church in Fort Worth brought Dixon on staff as minister of youth activities, and his wife, Jean, got a job at the then-Radio and Television Commission.

Dixon went on to serve as a pioneer in the field of church recreation and youth ministry at churches in Jackson, Miss., Nashville and Memphis, Tenn., before he was invited to return to Texas to direct the state's Royal Ambassadors program in 1966. Three years later, he became executive director of Texas Baptist Men.

Just as God used his affinity for sports to draw him into church recreation and his penchant for campcraft and love of the outdoors to bring him into Royal Ambassadors leadership, Dixon believes the Lord used all of his life experiences up to that time to equip him for his new assignment.

"As mobilization officer for the Sixth Naval District, my job was finding the right men for the right jobs. I never realized God was preparing me to mobilize volunteers in his work," he says. "Then when I played ball and coached, he taught me about teamwork."

That skill has proved vital as Texas Baptist Men under Dixon's leadership has built a statewide network of volunteer ministry teams that has set the pace and often paved the way for Southern Baptist men's ministries nationwide.

Texas Baptists blazed the trail for Southern Baptists in disaster relief ministries when Hurricane Beulah hit in 1967. Dixon was working at an east Texas RA camp when he was called to the Rio Grande Valley to help do what he could in coordinating volunteers in their relief efforts.

"At the time, nobody knew I had received disaster relief training by the U.S. Bureau of Mines when I was with the Tennessee Valley Authority," he recalls.

Before he left the RA camp, he loaded it with homemade "buddy burners" fashioned from gallon-sized coffee cans. In south Texas, he and other Texas Baptists used the cooking cans to prepare breakfast for truck drivers delivering food and clothing to storm victims.

Four years and a couple of major disasters later, TBM had its first Disaster Relief Mobile Unit. The tractor-trailer rig was specially equipped with a field kitchen, ham radio, bunks for the volunteer crew and a generator to provide emergency power in electrical outages. It became a prototype for units throughout the Southern Baptist Convention, and it was the first of a fleet of disaster relief vehicles in Texas that now includes a command post, temporary emergency child-care unit, utility vehicles and regional response units.

Texas Baptist Men also led the way in volunteer construction for churches and encampments, launching teams throughout the state. In 1986, they worked around-the-clock for 24 hours, nearly completing construction of the first Hospitality House, a refuge for prisoners' families in Huntsville, Texas. A year later, Texas Baptist Men led more than 700 volunteers who worked throughout Labor Day weekend to rebuild Saragosa, a west Texas town that had been destroyed by a tornado.

Perhaps the greatest influence on Dixon's life and the greatest course change in the organizational life of Texas Baptist Men began with the prayer seminars of Fort Worth's Don Miller in the mid-1970s.

"I had never known much about the Holy Spirit before," Dixon acknowledges. But through the teachings of Miller and others such as T.W. Hunt, Avery Willis and Henry Blackaby, he became convicted that God had called his children to be "a praying people." Blackaby’s "Experiencing God" teachings on the "Seven Realities" of God's work among his people particularly made an impact.

"I came to understand that God is always at work around us, and he pursues a continuing love relationship with us. It's when we are in that relationship that he invites us to join him in his activity," Dixon says.

In the late 1980s, he led Texas Baptist Men to reject program-driven long-range planning. Instead, he urged his executive board and staff to make any "radical adjustment" necessary to respond to God's invitations.

That's when the doors of ministry swung wide open.

In the spring of 1991, when a cholera epidemic swept through Peru, Texas Baptist Men coordinated the shipment of desperately needed medical supplies. Since the organization was able to meet that urgent need, a few weeks later a representative from the U.S. Department of Defense called Dixon to ask if they could secure blankets in large quantities. They would be airdropped by military planes to the 2 million Kurdish refugees who had fled from Saddam Hussein's army to the United Nations "safe haven" at the juncture of Iraq, Iran and Turkey.

Success in that effort led to Texas Baptist volunteers working in cooperation with Global Partners, a London-based relief clearinghouse, to offer medical relief in Kurdish refugee camps and operate field kitchens in remote villages.

Since then, Texas Baptist Men has continued to be involved in Kurdish refugee resettlement in Texas. At their home church, Midway Road Baptist in north Dallas, Dixon and his wife work with the Kurdish ministry each week. Using a storytelling technique developed on the international mission field, they "chronicle" the story of redemption from creation to the second coming of Jesus.

In addition to working internationally with the Kurds, Texas Baptist Men also in 1991 began an ongoing ministry in the Ukraine. Other overseas assignments followed, including an ongoing project in Belize which Dixon hopes will develop into a training base for Third World ministries.

The widespread, varied nature of the "assignments that God has given Texas Baptist Men" prompted the group to adopt the ministry slogan: "Anyway, Anytime, Anywhere," Dixon notes.

"I have a pretty wild imagination, but when I first came to Texas to work with TBM, I never could have dreamed what God would do with this group," he says.

"We didn't ask for any of it. It's all been at God's invitation. But one thing I have learned. When God invites you to join in his activity, he will provide the resources you need."