ALPHARETTA, Ga. (NAMB)—Each year Southern Baptists set aside a week of prayer to reflect on the work of Southern Baptist missionaries who are serving across North America—and to prepare for an offering that has exceeded $1 billion since its inception.

The reason we give to AAEO: To help our missionary force reach for Christ an estimated 248 million lost people in the United States and Canada; that’s three of four people.

Last year (2006), receipts to the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering(r) for North American Missions exceeded $57 million. This year’s goal of $57 million will continue to help more than 5,300 missionaries, many of them jointly sponsored through partnerships with NAMB and state conventions.

HURRICANE, W. VA. (NAMB)—It’s another early morning for Bill Barker in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia. He leaves home earlier than usual in his brown Toyota minivan, which suddenly tops a mountain crest. He pulls off the road to talk to God.

MESICK, MICH. (NAMB)—Evangelistic deer hunts. Christian fish fries. Wild game dinners at church. North American missionary Ken Wilson has a lot of tools in his Gospel-sharing tool box to win people to Christ amid the thick woods and crystal-clear lakes of northern Michigan.

DENVER, COLO. (NAMB)—Little Anatoliy Odnoralov often came home after school with a bloody nose—the result of just another day as a Christian at his school in the North Caucasus region of the old Soviet Union.

KANSAS CITY, MO. (NAMB)—”The Annie Armstrong Easter Offering makes the thing that is impossible among us … possible.”

GULF SHORES/ORANGE BEACH, ALA. (NAMB)-The Gulf Coast of Alabama is blessed with a usually warm, emerald-green ocean for swimming and sugar-white, soft-sand beaches for sunning. It’s a paradise that draws 6 million people a year, but 70 percent of them don’t know Christ.

IRVING, TEXAS (NAMB)—”If there is anything being done in the world today, to change the world, it is planting churches.” So says Leroy Fountain, church planter associate for the North American Mission Board and the Southern Baptist of Texas Convention.

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (NAMB)—When the North American Mission Board and the Arkansas Baptist Convention appointed Diana Lewis as state ministry evangelism director here almost 15 years ago, it was something akin to throwing the wily rabbit into the proverbial briar patch.

SEATTLE, Wash. (NAMB)—Seattle can seem like one big paradox.