More than 35 students and faculty from Southern, New Orleans, Southeastern, and Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminaries spent two weeks in late May and early June on a joint mission trip to the Asia-Pacific region. Faculty members from the seminaries say the unprecedented partnership pictures the Southern Baptist Convention cooperating at its best.
The idea began in 2024, when seminary missions professors gathered at the IMB’s training center in Richmond and started discussing the close partnership between the seminaries and the IMB. J. Keith McKinley, professor of Christian missions and director of the Bevin Center for Missions Mobilization at Southern, recalled the moment.
“Several of us were at ILC representing our seminaries when Dr. Mathias suggested we do a mission trip together,” he said.
Having served with the IMB for twenty years in Southeast Asia, McKinley quickly volunteered.
“I jumped in and said, no problem. Let’s do it next year. I’ll set it up.”
McKinley said the mission trips he leads at Southern Seminary ask three guiding questions.
“Number one, to see what it’s like to be a lost person in this place,” McKinley said. “Number two, what’s it like to be a believer in this place. And number three, what’s it like to be a missionary or local church-planter in this place.”
He described the journey, four cities over two weeks, as fundamentally a learning experience,
“By paying attention to people around us and paying attention to culture and worldview, it helps our students, and all of us frankly, focus on people. We learn by talking to people, listening to them, understanding their lives, and, when appropriate, sharing the good news of Christ with them.”
Keelan Cook, assistant professor of missions and the George Liele Director of the Center for Great Commission Studies at Southeastern, said the trip revealed the layered cooperation that makes SBC missions work.
“Our seminaries are each training students entrusted to them by our family of churches, and one of our primary responsibilities is equipping those students to go make disciples among the nations through the IMB,” Cook said. “The IMB is entrusted with facilitating the sending of our churches to the nations. We all, churches, seminaries, and the IMB, cooperate to accomplish this one sacred effort.”
Cook noted that the trip is just one visible expression of a much deeper, ongoing relationship.
“Each year, all six of the schools send members of their missions faculty to meet with Dr. Chitwood and the senior leadership of the IMB,” he said. “In recent years, these meetings have produced some really close cooperation both between the IMB and the seminaries and among the seminaries directly. Our professors are now publishing books together, sharing mobilization strategy, and actively looking for ways to serve our churches together in the Great Commission.”
That cooperation, Cook added, “cuts against any false narrative that our schools exist in a competitive relationship to one another or that the seminaries and the IMB somehow stand at odds with one another.”
Paul Akin, Southern’s provost, said the trip reflects a shared institutional calling.
“This joint trip demonstrates that the Great Commission is a shared passion and commitment of all of our Southern Baptist seminaries,” Akin said. “This initiative models the gospel cooperation of our churches and serves as a reminder that even though we are different institutions, we ultimately share the same mission. Thankful for the way these trips shape and form our faculty and our students, and hope to see this effort continue in the years ahead.”
George Martin, senior professor of Christian missions and world religions at Southern, tied the trip to the Cooperative Program’s legacy.
“On the 101st anniversary of the establishment of the Cooperative Program, it was great to see the seminaries together on the other side of the world,” Martin said. “Hopefully, this trip, even if in a small way, can serve as a catalyst for our seminaries to work together in reaching the world.”
McKinley’s hopes extend well past this single trip.
“I pray that some will be led to serve the Lord as missionaries through the IMB and that all of us would pray more and more deeply for the mission, strengthen the missionary-sending culture of our churches, and encourage Southern Baptists to continue to do together that which we should not, and often cannot, do apart.”