Students and faculty from four Southern Baptist seminaries took a joint trip to the Asia-Pacific region this summer to learn about the culture and share the Gospel.
A group of more than 35 from New Orleans, Southeastern, Southwestern and Southern Baptist Theological Seminaries participated in the two-week trip in late May and early June.
Greg Mathias, associate professor of global missions at New Orleans Seminary and director of the Global Mission Center (GMC), said that to his knowledge there has never been an international mission trip where multiple SBC seminaries partnered together in this way.
The idea for the trip came about during an event each of the seminary missions professors were attending at the International Mission Board (IMB) training center in Richmond back in 2024. Mathias and others were noting the incredible partnership that currently exists between the SBC seminaries and the IMB.
Mathias suggested the idea of a joint seminary trip to the others. The professors began to work on logistics, and this recent trip was the fruit of that conversation two years later.
“We are at a really good place right now in the Southern Baptist Convention and specifically in terms of the missions departments at our seminaries,” Mathias said. “There is unity, we pull for one another and we are all after the same things. We wanted a chance to showcase this through a trip together.
“Coming off last year where we celebrated 100 years of the Cooperative Program, we wanted to model that unity and cooperation as seminaries regarding missions specifically.
“As a convention, one of the main things that ties us together is a heartbeat for lostness among the nations and fulfilling the Great Commission. We thought what would be a better way to show this off than to take a trip together. It was neat to see this trip come to fruition, and we hope we can see this kind of trip replicated in the future.”
The trip is one Ed Stucky, associate director of recruiting for admissions at Southwestern Seminary, has dreamed of for almost a decade.
Stucky, who led the Southwestern students on the trip, said he previously had been to the region 14 times, either with his wife or taking students on mission trips.
“Back when I first came to Southwestern, I started thinking about how special it would be if we could do a trip [to APAC] that involved multiple seminaries,” he said. Stucky joined the Admissions teams in 2019.
“Just the fact that we could have four seminaries cooperating to share the Gospel with the highest concentration of Muslim population anywhere in the world was a special opportunity,” he added.
Students on the trip had the chance to visit several notable places around the country, connect with IMB personnel stationed throughout the nation and interact with leaders of other religions in the local community.
Mathias explained there were three goals of the trip or three questions faculty wanted students to examine while on the trip.
- What does lostness look like here, and what does it look like to engage the lost?
- What it is like to be a Christian in this part of the world?
- What is it like to live and work here?
George Martin, senior professor of Christian missions and world religions at Southern Seminary, said, “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. Hopefully, this trip, even if in a small way, can serve as a catalyst for our seminaries to work together in reaching the world.”
The celebration of Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice, was taking place during the team’s visit.
“The devotion that day, the call to prayer, started early, probably a little before 4 a.m.,” Stucky said. “I was on the roof of my hotel, and I just got overwhelmed. Well, I have been overwhelmed by the call to prayer before, but I just got overwhelmed that morning with the vast lostness that is everywhere, with the people that are trying to be devout and to be devoted, and yet they’re looking in all the wrong places, and so my heart continues to break for them. I think it’s why I keep going back.”
SWBTS student Noelle Zedwick said she went on the trip “to further my experience with overseas mission work, as that’s my long-term career plan, and to get a taste for another culture.”
“It’s hard to describe exactly the impact this trip had on me, but it’s safe to say it furthered my burden for the lost and reignited my fire for missions,” Zedwick said. “I saw once again how deep brokenness goes in these places and how powerfully God is at work.”
This story was compiled from an NOBTS report here and a SWBTS report here.
