The Jenkins Center for the Christian Understanding of Islam at Southern Seminary hosted its annual Academic Lecture Series August 27–28 with keynote speaker Gabriel Said Reynolds (PhD, Yale University). Two sessions were held at Southern Seminary and featured a total audience of over 200 students, pastors, and community members.

Ayman Ibrahim, professor of Islamic studies at SBTS and Director of the Jenkins Center, knows the lectures will serve to advance the gospel in the Muslim world.

“We were astonished at the turnout,” he said. “The Academic Lectures serve our vision to establish a scholarly Christian understanding of the many strands of Islam. Our mission is to equip students, pastors, and missionaries with an awareness of the Muslim world, in all of its diversity, to boldly and respectfully proclaim the gospel to our Muslim neighbors to the ends of the earth.”

The event highlighted current controversies in Quranic scholarship.

To engage advanced issues, the center invites Christian experts on Islam to participate in the annual lecture series. Reynold’s specializes in Quranic studies and Muslim-Christian relations.

He addressed whether there is a “Meccan” and a “Medinan” Quran, and then discussed the similarities and dissimilarities between Allah and the God of the Christian Bible.

The 18^th annual Heritage Classic Golf Tournament—held Monday, August 23 at Big Spring Country Club—raised $253,000 for SBTS and Boyce students.

The tournament included 116 golfers, most of whom were SBTS donors, and the money was directly applied to the Southern Fund to underwrite tuition costs for students studying at Southern Seminary and Boyce College. SBTS President R. Albert Mohler Jr. said the day of golf will have a lasting effect in helping the gospel advance through theological education.

“It means a lot that we can have golf played to the glory of God,” Mohler said. “It will make a difference on the mission field and in the pulpits of our churches and places we will never go, places we’ll never see. That is absolutely glorious. What a great way to spend a day.”

The event culminated during the closing ceremony when Timothy Babatunde (SBTS) and Joel Warren, a Boyce College student who is also working toward an MDiv at SBTS through the school’s seminary track, each received the $5,000 Rick Bordas Memorial Scholarship.

Marking a new milestone, the Southern Seminary community dedicated both The Bookstore at Southern and Scholars’ Coffee on Tuesday morning.

“This is the fulfillment of a lot of hopes and dreams,” SBTS President Albert Mohler said. “We are a people of books, and that goes all the way back to Ecclesiastes where [the author] is talking about so many books. That’s because where you find Christians, you find disciples, you find scholars, you find readers, and readers need books. This is a great day for Southern Seminary for which we are very thankful.”

Construction originally began on the new bookstore in February of 2020 but was interrupted for a year by the pandemic. Work resumed this past February. During construction, the campus bookstore was housed in a small room above Founders Cafe. Scholars’ Coffee is attached to the bookstore and offers a wide variety of desserts, coffee, and other drinks.

The new bookstore is spacious with 2,600 linear feet for bookshelf space and includes a wide selection of used books in addition to dozens of new titles and hundreds of works on theology, church history, preaching, ministry, and numerous other categories pertinent to theological education and the historic Christian faith. The Bookstore also offers a wide variety of SBTS and Boyce College apparel.

“While anyone is welcome to come shop in our store, we want The Bookstore at Southern to excel at serving the Southern Seminary community,” said bookstore manager Jacob Percy.

“This means we will continue to prioritize rich, theological books that aid in the sharpening of the Christian mind and the development of future church leaders. The Bookstore at Southern now has an extensive, and ever-growing section of used books that make some of the great works of theology, biblical studies, and church history of the past available to our customers. We hope this will encourage people from all over to come and visit the store for a one-of-a-kind experience.”

The battle of ideas is not a matter of intellectual strength but is most fundamentally a spiritual war in which our very souls are at stake, SBTS President R. Albert Mohler Jr. told students and faculty gathered Tuesday morning for fall convocation at Alumni Memorial Chapel.

Southern’s convocation marked the return of in-person chapel for the first time since March of 2020 when twice-weekly services were interrupted by the pandemic. As in the past, SBTS will hold chapel worship services on Tuesday and Thursday each week throughout the fall semester.

“By the grace of God, we are here, and we give him thanks for this incredible privilege,” Mohler said. Mohler preached to a packed chapel from Philippians 4:8-9, “Think on These Things: How to Keep Your Soul While Expanding Your Mind.”

“We’re in a battle of ideas and that becomes ever more apparent to us,” he said. “(Southern Seminary) was born into a battle of ideas in 1859. Throughout its history, it’s been part of that battle of ideas—sometimes even central to that battle of ideas.

The Alumni Academy Greek and Hebrew for Life Conference July 30-31 at Southern Seminary gave over 200 participants the chance to retain or revive their biblical language skills.

The event was co-sponsored by Daily Dose of Greek and Hebrew and featured an audience of alumni, current students, and many attendees outside of SBTS who were drawn to campus by the Daily Dose ministry.

Rob Plummer, Collin and Evelyn Aikman Professor of Biblical Studies at SBTS and host of Daily Dose of Greek, is excited to see Christians desiring to know God’s Word better. Alumni Academy was last held on campus in January of 2019.

Roberto Carrera has been named director for Online Hispanic Program (OHP) at Southern Seminary. Southern serves an increasingly global and diverse network of churches—making OHP a critical avenue for delivering theological education to Hispanic leaders.

SBTS President Albert Mohler said the Hispanic program is important to the seminary’s mission, particularly since the destructive weeds of prosperity theology have grown widely across the spiritual landscape of the Spanish-speaking world.

Two longtime pastors were named alumni of the year Wednesday afternoon at Southern Seminary’s alumni luncheon held at the annual meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention in Nashville.

Seminary President Albert Mohler announced David Dykes and Josh Manley as co-alumni of the year.

David Dykes

Dykes holds both a master of divinity and a doctor of ministry from the seminary. He has served as senior pastor of Green Acres Baptist Church in Tyler, Texas, since 1991 and will retire on August 31.

Dykes also did post-doctoral studies at Cambridge University, focusing on biblical art from the Renaissance period. In 2017 he received an honorary doctorate from East Texas Baptist University.

NASHVILLE (BP) – A theology of conversion, such as Christianity, necessitates religious liberty because regeneration of the heart cannot be achieved by coercion, Albert Mohler said Tuesday (June 15) during “Baptists Thinking Biblically: A Conversation on Religious Liberty.”

The late-night event, hosted by Southern Baptist Theological Seminary at the Music City Center in Nashville, featured Mohler, Southern’s president, and Andrew Walker, associate professor of Christian ethics and apologetics and associate dean of the school of theology at Southern.

“In the history of Western civilization,” Mohler said, “religious liberty as we know it really came out of a culture committed to the understanding of human beings as imago Dei – made in the image of God – of a conversionist faith that, though obscured during the Middle Ages, still made a distinction between those who professed the faith and those who did not.”

Originally, religious liberty did not mean a freedom to reject belief in God “because that wasn’t even an intellectual option,” Mohler said. It meant a freedom “not to be coerced – especially after the Reformation – into a particular confession, be it Catholic or Protestant.”

Religious liberty sounds so strange to many now “because the default position is no longer theistic belief but the secular condition,” Mohler said.

The first annual Southern Seminary Apologetics Institute, a conference examining how Reformed apologetics looks in a secular age, took place May 10-11 at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Featured speakers included Albert Mohler, Timothy Paul Jones, and J. V. Fesko.

Jones, director of Southern’s Center for Christian Apologetics, was happy to see the conference happen after it was postponed from May 2020 due to the pandemic.

“This inaugural Apologetics Institute didn’t take place exactly when or how we expected,” he said. “It was originally scheduled in May 2020, but had to be postponed until 2021 due to the coronavirus. Even with the limitations, it was a delight to have a room full of students eager to engage deeply with theologically-grounded apologetics.”

The Institute focused on the question “What does apologetics look like for those whose theology has been shaped by the Reformation?”

Jonathan B. Austin has been appointed as the new senior vice president for institutional administration at Southern Seminary, President Albert Mohler announced Thursday afternoon.

Austin, who has served as Mohler’s executive assistant and chief of staff since 2017, will begin in the role on August 1. In this role, he is following Craig Parker, who recently announced his retirement after serving SBTS in that role and others for many years.

“Jon is a remarkable leader and one of the most capable managers with whom I’ve had the experience to work,” Mohler said.

“He has a remarkable background, including having served as a partner in a law firm. He reveals a deep love of Christ and great Christian character. He is also a graduate of Southern Seminary. I know the entire Southern Seminary family will take great satisfaction in Jon’s appointment.”

An Oklahoma native, Austin holds an undergraduate degree in business from Oklahoma State University and a law degree from the University of Oklahoma College of Law. He practiced law for nearly 15 years at a specialty firm in Oklahoma City and was a partner in the firm. His primary areas of practice were in business transactional work, commercial real estate, and non-profit law. Austin graduated from SBTS on May 7 with a master of arts in theological studies.

Austin is a gifted and experienced teacher who also serves as an assistant professor of law at Boyce College. Prior to his move to Louisville in 2016 to attend SBTS, Austin served as an adjunct professor at the University of Central Oklahoma and taught for the Oklahoma Bar Association. Jon and his wife, Erin, have four children. They are members of Ninth & O Baptist Church.