• Learn about missions
• Pray for missions
• Give to missions
• Do missions
• And participate in the work of the church

“We are ambassadors for Christ” (2 Cor. 5:20, NIV). This verse of Scripture, adopted as the Royal Ambassador motto, capsules the 100-year history of Royal Ambassadors.

Beginnings

The Royal Ambassadors organization grew out of a need for Southern Baptist boys to learn that they are commissioned as Christ’s ambassadors to go into the world and tell the story of Jesus Christ. It is an organization that grew through enthusiasm for missions and the need of belonging to a group of other young Christian ambassadors. To date, 2.16 million boys have participated in Royal Ambassadors since its inception in 1908; and in the past 10 years alone, a quarter million young boys have learned to live out the RA pledge.

As early as 1883, a group of boys between 12 and 14 years of age began a missionary organization in Owensboro, Ky. They met regularly with their pastor to study missions and collected money to help support a young girl in Miss Lottie Moon’s school in Tengchow, China. Groups of boys in other sections of the country also became interested in missions during the 1890s and into the early years of the twentieth century. But it was Miss Fannie Heck, an active member of the Woman’s Missionary Union (WMU), who was particularly challenged by the possibility of boys united for the sake of missions. She began to make definite plans for the organization, and in October 1907, a “Committee On Mission Work for Boys” was appointed by the WMU with Miss Heck as chairman. In May 1908, WMU adopted the recommendations of the committee and began promoting a boy’s missionary organization. It was known as The Order of Royal Ambassadors and included in its membership boys aged 9 through 16. The first chapter of Royal Ambassadors organized after the 1908 meeting in Goldsboro, N.C.