The Missions Show

By default, most missionaries and pastors tend to focus their ministry only on those age 18 and up. But if we refocused on the evangelism and discipleship of children—both at home and abroad—might we not see God bless the efforts of church planters in a new way? Taylor Lassiter of Awana thinks so.

Taylor Lassiter serves as Awana Missionary and as an Awana U.S. Field Director. As an Awana Missionary, he leads a volunteer team serving over 300 churches in Southeast Texas and Louisiana. His other leadership responsibilities with Awana include leading ten Awana Missionaries in nine different states, impacting hundreds of churches across America. Taylor and Meredith have served as US Missionaries with Awana since 2008 and served in North Texas and Arkansas before relocating to Houston in 2018. Taylor is originally from Lubbock, TX, and Meredith is from Elgin, TX.

ABWE's children’s ministries focus on reaching the world’s 2 billion children, because research has shown that 75 percent of Christians accept Christ before they reach the age of 14. Explore international children’s ministry opportunities with ABWE.

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The Missions Show is powered by ABWE International and the Global Gospel Fund. This episode is also sponsored by Radius International.

What role should our emotions play in motivating us towards missions? The answer is in church history. Jonathan Edwards is noted his biography of the famous missionary David Brainerd, who was among the first to reach the Native Americans with the gospel. But most people don’t know that Jonathan Edwards wrote about Brainerd primarily as an example of a missionary life driven by powerful, stirring affections for God. And if we feel the way we should about God and his gospel, we will be driven out on mission too.

To explain all this, we consulted with Ryan Martin. Ryan is pastor of the First Baptist Church of Granite Falls, Minnesota. Prior to that, he served as the associate pastor of Bethany Bible Church in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He is on the board of directors of Religious Affections Ministries. Ryan received his undergraduate degree at Northland Baptist Bible College, and has received further training from Central Baptist Theological Seminary of Minneapolis, Minn. (M.Div., 2004; Ph.D., 2013). He was ordained in 2009 at Bible Baptist Church of Elk River, Minn. (now Otsego, Minn.). He has a wife and children too. Ryan is the associate editor of Hymns to the Living God (Religious Affections Ministries, 2017). He contributed to the Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (Eerdmans, 2017) and is the author of Understanding Affections in the Theology of Jonathan Edwards: “The High Exercises of Divine Love” (T&T Clark, 2018).

Remember to share, rate, leave a review, and subscribe. Together we can bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and missions.

Want to ask a question or suggest a topic? Email us.

The Missions Show is powered by ABWE International and the Global Gospel Fund. This episode is also sponsored by Radius International.

How can believers of all educational and vocational backgrounds use their skills in the marketplace for the Great Commission? In this episode, you’ll hear an expert panel address this topic at Cedarville University.

The discussion was led by Matt Bennett, Assistant Professor of Missions and Theology at Cedarville. Also joining the conversation are David Butler, NAMB missionary leading the SEND Boston program, Kyle Peterson, deputy director of Cedarville’s entrepreneurial accelerator program, along with Scott Dunford and Alex Kocman.

Remember to share, rate, leave a review, and subscribe. Together we can bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and missions.

Want to ask a question or suggest a topic? Email us.

The Missions Show is powered by ABWE International and the Global Gospel Fund. This episode is also sponsored by Radius International.

You may know her from Sheologians, but long before she was “internet famous,” a young Summer Jaeger would spend whole days with her family and friends engaged in street evangelism outside Mormon temples tackling tough apologetic issues and sharing the gospel. Now, as a married, homeschooling mother of four and an avid podcaster, Summer’s perspective on engaging Latter-Day Saints and other cultists is continuing to grow. What should every Christian know about engaging the cults? And what about those of us who don’t feel as though evangelism is their “gift”? We tackle these exciting questions in this episode.

When she’s not cohosting Sheologians, Summer Jaeger is a wife, mom, blogger, active church member, and thoroughgoing Baptist. Follow her on Twitter.

Remember to share, rate, leave a review, and subscribe. Together we can bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and missions.

Want to ask a question or suggest a topic? Email us.

The Missions Show is powered by ABWE International and the Global Gospel Fund. This episode is also sponsored by Radius International.

How can missionary wives balance the pressures of home, marriage, and children with the demands of ministry itself? And do wives have to be “called” to missions the same way their husbands do? Heather Farran, ABWE missionary and wife of Western Europe Regional Director Kyle Farran, shares her wisdom from raising three children in Tanzania and Portugal.

Heather and Kyle have served with ABWE since 2007 and currently reside in Lisbon, ministering to the 100+ ABWE missionaries in Portugal, Spain, France, England, Ireland, Germany, Norway and Italy. Heather is an RN with her degree from Cedarville University. Support the Farrans’ ministry.

Remember to share, rate, leave a review, and subscribe. Together we can bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and missions.

Want to ask a question or suggest a topic? Email us.

The Missions Show is powered by ABWE International and the Global Gospel Fund. This episode is also sponsored by Radius International.

The inconvenience of learning a foreign language is a major reason people choose not to pursue cross-cultural missions. But, as Dr. Vern Poythress explains, language isn’t just a barrier; it’s a gift from God that displays his creativity. In this special interview, Dr. Poythress explains why language itself finds its source in the Trinity, how missionaries should approach language learning. Later, we address how missionaries can use presuppositional apologetics in dealing with pagan religious cultures.

Rev. Dr. Vern Poythress (Ph.D., Harvard; D.Th., Stellenbosch) is professor of New Testament and biblical interpretation at Westminster Theological Seminary, where he has taught for 43 years.

Dr. Poythress’ academic interests include how Christianity and the Trinitarian nature of God impact all areas of life. He has also spent much of his career studying and teaching biblical interpretation and hermeneutics. A few of his notable books include Redeeming Science, Redeeming Philosophy, or Chance and the Sovereignty of God, and In the Beginning Was the Word, which looks at the Trinitarian foundations for language.

Remember to share, rate, leave a review, and subscribe. Together we can bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and missions.

Want to ask a question or suggest a topic? Email us.

The Missions Show is powered by ABWE International and the Global Gospel Fund. This episode is also sponsored by Radius International.

Biblical authority is under attack. A missionary’s job is partly to make the transcendents truths of God’s word understandable within human language, context, and culture. But is it possible to know God’s objective truth, or are we always “stuck” within our culture—making modern missions inescapably colonialist? In this episode, Scott Dunford and Alex Kocman dialogue over these important topics.

In the episode, we referenced the following resources:

• The Calvinistic Concept of Culture by Henry Van Til
• Transforming Worldviews: An Anthropological Understanding of How People Change by Paul Hiebert

Remember to share, rate, leave a review, and subscribe. Together we can bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and missions.

Want to ask a question for a future episode? Email [email protected].

This show is powered by ABWE International and the Global Gospel Fund.

While Europe has been the cradle of Christian civilization for centuries, certain countries—like Italy—never truly enjoyed the fruits of the Reformation. Now, Italy is steeped in secularism, paganism, and the occult, in addition to nominal Roman Catholicism. How should missionaries reach into this context, and how can we all engage our Roman Catholic friends and neighbors? Jonathan Kleis, an ABWE missionary in Italy engaged in evangelism and even public debate, weighs in.

Jonathan and Noella Kleis have served in Italy since 2005 in evangelism and church planting. They currently reside in Caselle in Turin, Italy. Support the Kleis’ ministry or email Jonathan to learn more.

During the episode, Jonathan mentioned these resources:

• Roman Catholic Theology and Practice: An Evangelical Assessment
• Vatican Files
• The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples

Remember to share, rate, leave a review, and subscribe. Together we can bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and missions.

Want to ask a question for a future episode? Email [email protected].

This show is powered by ABWE International and the Global Gospel Fund.

Disciple-making movements (DMM) and church planting movements (CPM) are more than just buzzwords—they represent controversial methodologies that are dividing missionaries along organization and theological lines. Do these methodologies represent faulty views of conversion or ecclesiology, or are the critics guilty of prayerlessness and quenching the Holy Spirit? We’ve explored these topics in the past on the podcast, but this week, by popular demand, we’ve brought in a strong DMM proponent to help make a positive case: Dr. Glenn Sunshine.

Glenn Sunshine is Professor of History at Central Connecticut State University and a Senior Faculty Member of the Colson Fellows. An award-winning author, Glenn has published books, articles and book chapters on history, theology, and culture, online and on both sides of the Atlantic. His most recent book, The Kingdom Unleashed: How Jesus' 1st-Century Kingdom Values Are Transforming Thousands of Cultures and Awakening His Church, was co-authored with Jerry Trousdale. Glenn has taught a variety of Bible, history, and worldview seminars and courses to churches around the U.S., Europe and Asia, as well as leading church retreats, seminars, and renewal weekends. He is the founder of Every Square Inch Ministries and he & his wife Lynn have been married for over 30 years and have two children. They live in Newington, Connecticut.

During the episode, we referenced our previous interview with Brooks Buser—listen to that episode here.

Wherever you stand on this critical missiological topic, we believe this dialogue will edify you—and challenge you.

Remember to share, rate, leave a review, and subscribe. Together we can bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and missions.

Want to ask a question for a future episode? Email [email protected].

This show is powered by ABWE International and the Global Gospel Fund.

In much of the contemporary missions conversation, the good, ordinary gifts of God—like marriage and family—are often spoken of mainly as things to be sacrificed, not as things to be cultivated as a part of the church’s mission. This week, Chris “C.R.” Wiley explains why a return to the biblical understanding of the household can be a powerful weapon on the church’s cosmic spiritual warfare, as well as an evangelistic tool in frontier missions.

C.R. Wiley has written for Touchstone Magazine, Modern Reformation, Sacred Architecture, The Imaginative Conservative, Front Porch Republic, National Review Online, and First Things, among others. His most recent book is, The Household and the War for the Cosmos published by Canon Press (2019). His short fiction has appeared in The Mythic Circle (published by the Mythopoeic Society) and elsewhere, and the first book in his young adult fantasy series, The Purloined Boy, was published by Canonball Books (2017). He is a member of the Academy of Philosophy and Letters. He can be heard weekly on The Theology Pugcast.

Remember to share, rate, leave a review, and subscribe. Together we can bridge the gap between the worlds of theology and missions.

Want to ask a question for a future episode? Email [email protected].

This show is powered by ABWE International and the Global Gospel Fund.