Missionaries who will go to New York City, Australia and the Arctic Circle came to First Freedom Baptist Church in Brimfield, Ohio with the hopes of raising financial support to fund their work.

About 70 church members gathered yesterday night to hear Nathan Jones present the work he would be doing in Rankin Inlet, Nunavut Territory, Canada.

“Hopefully it fires up our congregation to reach out to students at Kent State,” said Joe Eckmeyer, campus director of Truth and Love Ministries to Kent State, which is affiliated with First Freedom Baptist Church.

“(The students) at Kent State come from a faith background and their faith is under fire in their classes,” he said.

In classes dealing with such topics as biology, they can find their religion under attack, he said. Part of the hope of having the Annual Spring Missions Conference at the church is to change hearts to see the need for missionaries, which will lead to good work being done in the local community.

“In any capacity we need people to see the need for the missions field,” Eckmeyer said.

He used the movie Pay it Forward as an example of the way that missions work to help spread the gospel.

Missions work helps change hearts, and if it changes hearts at the church, it could spread locally to the community – which includes Kent State, he said.

Jones’ presentation consisted of a brief description of what the missionary work he and his family plan to do in the Nunavut Territory.

Right now, Jones said he is raising funds to go live there permanently so he can start a church and lead people to the Lord.

One of the main reasons for going to the Nunavut Territory is that currently the only churches there are frauds, he said.

The missions work will face some trials, he said, because the community is remote and only reachable by airplane. There is also a language barrier.

The city of Rankin Inlet has a population of only 3,000, and 80 percent of the people are Inuit, Jones said.

As missionaries, the Jones and other families won’t be allowed to work regular full-time jobs in their host country, so they come to the conference to ask the church for financial support, said Sue Fields, First Freedom Baptist Church treasurer.

After the presentations, the church congregation will vote to decide if it wants to support the missions the families will go on, Fields said.

Also, it is nice to know what is going on in other countries and to be involved with the missions work, she said.

Contact religion reporter Heather Scarlett at [email protected].