Baseball Outreach Helped Southern Baptist Missionary Bill Cashion Plant Churches in Caracas, Venezuela

Baseball has been part of Bill Cashion’s life since he was a boy in the mill village of Slater, South Carolina. Cashion, a longtime Southern Baptist missionary and pastor who currently serves as interim pastor of Cleveland First Baptist Church, said, “Baseball was a part of my DNA.”

Textile baseball was strong in the 1940s and 1950s, Cashion recalled. His father and grandfather were both textile league stars with the Slater Sluggers mill team. His father was offered a contract by the Cleveland Indians but joined the Navy during World War II. Cashion served as a batboy for the Sluggers as a youngster and hoped to play for the team himself, but the textile leagues had disbanded by the time he reached playing age. He played for Slater-Marietta High School and for four years at Baptist College at Charleston, now Charleston Southern University.

During his college years, Cashion said, God called him to preach. He had told God he wanted to be a baseball-playing preacher, and he said that request was not granted. He served for four years as a basketball and baseball coach while also serving as a bivocational pastor in North Carolina. “The Lord allowed me to stay in baseball,” he said.

He returned to South Carolina in 1978 as pastor of Washington Baptist Church in Greer. There he served as baseball chaplain for the Greenville Braves, the Double A affiliate of the Atlanta Braves. Years later he served the Greenville Drive, the Red Sox Single A affiliate, as Spanish-speaking chaplain for 11 years.

In 1985, Cashion and his wife, Kathy, were appointed as missionaries to Venezuela by the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, now the International Mission Board. He served as coordinator of church planting strategy for the churches of Caracas. According to the article, Cashion and other Southern Baptist missionaries developed a strategy that used Venezuelan laymen, volunteers from the United States, and missionaries in human needs projects, children’s ministries, sports clinics and partnership evangelism crusades. Cashion said that he and others started the Baseball Chapel ministry in the Venezuelan Professional Baseball League. He also led evangelistic sports clinics for youth teams, led Bible studies for the Caracas Lions in the professional winter league, and worked with academies that several Major League Baseball teams sponsored in the country. He also led basketball clinics and coordinated an annual tournament that included all-star high school teams from the United States and Venezuelan national champions.

Cashion credited his wife with helping reach baseball players with the gospel, describing what he called “Kathy’s Biscuit Ministry.” Many of the players had never eaten a biscuit before, he said, and they often stopped by at mealtimes asking whether she had any. While they sat at the table, the couple discussed the gospel with them. “Several trusted the Lord and soon were helping us in the baseball clinics as instructors and evangelists,” Cashion said. He attributed the sports-centered strategy to numerous outcomes, including 30 new missions and churches in the Caracas region and 120 churches reported in Argentina, along with 20 churches started by baseball and basketball players in the Caracas area. He said the strategy also influenced around 50 additional churches in Venezuela.

Cashion later returned to the United States to work stateside with the International Mission Board. He has continued to lead mission teams to Venezuela and later to Costa Rica, with sports evangelism as a major emphasis every year since 2006. He already has a trip scheduled for next year in Costa Rica.

Source: Read the original report