Great Commission Conversations

Missionary mentorship and on-the-job-training, while often neglected, can be a critical element of training and preparation for new and prospective missionaries. Short-term mission trips can be a great way to develop a burden for missions and can even be used facilitate the kind of mentorship and training that is invaluable to effective and long-lasting missionary service. These come into focus in this interview with Missionary Brad Barkowski. Bro. Brad has served in the island nation of Trinidad since 2015, but his exposure to that field of service and his training for ministering there began before his deployment as a supported missionary. This is among the things that discuss in this Great Commission Conversation. 

Your feedback is welcome! You can email Lee at [email protected]. 

This is part two of the interview with Jon Nelms, founder of Final Frontiers Foundation. He is making the case for supporting nationals and in the course of this conversation he addresses a critically important subject in the support of foreign nationals: accountability . 

Your feedback is welcome. You can email Lee at [email protected]. 

One of the relatively recent developments in American missions giving is the effort to get American funds into the hands of national workers on foreign fields. Jon Nelms has given his life to this effort, establishing Final Frontiers Foundation back in 1986. Bro. Nelms is also the author of "The Great Omission: Why we have failed in accomplishing the Master's departing command of global missions, and how we can be the first generation in history to finally and fully accomplish it." In Bro. Nelms view, it cannot be done apart from the support of national workers. In this first part of a two-part interview, Bro. Nelms sets the backdrop in his case for supporting nationals. 

Your feedback is welcome! You can email Lee at [email protected].

Tommy Tillman is something of an independent Baptist missionary legend. His labors in missions and evangelism have included smuggling Bibles onto Soviet ships, evangelizing Mayan tribes in Central America, ministering to lepers in Thailand, and working among the Gobi desert nomads in communist Mongolia. In this interview we talk with Tommy Tillman's son, Mitch, about his dad's ministry and the ongoing work of Harbor Evangelism. 

Your feedback is welcome! You can email Lee at [email protected].

The local church is God's appointed institution for evangelizing the world in this age. If we're going to be effective in the work of missions we need local churches and local church pastors to work hand-in-hand with cross-cultural missionaries serving in foreign fields. Pastor Adam Thompson has a zeal for world missions and has been on both sides of this important partnership. He served in foreign missions for 15 years before assuming the pastorate of Capitol City Baptist Church back in 2009. In this interview, Pastor Thompson helps us to think through the relationship between the local church and the foreign field. 

Your feedback is welcome! You can email Lee at [email protected].

In this second and final part of our interview with Greg, we take a brief look of the history of the three-self church in China and we discuss at length the reality of the persecution of Christians in China, the challenge of dealing with fear as a missionary in a closed-country, and the growing repression of Christianity in the country and its affect on foreign missionaries.

From the most populated country on earth, we've heard years of glowing reports of the unprecedented growth of Christianity alongside harrowing tales of repression and persecution. What are we to make of these popular presentations of the church in China? In this two-part interview, veteran Bible-believing missionary Greg relates his take on the state of Chinese Christianity and the increasing difficulty facing American missionaries seeking to work under the atheistic antagonism of the ruling Communist party. In part one, Greg relates how the Lord directed him to China, he assesses the condition of the Chinese church at large, and speaks to the strength and weaknesses of the underground house-church movement. 

How do you get the gospel to people groups without a written language, scattered in a difficult-to-access region of the world, within a country that is closed to missionaries? In this episode, we talk to Tim about how he ended up serving in the remote regions of Central Asia and some of the challenges and gains that he and his team have experienced as they seek to get the gospel to the unreached Persian peoples that live there. 

Cornerstone Baptist Church in Carthage, Tennessee has a reputation for its generosity toward missionaries and the tool they have employed to carry out this liberality is Faith Promise Missions Giving. In the conclusion to our interview with Pastor Ron Ralph, he walks us through what the missions conference at Cornerstone looks like, how they take their faith promise, and he provides some suggestions as to how churches can get involved in giving to missions. 

We all know that missions takes money. One of the tools which God has used to get funds into the work of missions is Faith Promise Missions Giving. In this episode, Pastor Ron Ralph of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Carthage, Tennessee tells us how Cornerstone, from its inception, got involved in faith promise missions giving and he provides a primer on what faith promise missions giving is. This is the first part of a two-part series.