Ministry awards honor perseverance, empathy & creative care for other

Texas Baptist Ministry has awarded three people including Robin Feistel who has spent much of her life teaching English to adults. DP

By Staff, Baptist Standard

FORT WORTH—The 2008 Texas Baptist Ministry Awards honored a long-tenured small-church pastor, a pioneer in ministry to the mentally disabled and a leader in teaching English to adults.

Baylor University and the Baptist Standard presented the awards during the Friends of Truett Seminary Dinner, held in conjunction with the Baptist General Convention of Texas annual meeting in Fort Worth.

This year’s honorees were Bill Wright, pastor of First Baptist Church in Plains; Joel Pulis, founding pastor/executive director of the Well Community in Dallas; and Robin Feistel of Nacogdoches, longtime English-as-a-Second-Language teacher and author of a new ESL training program.

"Baylor and the Standard present the Texas Baptist Ministry Awards for three important reasons,” Standard Editor Marv Knox explained. “We want to affirm and elevate the ministerial calling. We are blessed to recognize and honor exemplary ministers. And in highlighting those ministers, we also lift up role models for ministry, which can and should be followed by all of us.”

• Feistel took home the Marie Mathis Award for Lay Ministry, which recognizes a Texas Baptist layperson for either recent singular or lifetime ministry achievement. Mathis directed Baylor’s Student Union 25 years and led women’s missionary programs at the state, national and international levels.

Feistel has enabled countless people to speak and read English, and through that association, she has led many of them to faith in Christ.

When the English-as-a-Second-Language program at First Baptist Church in Richardson needed a director, Feistel expanded the ministry. Later, when her family moved to East Texas and their “plan” called for her to get a paying job, she saw another need and devoted almost full time to the ESL program at First Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, at Stephen F. Austin State University and in the community.

When Feistel learned the library at Baylor University’s Center for Literacy needed to be reorganized, she drove to Waco, stayed with a friend and got the job done.
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