Here - Southern Baptist Theological Seminary

Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Church Growth
By David Roach
Summer mission trips send
SBTS students across globe
Sharing the Gospel on university campuses
in a country largely closed to Christianity,
working with church planters in a remote
area of Canada and researching Japanese
immigrants in Argentina were among the
ministries conducted on mission trips this
summer by teams from Southern Seminary.
Through late-July, five mission trips coordinated
by the seminary’s Great Commission
Center have taken students and faculty
to three continents. The trips have gone to
East Asia; Argentina; Quebec, Canada; Newfoundland,
Canada; and South Asia.
“The Great Commission Center wants to
involve every student and every professor
in intercultural missions, both overseas as
well as among immigrants in the USA,” said
David Sills, director of Southern’s Great Commission
Center and associate professor of
missions and cultural anthropology.
Sills led a team of nine Southern students
July 1-14 to conduct research on how to
reach Japanese people living in Buenos Aires,
Argentina. After a week of class instruction on
Southern Seminary student Will Brooks (left)
explores Scripture with a university student in
Asia during one of five mission trips this summer
by students and faculty.
how to conduct ethnographic research, the
group surveyed the Japanese population.
In a trip to Gaspe, Quebec, Canada, June
24-30, a team of five Southern students and one
professor worked with a church-starting strategist
from the Canadian Convention of Southern
Baptists to prayer walk, share the Gospel and
encourage a family of church planters.
Trip leader J.D. Payne said there was at
least one significant victory on the trip when
his team showed a discouraged church
planter how he could partner with other
Baptists to improve the effectiveness of his
work. Payne serves as assistant professor of
church planting and evangelism at Southern.
The Newfoundland, Canada, team, which
was also led by Payne, worked July 15-21 with
the first Southern Baptist missionaries ever to
serve in Newfoundland. The team, made up
of 18 Southern students and faculty members,
encouraged the missionaries and shared the
Gospel with lost Newfoundlanders.
The team in East Asia shared the Gospel
on seven college campuses June 3-23
through activities such as basketball, English
classes and engaging people on the streets.
The group of nine Southern students shared
the message of Christ with at least 100 people
individually and saw at least three people
trust Christ as Lord and Savior. They were
able to spend a large amount of time discipling
each of the new believers and helped
them get connected to a local church.
Boyce College
Boyce guides Bone to
church music ministry
By David Roach
For Matthew Bone doing music ministry at Shively Baptist Church in Louisville, Ky., began as a
part of his educational program at Boyce College. But it developed into an opportunity for him
to impact hundreds of Shively members by applying his Boyce education on a continuing basis.
Bone, a junior from Columbia, Tenn., went to Shively in the fall of 2005 to fulfill a Supervised
Ministry Experience component of his music ministry degree. After a semester of work,
however, he began talking to the church’s music minister and realized that there were needs he
could help meet if he would stay at Shively as a music intern.
“I was able to apply directly what I was learning at Boyce on a weekly basis to my ministry,”
Bone said. “Even the music theory classes that everyone hates were able to show me new ways
in which I could teach or plug in exactly what I was learning.”
Among the first projects Bone undertook in his new ministry role was to start a youth
choir. Approximately 40 teenagers signed up initially, and the ministry expanded both in its
numbers and in its impact. Last summer he took the youth choir on a tour through Tennessee
and Alabama.
Today, in addition to leading the youth choir, Bone leads the music in worship services
regularly, sings in the adult choir and fills in playing trumpet and guitar in the orchestra
when he is needed.
Southern Seminary Magazine | Fall 2007 page 29