MISSIONARY SPOTLIGHT: Bill and Bettye Roberts
Mission Service Corps missionaries bring gospel hope to Indian tribes
By Bonnie Pritchett
Reprinted with permission of the Southern Baptist Texan
WHITEWRIGHT—It’s the people, especially the children, who keep drawing Bill and Bettye Roberts to the unforgiving and seemingly inhospitable desert climes of the Southwest and to the citizens of the Navajo tribe.
And it is the Roberts’ love and devotion to those people that earned the North Texas couple the honor of Mission Service Corps Missionaries of the Year [2006] during the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention’s annual meeting in November.
What began as yet another mission trip seven years ago has evolved into a ministry drawing from resources that, the Roberts admit, come from God. “It’s just amazing,” Bill Roberts said. “We just sit back and watch God work.”
It’s been more than once that God’s provision has thrilled the couple from Whitewright, an hour north of Dallas. Each mission trip to the Navajo lands of New Mexico, Utah and Arizona gives the Roberts new perspective on the needs of the people there. And with each need God puts on their hearts to provide for the Navajo, they said, God brings someone across their path to meet the need.
That is how their ministry has grown from a one-time trip with 28 volunteers from their own church, First Baptist Church of Howe, to multiple trips a year with support from churches across the South. The Roberts are commissioned through the North American Mission Board and the Southern Baptists of Texas Convention, which work together to coordinate the volunteer ministry of MSC missionaries.
“Each year we go we get a blessing,” Bill Roberts said. “It just kind of grows on you.”
With help from their growing list of volunteers and donors, the Roberts have delivered bikes, quilts, Bibles in the Navajo language, food, coats, and all of the hugs and snacks common to Southern Baptist churches’ Vacation Bible Schools.
There are so many people who have so little, Bettye Roberts said. “That’s why we take them Jesus.”
They have taken Jesus these past six years in the form of VBS and school supply drives each summer and Christmas parties each December. This last trip, taken the first week of December, gave those involved one of the most emotional experiences in all their years of ministry, Bettye said.
She told how she recruited the labor of a quilting group in Canyon, Texas, in the Panhandle. The women, she said, make quilts for charity. The women made 150 quilts for distribution among the Navajo.
Bettye said the gifts were to be given to the parents of children who attend the annual Christmas parties. But a young girl, who Bettye estimated to be 11 or 12 years old, asked to exchange her toys for a quilt. Choking back tears as she told the story, Bettye recalled the girl saying, “I get so cold at night.”
That moment brought to the fore the desperate need of many of the people and the blessing of being able to provide for them, even if only one at a time, she said.
While the Roberts cannot supply the running water and electrical power that some Navajo still do without, they can provide some of the more basic essentials and, in doing so, create an opportunity to share the gospel. Bettye said the Navajo follow their traditional spiritual ceremonies but many practice an amalgamation of spiritual practices or none at all. A depressed economy and disproportionately high drug and alcohol abuse have created a cycle difficult to break.
Bettye said the remoteness of the communities, or pueblos, from major cities where good paying jobs are available contributes to the poor economic conditions within the reservation. Many drive the 100 miles—one way—to Albuquerque for work, leaving early in the morning and returning late in the evening. But still others do not have the resources to make such a daily trip.
The first mission trip to the reservation with gifts for the kids was the only Christmas many of the Navajo children had. That fact keeps them coming back, she said.
Southern Baptists have had a positive spiritual influence in the Navajo nation, but discipleship and training of the Christian community has been sporadic. Bill said the SBC built several churches on Navajo lands about 30 years ago, but many of those buildings are in disrepair because the congregations could not maintain the facilities.
That is something New Mexico Baptists hope to change, Bill said. He is coordinating the creation of a program that will help equip local, bivocational pastors to lead congregations in building and maintaining facilities and equipping the saints in discipleship and congregationalism.
Bill said congregations are becoming increasingly effective in operating their own churches and reaching out to their communities. The training program will add to the structural foundation of each congregation, physically and spiritually.
A major goal of the Roberts’ ministry is to recruit churches to adopt a Navajo congregation. The Navajo congregations are able to give little financial support for the function of their churches, much less the salary of their pastors. If churches outside the reservation can encourage the Navajo congregations through financial support and regular mission trips, the Roberts are certain the Christian community on the reservation would blossom.
One $3,000 donation financed a school-supply shopping spree that began in North Texas and ended at the reservation in New Mexico. Bettye said the group stopped at several Wal-Mart stores along the route, buying up backpacks, spirals, papers, pencils, and sundry school supplies. As they drove, the volunteers would stuff the backpacks, making sure they would be ready for distribution upon arrival.
During the SBTC Mission Service Corps awards ceremony in Austin, the SBTC’s MSC director, Janice Brooks, said: “Our Missionaries of the Year have understood grace giving. I firmly believe that giving encompasses much more than tithes and offerings. It also involves the giving of time and energy and the use of the gifts that God has bestowed upon us. Our couple this year certainly does just that.”
The Roberts would admit their work is not done on their own. God has impressed upon the hearts of others to reach out to the Navajo, and to American Indian tribes in Oklahoma, where the couple also coordinates mission trips.
Volunteers who have joined their efforts throughout the years have traveled from Texas, Louisiana and Tennessee, they said. Financial assistance has come beyond those borders. Bill said for many people, the mission trips are family affairs and the help from the children, especially the youths, is valuable because of the Christian influence the young ones can have on their Navajo peers. He cited a recent youth rally that saw 30 Navajo teens give their lives to Christ.
Becoming a Christian does not mean leaving behind one’s Navajo heritage, Bettye said. Although there are pagan spiritual elements that must be forsaken, one does not stop being Navajo by becoming a Christ-follower.
Though the land of the Navajo can be inhospitable, the people are not. Bill and Bettye Roberts have only been home from their most recent trip a few weeks, but the couple is already planning the next visit, coordinating donations, raising funds, and looking forward to taking Jesus and the hope that he gives to a people they have grown to love.
MISSIONARY SPOTLIGHT ARCHIVE | 
