How can seminary students, faculty and staff use their theological knowledge to make an immediate impact throughout the world for Christ?
For nearly 80 students, faculty and staff at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary the answer is taking summer mission trips.
Teams from Southern will travel to six countries on three continents this summer spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The teams will engage in such activities as conducting cultural research, evangelizing people from other world religions, participating in post-tsunami cleanup efforts and planting churches.
“It’s an incredible thing to reflect on what God can and will do through these, our brothers and sister who are going to these specific places,” Southern Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. said during a commissioning service April 28.
“We don’t know all you are going to face this summer,” he said. “… I think we have good New Testament authority for understanding that the path is not always going to be easy and the road is not always going to be smooth. I think you can expect some opposition to the Gospel. I think you can find some opposition directed specifically at you because those who would carry the Gospel also carry that burden. I pray the Lord will give you protection.”
International teams will travel to South Asia, Guatemala, the Pacific Rim and East Asia. North American missions efforts will extend to Newfoundland and the Northwest Territories in Canada and several states across the U.S.
Daniel Wiginton, a master of divinity student from Abilene, Texas, is scheduled to participate in the South Asia trip. He said he looks forward to engaging Muslim men and women in conversations about the Gospel and sharing the love of Christ by meeting practical human needs.
“It’s just about spreading the Gospel and getting God’s Word to people there,” he said. “We know that when God’s Word goes out, it does not return void. So it will be effective in that way.”
Kathy Fredrick, executive secretary to the dean of Southern’s Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Church Growth, is scheduled to participate in a trip to Newfoundland in May. As a native of Wisconsin, Fredrick has firsthand knowledge of the particularly severe need for the Gospel across the northern United States and Canada.
“We are from Wisconsin, and we know how badly the Gospel message in needed in the North,” she said. “And so we are very excited to get to go to Canada and present that to the folks up there.”
Mohler assured all the participants in Southern’s summer missions efforts of the seminary’s prayer and support.
“Where you go, prayer will have preceded you,” he said. “So we’re going to pray not only that the Lord would protect you, but that the Lord would prepare the way so that when you arrive where the Lord has sent you, there will be an amazing receptivity to the Gospel because the Holy Spirit has been working in hearts to prepare them for the very Gospel you will come to preach.”