John M. Perkins, an evangelical civil rights leader on issues of racial reconciliation and community development, will deliver the Julius Brown Gay Lecture on Christian Ethics at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Oct. 27.

“For reconciliation to take place, we must create an environment that is worshipful and where God’s Word can clearly be heard,” said Perkins, 84, in a recent interview with Southern Seminary. “The gospel is only the gospel when the totality of the redemption is heard, when we proclaim the depths of God’s love and the longing of his people for change.”

Perkins will lecture on “Why We Can’t Wait: The Urgency of the Now” at 10 a.m. on Monday, Oct. 27. The lecture will be held in Legacy 303 at the seminary’s Legacy Hotel & Conference Center. The first 50 students in attendance will receive a free copy of Perkins’ book, Let Justice Roll Down.

When Travis Freeman lost his eyesight in high school, he never expected his story to be told on the big screen. He just wanted to play football. But 23 Blast, a film based on his journey in early high school when he lost his sight after contracting an illness, releases Friday, Oct. 24, in 600 theaters across the country.

“The movie isn’t the Travis Freeman story,” said the two-time graduate from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in a recent interview. “It does a really good job capturing the spirit of my story. I want people to be encouraged whether by watching the movie, 23 Blast, or reading the book, or following me on Twitter or hearing me speak.”

The movie chronicles Freeman’s story as he went from a healthy teenager and football player to a hospital patient with bacterial meningitis that left him blind in 1993.

His sermons are still circulated around the world through books, pamphlets, and the Internet. He is quoted by thousands of pastors across the land each Sunday. His books are read and re-read. Church historians often say Charles Haddon Spurgeon was the prince of preachers, but it may accurate to say he still is.

“The ministry of a man like Spurgeon is timeless,” said Thomas J. Nettles, who studied Spurgeon for nearly 20 years in writing Living By Revealed Truth: The Life and Pastoral Theology of Charles Haddon Spurgeon. “His attentions and affections were focused on things that were not merely ephemeral, but were eternal. The longevity of interest in him is something that certainly commends him to all of us.”

More than 125 alumni of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary attended a two-day Alumni Academy, Oct. 9-10, devoted to the life and ministry of the great British pastor.

As a New Testament professor, Robert L. Plummer is concerned that his former students are apostatizing. But he says graduates from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary are not turning from their faith, but turning from their Greek.

Plummer, professor of New Testament interpretation and the chair of the New Testament department at Southern Seminary, has taught introductory Greek courses for 15 years. After watching students invest so much time into learning Greek only to see their skills wilt from disuse, Plummer resolved to fight back against linguistic atrophy.

Realizing he may have a couple decades left of seminary teaching, he wanted to think of ways to buck this trend, and came up with a web project called “Daily Dose of Greek.”

Christians in this generation need to complete the Great Commission, Ronnie Floyd said in a chapel service at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Oct. 16.

“Let us go to places where the gospel has never been,” he said. “We must complete the Great Commission in our generation, and we need to make a commitment together that their spiritual death will not happen on our watch.”

Floyd, president of the Southern Baptist Convention, urged students to fulfill the Great Commission and take the gospel to unreached people, both overseas and even across the street.

“Opposition from the world is an opportunity to witness,” said R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, during a special Heritage Week chapel service, Oct. 15.

"The opportunity of greatest Christian witness is not when we think the world loves us, but when the world quite openly hates us."

Preaching from John 15:18-27, Mohler said, “This passage is, of course, not completely unfamiliar to us as evangelical Christians in the United States. But for most of evangelical history in America, we have not heard them as particularly addressed to us.”

Trustees of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Ministry during the fall trustee meeting, Oct. 13-14.

During an Oct. 14 special chapel service marking the occasion, Thom Rainer, the founding dean of the Billy Graham School, preached a sermon on evangelism and President R. Albert Mohler Jr. read a congratulatory letter from the Graham family.

Mohler read the letter from Will Graham, grandson of Billy Graham and vice president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, who sent greetings from the Graham family on the occasion of the BGS anniversary. The nearly 96-year-old world-renowned evangelist is “homebound, frail and weak, but confident in heart about the promises of eternity and the truth of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ,” his grandson wrote.

EDITOR'S NOTE: For a two-minute video tour of Northland's 660-acre campus gifted to Southern Seminary, click here.

Trustees of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary unanimously accepted the gift of a Christian university campus in Wisconsin as a new extension campus of the seminary and Boyce College during its fall meeting, Oct. 13-14.

Trustees also celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism and Ministry, elected three faculty, approved four sabbaticals, and adopted responses to referrals from the Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting.

Northland International University, an evangelical Christian school located in Dunbar, Wisconsin, will become the first campus outside of Louisville for Boyce College, Southern’s undergraduate school. The action is effective Aug. 1, 2015.

PADUCAH, Ky. (BP) -- The funeral of a youth pastor, his wife, and two teenage sons was "the hardest thing I have ever done as the pastor of this church," Justin Mason of Rosebower Baptist Church in Paducah, Kentucky, said Oct. 8

Without the Holy Spirit’s help, aspiring church planters are “doomed to fail,” according to mission strategists in a panel discussion on church planting and revitalization at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Oct. 2.

“I think the most important thing you can do is figure out who you and and who you are not,” Aaron Coe said, vice president of mobilization and marketing for the North American Mission Board. He emphasized the importance for those interested in church planting to realize their leadership capacity in certain contexts. “People who enter ministry with an uninformed idea of its realities result in disappointment,” he said.

Coe began the panel discussion, saying he thinks much of the struggle in church planting — a spiritual activity, he said — stems from men who “plant the church in their mind long before they plant the church in the field.”