WAKE FOREST, N.C. (BP)–Hundreds of students filled the stage of Binkley Chapel at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary on the morning of March 27, their presence a testimony to each one’s desire to see the gospel of Christ spread throughout the world, and their desire to join that endeavor.
They stood behind Jerry Rankin, president of the International Mission Board, who had finished a stirring message that reminded them a call to missionary life is not only a call to die spiritually, but also, possibly, physically as well.
Still they came, joined by dozens more of their classmates and friends who newly committed themselves to fulfilling the Great Commission around the world.
“This generation of students, from this seminary,” predicted Waylan Owens, Southeastern’s vice president of institutional advancement, “will make more of an impact on the world through the sharing of the gospel than any in history.”
Thus ended the yearly Global Missions Week emphasis on international church planting and evangelism on the seminary’s Wake Forest, N.C., campus. While global missionary work is a constant focus at Southeastern, the week of conferences, testimonies and commitments served to energize those students already headed to the mission field and stir the hearts of those whom God has newly called.
“Most of our world has never heard a message of redeeming love,” Rankin said, highlighting the need. “They’re still in darkness waiting for someone to reveal the light.”
Rankin was one of dozens of missionaries and speakers who descended on Wake Forest to celebrate the week, which also included special chapel services on Tuesday and Wednesday.
Tuesday’s speaker was Cal Guy, one of the Southern Baptist Convention’s foremost authorities on missions.
Guy, for decades a missions professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas, has in recent years been teaching at Southeastern as distinguished professor emeritus of Christian missions. He challenged the students to see themselves in God’s plan to reach the world.
“God’s ways seem illogical, radical, sometimes even unreasonable and unnatural,” he said. “It’s because they are supernatural.”
On Wednesday, Southeastern’s own Keith Eitel — a well-known missiologist and director of the Center for Great Commission Studies — delivered a message on what he called the “Antioch Factor,” challenging the students to imitate the Antioch church of Acts in the New Testament and reach out cross-culturally.
Citing Barnabas as a leader in the movement, Eitel said the type of love that Barnabas showed for the evangelism of non-Jews in the first century should be a model for church planters in the 21st century.
“He took what he knew from the Word of God and he saw that that meant gentiles should have the same basis of salvation as Jews,” Eitel said, “That is, faith in Christ.”
Eitel reminded the students that any attempt to do this in their own power would end in failure.
“He’s the one to do the empowering,” the professor said. “You’re the one to simply yield.”
Rankin, preaching the final message of the week, encouraged the students with reports from missionaries overseas, how hundreds, and even thousands, of people are coming to Christ daily and many churches are being planted.
But he cautioned the students not to be motivated primarily by the need, though it is great, or by an obligation to serve Christ. Rather, Rankin said, be motivated to share God’s passion of love for all people.
“Whatever it takes,” he said. “That’s what God’s passion did when he sent Jesus to the cross — whatever it takes.”
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(BP) photos posted in the BP Photo Library at https://www.bpnews.net. Photo titles: CONTEMPLATING THE CALL and RANKIN’S EXHORTATION.
