Staff members at Resource Development International of Cambodia are mourning the recent death of the organization’s founder Mickey Sampson, a former student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

Sampson, 43, died on March 19 of a heart attack, while seeking medical treatment in Bangkok, Thailand. According to the RDIC website, Sampson had been experiencing medical problems and had traveled to Bangkok to seek evaluation by a specialist.

A Louisville native, Sampson had worked in Cambodia with his family since 1998 after founding RDIC, an non-profit agency that labored to improve drinking water and sanitation for the people of Cambodia. One in five children in Cambodia dies before age 5, largely from diseases communicated through contaminated water.

Under Sampson’s leadership, RDIC established a ceramic water filter manufacture and distribution system (manufacturing 25,000 filters in 2006); produced a Cambodian television series for children to promote literacy and healthy living; and worked extensively to alert Cambodians to the risks of drinking arsenic-laden groundwater. RDIC also has developed and implemented agricultural, water, health and educational programs in villages throughout Cambodia.

Funeral services will be held in Cambodia. Sampson is survived by his wife, Wendi, and their four children, Michal 13, Madelyn 11, Isaiah and Zach, both 9, along with his parents, James and Diane Sampson and one brother, James Sampson.

Sampson received a Ph.D. in chemistry from the University of Louisville and taught as an assistant professor of chemistry in the University of Kentucky college system. He had taken some classes at Southern Seminary.

In light of the shooting death of Illinois pastor Fred Winters March 8, some might ask, What’s a church to do?

Winters, pastor of First Baptist Church in Maryville, Ill., was preaching when a man walked down the aisle, pulled out a gun and fatally shot Winters in the chest.

Two security officers at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where Winters had earned a doctor of ministry degree, offered suggestions to help other congregations stay safe.

“People go to church for a couple of real good reasons,” said Bob Perkins, director of safety and security at the Louisville, Ky., campus. “They want to know who God is and come to know God. But they also want to be safe,” which Perkins described as a subconscious matter that church leaders need to address.

While most church crimes do not involve violence or shootings, congregations should have a plan for handling an attack like the one at First Baptist Maryville, Perkins said. People who want to bring guns into a church can do so with relative ease, Perkins admitted, but noted that certain measures can reduce the risk of harm.

A security officer should sit in a strategic location in each service so that he can scan the crowd and spot anything out of the ordinary. The security officer should position himself between a potential shooter and the pulpit, Perkins said.

If someone approaches the platform unexpectedly during a service, the pastor should take cover.

“If someone out of the blue just walks up the aisle in the middle of a sermon or the middle of a service, we don’t know how to act,” Perkins said. “Somebody has to be aware that this is the potential for a problem, and they’ve got to avoid that problem. Anybody is a potential victim, and they have to be ready for these types of situations.”

All security planning must begin in deacons meetings, staff meetings and other committee meetings, Perkins said.

“There needs to be emergency planning,” he said. “How do you exit your pulpit? Where do you go? Who gets between you and the assailant? Those types of things have to be discussed.”

If a church doesn’t know where to begin its security planning, Perkins and James Sharon, Southern Seminary’s supervisor of safety and risk management, offered several suggestions. First, ask a local law enforcement agency to do a security survey and suggest an emergency plan. Most police and sheriff’s departments are happy to provide such services, they said.

A great way for churches to detect potential threats is to appoint a member to head up security. Often a police officer in the congregation is the ideal person for such a job, although other interested members can serve effectively as well, Sharon and Perkins said.

They recommended two helpful books: Ron Aguiar’s “Keeping Your Church Safe” and Jeffrey Hawkins’ “An Introduction to Security and Emergency Planning for Faith-Based Organizations.”

While security planning is important, they reminded congregations that in almost all instances, churchgoing is a safe activity.

“You’re still safe to go to church,” Sharon said. “The chances of you getting killed in a car wreck going home is 100 times greater than the chances of getting shot in church Sunday morning. Always plan, but don’t panic because there’s a report in the paper.”

Additional security steps include:

-- Investigating all suspicious activity, including vandalism to church property and obscene or threatening phone calls, Perkins said.

“You want to try to detect and deter any type of threat before it gets into the physical phase,” he said. “It doesn’t depend on what size church you are, you need to be thinking about security systems. You need to be thinking about closed circuit TV and recording things that are happening.”

Cameras and security systems are affordable even for small churches, Perkins said, noting that a congregation can install a motion-sensitive closed circuit TV system for less money than they might think. Because most criminal acts are carried out by people who have previous contact with a church, cameras can deter criminals from coming back for a violent attack or burglary.

Anyone who threatens a church or spends time on the church property without attending church activities should be reported to security or law enforcement officials, Perkins said.

-- Keeping a record of all incoming phone calls. A digital phone system that automatically records callers’ identity is particularly helpful, Perkins said.

“There’s a term that’s always kicked around in law enforcement: situational awareness,” Sharon added. “You need to be aware. It’s amazing, when you go back in crimes we’ve worked, how many times there’s a hint before a crime. The majority of crimes that happen, somebody had knowledge beforehand.”

It was said of Buck Leonard, one of the greatest professional baseball players of all-time, that trying to sneak a fastball past him was akin to sneaking a sunset past a rooster.

Leonard was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972, but he never had an at-bat in the Major Leagues, that is, the “white” Major Leagues. Leonard starred in the Negro National League, the most prominent of the Jim Crow-era black professional baseball
organizations.

Until Jackie Robinson’s monumental breakdown of baseball’s color barrier in 1947, Major League Baseball was lily-white; but in Buck Leonard’s league, only the ball was white. Like many of the citizens of pre-civil rights America, white and black men who played baseball for a living inhabited separate and decidedly unequal worlds.

Baseball historians widely agree that the skills of the top Negro Leagues players such as Leonard and Satchel Paige equaled those of the stars in the white Major Leagues.

And, like their white counterparts, black players ranged in character from Christians and educated solid citizens to ne’er do goods. As Negro Leagues historian Robert Peterson put it, “They were saints and sinners, college professors and illiterates, serious men and clowns, teetotalers and Saturday night drunks.”

Leonard was one of the saints. A devout follower of Christ, Leonard was to the Negro Leagues what Christy Mathewson had been to its white counterpart a generation earlier: an omni-respected Christian gentleman.

A part of Leonard’s legacy exists at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the person of his great nephew Kevin Smith, who serves as assistant professor of church history.

Smith, who will soon earn his Ph.D. from Southern, was a young child when he last spent time with Leonard, but recalls vividly the content of his character, character which bled through effusively when Smith attended family reunions at Leonard’s home in Rocky Mount, N.C.

“I remember how agile he was even though he was an older man,” Smith said. “It was easy to see how he would have been such a great athlete. He would always play with all of us kids. He was very gentle, very playful with the kids, the kind of man you were drawn to.

“Today, when I think of him, I think of the stability of his character. He left a great legacy as a man who loved the Lord, his family and his community. He is a great role model for African-American men, the kind of role model we desperately need.”

Smith still visits his aunt Lugenia, Leonard’s wife, each year in Rocky Mount. Leonard died in 1997 at the age of 90. The family possesses a considerable amount of memorabilia from Leonard’s playing career and labors to keep alive the memory of both the man and player, Smith said.

On both fronts it is a legacy that is deep as it is wide.

In the Negro Leagues, Leonard was known as “the
black Lou Gehrig,” because he was a left-handed hitting first baseman who could hit the ball into next time zone and because the deep integrity that served as the default setting of his life earned the respect of his peers.

Leonard was a stalwart for the famed Homestead Grays—the New York Yankees of black baseball. With a roster populated by such Negro Leagues legends as Leonard, Josh Gibson (known as “the black Babe Ruth” for his incredible power at the plate) and James Thomas “Cool Papa” Bell, the Grays won nine straight Negro National League championships from 1937 to 1945 and again in 1948.

Though Negro Leagues statistics are somewhat spotty, Leonard finished with an unofficial lifetime batting average of .324. He hit .419 over his career in NNL World Series games.

The same year Robinson joined the Major Leagues, Leonard got an opportunity to play in what black players called “The Show” when Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck offered him a contract. But by this time, Leonard was 40 and saw his skills beginning to erode; he turned down the offer, telling Veeck, “I am too old and I know it.”

“He didn’t want to shame his people by going to the big leagues and playing poorly,” Smith said. “He didn’t want to tarnish such a great opportunity and give a poor representation of black players. Other players and family members greatly respected him for making that difficult decision.”

Leonard was a devout churchman, who served for many years as a leader in his local Baptist congregation in Rocky Mount, Smith said.

Leonard’s deep faith in Christ boiled over in his induction speech into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972. That year, Leonard and Homestead Grays teammate Gibson were rightly added to baseball’s pantheon of elite stars one year after the hall opened its doors to black baseball’s legends.

“My greatest thrill as a baseball player came from what somebody did for me,” he told the audience. “And that was select me for the Baseball Hall of Fame. I will do everything in my power to try and take care of this selection and this induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“Again I want to say this...It is nice to receive praise and honor from men, but the greatest praise and honor come from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

The Boston Red Sox did not sign a big-name free agent this winter to help them fend off the hated New York Yankees in the American League East during the upcoming season, but the clubhouse presence of a man who batted .080 in his last year of organized ball could make a significant impact on the team in 2009.

Bland Mason, a two-time graduate of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and New England church planter, was named chapel leader for the Red Sox in January by Baseball Chapel, a Christian organization that has an informal relationship with Major League Baseball and places chapel leaders with each team.

Mason, who received his master of divinity from Southern Seminary in 1997 and his Ph.D. in 2005, seems to be the most unlikely of candidates to serve the Boston Red Sox; Boston is a Red Sox-mad city with fans that number among the most ardent and baseball-savvy in America, able to sniff out a historically naïve, Johnny-come-lately fan from 100 paces.

Mason has been a Boston citizen exactly four months and
prefers basketball to baseball, having last played the
latter in fifth grade, concluding his brief career with a batting average of .080.

And Mason is still catching up on his baseball knowledge. Several years ago when he was a college student, the Red Sox’s new chaplain encountered a friend wearing an Atlanta Braves cap with the trademark “A” emblazoned across the front. Mason asked his friend if he was a fan of the A’s—as in Oakland. While he is not yet ready to dominate at baseball trivial pursuit, Mason points out that God’s ways often confound the wisdom of the wise.

“I have cheered for the Sox for the last five years and yes, I was touched somewhere deep in my soul when they won the World Series in 2004,” he said. “With all of that said, as of November of this year I could not have named more than six or eight players on the Sox’s roster.

“Add into this mix the fact that I just moved to Boston in November of this year and it makes complete sense why I wouldn’t be a good candidate for the position as a baseball chapel leader to the Red Sox. I mean, who would want a very modest Red Sox fan who just moved to Boston and never played baseball beyond little league to serve as the chapel leader to the Red Sox? It seems that ‘God’ is the only answer to that question because logically it just doesn’t work otherwise.”

A native of Gloucester, Va., Mason did not find the chaplain position; consistent with the theology of his Puritan heroes, it found him. A friend in the Acts 29 church planting network was offered the role, but could not fill it; he recommended Mason and Baseball Chapel contacted him. Mason and his family are laying the groundwork for a church plant in Boston.

As a chaplain, Mason’s duties include serving the spiritual needs of the Boston players, both those who play for the
big league club and those in the minor leagues. Each Lord’s Day, he will lead chapel services for both the Red Sox and the visiting ballclub and will offer Bible studies for players during the weeks when Red Sox are playing at Fenway Park.

Baseball chaplaincy offers a profound opportunity to minister to players who play a rigorous 162-game schedule of daily games, a schedule that consumes most every minute of their time for more than six months, Mason points out.

Half of the games are on the road, meaning players are seldom at home with their families and games are scheduled for each Sunday, meaning Christian players seldom worship in their local congregations.

“Most of the players are not from Boston and only live here eight months out of the year,” he said. “Combine that with the fact that they have the most games of any major sport means that the Christians on the team don’t get to their home church most of the year.

“I can offer Bible studies during a home stint for those players that are ready or interested. Within that group there are usually one or more players that are open to being discipled on a personal level. My prayer is for God to allow me to equip and encourage these guys to grow in the Gospel in every area of their lives.”

Since Mason took the position a little less than two months ago, he is getting acquainted with the Christian players who populate the Red Sox roster.

Mason and wife Teresa joined the Red Sox last week at their spring training camp in Fort Myers, Fla., where he met two players who were off-season acquisitions, both of whom are strong Christians: former Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz and catcher Josh Bard, formerly of the San Diego Padres. Both are active in Baseball Chapel. Mason has also met Justin Masterson, a second year pitcher and follower of Christ.

Not only will Red Sox players receive discipleship from Bland Mason, but Teresa Mason has also accepted a position with Baseball Chapel as a women’s leader and will work with wives and girlfriends of players.

Though it seemed a bit of an odd fit at first, Mason is embracing with vigor the new calling that God has given him to minister to the Red Sox through the ministry of Baseball Chapel.

“I have been reminded that God delights in working things out according to the counsel of His will, despite what we may think. If I can use my sanctified imagination for a minute, I think God smiled when he lined things up and I got the call offering the position to me,” he said.

“I honestly had never remotely considered the idea of being a chapel leader to a major league team...I am reminded of something Jesus said: ‘Oh how small is your faith!’ Knowing that I would have dismissed it, God went one step further to get me in place: have a friend call me. God showed once again that His providence will guide us exactly where we need to be when we need to be there.

“As I begin laying the foundation for a new church here in Boston, it excites me to have the opportunity to serve the Red Sox. The position will afford me instant credibility with Christians and the unchurched across Boston. Teresa will have the great opportunity to minister to the players wives as well.”

The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary began celebration of its sesquicentennial anniversary last week with a conference that the school’s place on the landscape of American church history.

Noted historians such as Timothy George, Grant Wacker, Stephen Nichols, Darryl Hart and Gary Dorrien joined several Southern Seminary faculty members to unpack the theme, “Southern Seminary & the History of American Christianity.”

The conference, sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Southern Baptist Convention, is the first of several events related to the seminary’s sesquicentennial celebration. Greg Wills, professor of church history at Southern, who serves as director of the center organized the conference.

George, who is dean of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Ala., opened the conference with an address on the meaning of theological education. George was professor of church history at Southern Seminary from 1978 to 1988.

George identified seven different approaches to theological education in church history from a “school of the prophets” that saw itself as prophetically communicating the Word of God to the “militia of Christ” which viewed itself as training ministers for spiritual combat.

“The founding of Southern Seminary represents the transference of all seven into North America,” George said.
“Each of these seven has been taken up into the history of Southern Seminary.”

Contributors from Southern’s faculty included President R. Albert Mohler Jr.; Russell D. Moore, dean of the school of theology and senior vice president for academic administration; Wills; Tom Nettles, professor of church history; and Mark Dever, chairman of the board of trustees at SBTS and pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.

Mohler examined the life and legacy of Southern’s fourth president, E.Y. Mullins, who was something of a transitional figure in the seminary’s history. Mullins sought to bring a mediating position to theology between the classical orthodoxy of founding president J.P. Boyce and the new thinking of modernism, Mohler argued. The result was an embrace of experience as the final arbiter of theological truth, a departure from the theology of Southern’s founders, he argued.

“The big question with E.Y. Mullins was: How did he understand liberalism?” Mohler said. “There is no clear answer. He was no liberal, but thought one could incorporate different thought streams into Christian theology...He left many questions unanswered.

“Mullins is an example of the failure of a mediating system between sterile orthodoxy and anti-supernatural liberalism.”

What does the church have to do with the home?

An upcoming conference featuring several speakers from The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and other church leaders called “Connecting Church & Home” will seek to show the crucial relationship between the two and will equip church leaders with practical ministry strategies for ministering biblically to families within the church.

The conference will be held March 20-21 at Brentwood Baptist Church near Nashsville. The event is being geared explicitly for current and future pastors and other church leaders who desire to see the church partner with parents in the discipling of children.

It is also a practical outworking of Southern Seminary’s family equipping model of ministry in the local church, a model developed by the school that equips churches to assist parents in discipling their children biblically.

“We all know there is a problem with local churches failing to help parents disciple the children and we are tired of talking about the problem,” said Randy Stinson, dean of the School of Leadership and Church Ministry at Southern Seminary.

“We want to talk about a solution. This conference is unique in that it is not going to be theoretical. It is a nuts and bolts conference with key practitioners in the field discussing, teaching and training on how they transition their churches from a standard programmatic model to what we are calling a family equipping model.”

Southern speakers will include two of the family equipping model’s pioneers, Stinson and Timothy Paul Jones, professor of Christian leadership, along with David Adams, director of the International Center for Youth Ministry at Boyce College.

The conference is a collaboration of several sponsors including Southern Seminary, FamilyLife Ministries, Brentwood Baptist Church and the Council on Biblical Womanhood, among others.

Other speakers will include: Jay Strother (Emerging Generations Pastor of Brentwood), David Horner (Sr. Pastor of Providence Baptist of Raleigh, N.C.) Steve
Wright (Student Pastor at Providence Baptist Church and author of the highly influential book “ReThink” and the just released “Apparent Privilege”), David Michael (children’s pastor and Children Desiring God leader at Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis, Minn.), Dr. Brian Haynes (Associate Pastor of Spiritual Formation at Kingsland Baptist in Katy, Texas and author of the soon to be released book “Legacy Milestones).”

Pre-registration is available at the conference website, www.connectingchurchandhome. Cost is $50 per person, which includes lunch on Saturday. A pre-conference will be held from 2-4 p.m. and the first session is scheduled for 6-7:30 p.m. See the website for additional details.

Five wins and 14 losses might not appear to be much of a cause for celebration in the college basketball world, but for the Boyce College Bulldogs two other numbers make that record far more encouraging: three out of five.

With a 69-43 victory over Dayspring Bible College Feb. 12, the Bulldogs have won three of their last five contests after beginning the season with two wins in 14 games. Best of all, Boyce got a home win in front of a capacity crowd on Feb. 10, handily beating Fairview Baptist 78-45.

First-year coach Jed Coppenger says the wins are indicative of a team that is maturing both on and off the court.

“The team understands that their approach to basketball matters to King Jesus,” Coppenger said. “Knowledge that Jesus cares about the attitudes, effort, etc. that they put forth on the court provides the kind of context needed for improvement. If we weren’t improving, that wouldn’t just reflect poorly on them as basketball players. They understand that it would be saying something about their love of Christ.

“The team has improved because they have been teachable. You can work hard and not get better. All you have to do is think you know everything. These guys haven’t act this way. They take our instruction and make the adjustments needed. The upperclassmen leadership has been critical as well.”

One obvious factor in Boyce’s recent success has been the play of sophomore Ben Ward, who leads the National Christian Collegiate Athletic Association Division II in scoring with more than 27 points per game.

A 6-foot-3 inch forward, Ward poured in 54 points and pulled down 11 rebounds in an 85-69 win over Appalachian Bible College, Jan. 23. In the victory over Fairhaven, he scored 36 with 14 rebounds. During the week of Feb. 11, Ward received player of the week honors for NCCAA Division II.

Along with senior team captain Jeff Pearson, who hit seven three pointers and scored 27 against Fairhaven, Ward has energized Boyce’s offense. Coppenger said the better Ward’s numbers have been, the more unassuming his attitude has grown.

“I don’t care what level you play on, if you consistently score more than 30 points (many times in the forties) and don’t get so impressed with yourself that you lose your focus, it is pretty unexpected,” Coppenger said.

“Most guys play well until they realize what they’re doing. Then their head gets so big they can’t do anything. So the fact that Ben continues to carry himself in humility even in light of his great accomplishments reveals a Gospel maturity that you hardly ever see.”

Last year, Keith Getty wrote or assisted in writing more than 700 songs, yet only eight of them will ever be recorded for use by local church congregations.

Getty said songs must strike the perfect balance of biblical truth and easy “singability” to make it onto one of the albums which he and wife Kristyn, along with writing partner Stuart Townend, produce for a single purpose: to be sung in local churches.

The Gettys visited The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary last week, playing a live concert Feb. 5. Keith Getty delivered two lectures for Southern’s Institute for Christian Worship.

Getty said he, his wife and Stuart Townend began collaborating to write new hymns in 2000 with two goals in mind: to teach the truths of the Bible through songs and to package them with melodies that could be sung by most any evangelical congregation.

The desire to write solid songs was born out of the realization that most Christians knew little about the faith they ostensibly believed, Getty said. Songs help people to memorize biblical truths in ways that sermons do not, he said.

“The words that we give people on Sunday have got to be the most important words of the week,” he said.

“So the most important thing in our services is that we sing really good material. Pray over and think over deeply the words that you sing and the words that people are committing to memory because preaching does not have the same luxury of committing words to people’s memories. When people are old, the teaching they have had will have built them up their whole lives, but it is the songs that will circle in their heads...When you don’t feel like praying, it’s where your default mechanism will go to, so choose the songs carefully before just writing for writing’s sake.”

Getty told the stories behind several of their most popular hymns, including “In Christ Alone” and “The Power of the Cross.” As is typical of their approach to song writing, Getty said they attempted to tell a story with each of those hymns—the life and death of Christ with “In Christ Alone” and Jesus’ walk from Gethsemane to the cross with “The Power of the Cross.”

“We were advised not to write these songs because there was no way to bridge the postmodern generation and the modern generation with the traditional generation,” Getty said.

“One (generation) wanted to sing theology and truth and one wanted to sing about experience and didn’t want theology. But when you give them a story, when you feed something through a story, it helps them to understand that the Bible itself is just one great story.

“If we are always teaching the Bible, if we are always teaching the faith through this same story, if we are reasoning our struggles in life and other people’s struggles in life through this great story of redemption, it helps people. We are made to understand life through the truth of salvation...We tend to tell stories in songs and it’s something I encourage when it’s done well, whether you are a worship leader or a pastor.”

Getty encouraged pastors and music ministers to write their own songs, but to make certain that they are solidly lashed to the teaching of Scripture. Above all, Getty said they should write for the church.

“While there is a skill and a craft, I think a lot of the craft in song writing is a passion to teach the truths of the Word in the church every week,” he said. “And, knowing when you stand up on Sunday, if the whole congregation can’t sing this melody, you’re [not writing well]

“If any of you are worship song writers, do not waste money making a studio demo with your songs to see if it sounds good, because all you are doing is paying somebody to make it sound good. That’s irrelevant; it’s whether people can sing it in church and whether the words are actually edifying to people. Instead, get them sung in church.”

Jesus told His disciples to proclaim the Gospel everywhere, so ministers must be ready to take the Gospel to every cultural context on earth, R. Albert Mohler Jr. said Feb. 3 during spring convocation at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The chapel was filled with students who returned for the first day of class after a severe winter storm on Jan. 26 left Southern’s campus without electricity for five days.

Preaching from Acts 1:1-8, Southern Seminary’s president used four worldwide cities as metaphors for the diversity of people and contexts to which ministers must faithfully bear witness: Memphis, Miami, Milan and Mumbai.
After all, Mohler pointed out, Jesus told His followers to take the Gospel to Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth, to areas with radically different cultures, areas posing difficulty and danger to the faithful minister.

“The Gospel was not seen as just for those in Jerusalem or the Judeans, but it was also for the Samaritans,” Mohler said. “And Jesus went on to say that it was for the remotest parts of the earth.

“They were to go with the same Gospel: one Lord, one faith, one baptism. But they were to go to different places, different contexts, with different challenges as the book of Acts makes abundantly clear. What we desperately hope for is a global generation ready for a global context.”

Some will be called to minister in a place like Memphis, Tenn., Mohler said. Memphis sits in the heart of the Bible belt where evangelical churches dot the landscape and where some form of Christianity is virtually a cultural assumption. In this kind of context, ministers will be called to go and preach to many who are unconverted, but believe that they are Christians, he said.

“That is really a unique ministerial context, but it may be a lot like Jerusalem, because in Jerusalem people thought they were fine, they assumed that they were the sons and daughters of Abraham,” Mohler said.

“There are people in our own Bible belt who think they are just fine because they live in a really religious culture or they went to church or were raised by Christian parents. They desperately need the Gospel.

“There is a need for graduates of this institution to go to those churches and love those people and to teach faithfully and to preach the Word in such a way that those congregations have their visions raised beyond Memphis to the very ends of the earth.”

God will call others to a place like Miami, which represents postmodern, multi-ethnic America, he said. Over the past 30 years, Mohler pointed out that Miami has morphed from a predominantly white, middle-class tourist attraction to a city in which the population is 65.8 percent Hispanic.

Miami’s transformation represents the multi-ethnic future of America, Mohler said, and presents a significant opportunity for the next generation of ministers to develop Hispanic congregations.

“Southern Baptists were ready for Miami so long as Miami looked like Memphis with a beach,” Mohler said.

“But Miami isn’t Memphis with a beach. It is Buenos Aires in the peninsula...This area has become a laboratory for ministry in postmodern America. Before our very eyes, we have to understand that as Miami now is, so also much of America soon will be. We need a generation ready to be faithful church planters and faithful expository preachers in a context that doesn’t look like home, when home looks so familiar.”

Others will find themselves proclaiming the Gospel in a place like Milan, Italy, Mohler said, a city that represents post-Christian Europe. Milan has deep roots in Christian history as the scene of the famous Edict of Milan—a proclamation of religious toleration signed in 313 by Constantine—and the home of church father Ambrose.

Today, however, like the rest of Europe, Milan has largely rejected the faith it once believed and features a highly secularized culture that rejects the very notion of revealed truth, Mohler pointed out. Some, however, still consider Europe Christian because of its history, Mohler said.

If a generation of ministers is ready to go to Milan, it will also be ready to take the Gospel to places like New York and Canada, both of which are rapidly embracing the secularism of modern-day Europe, he said.

“In reality, there are as many teeming millions of unreached persons on the continent of Europe today as in any other geographically comparative place in the world,” Mohler said.

“We desperately need a generation ready to go to Milan, a generation bold enough to say, ‘We’re going to show you what authentic Christianity looks like, so that the false and artificial Christianity that is the cultural artifact of centuries past is replaced by a vision of a vibrant Gospel Christianity that points, without any hesitation at all, to the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ as the only answer for sinful people.”

Others will be called to a place that resembles Mumbai, India’s largest city, which Mohler set forth to depict “the cutting edge of population growth in the developing world.” The city formerly known as Bombay was renamed in 1996 after a Hindu goddess, a reality which points to the nation’s rampant idolatry.

Sixty-seven percent of Mumbai is Hindu, 18.5 percent is Muslim and only 3.7 percent is Christian. It is a region rife with spiritual turmoil and terrorist activity as illustrated by a series of Islamic terrorist attacks in December that killed at least 173 people.

“I hope we produce in this institution a generation of ministers of the Gospel ready to go somewhere, anywhere, even everywhere,” he said.

“We can’t go everywhere ourselves, but we can go a lot of places. And we can send everywhere. If we are faithful in doing what the Lord Jesus Christ has called us to do, then disciples will be found not only somewhere and anywhere, but eventually, by God’s grace and for His glory, everywhere.”

Mohler announced that Mark McClellan, professor of Christian Theology and Missions at Boyce College, has been named dean of the faculty at Oklahoma Baptist University.McClellan will join the administration of David Wesley Whitlock, took office as OBU’s 15th president on Nov. 1.

Mohler also installed two professors into endowed chairs: Jesse T. Atkinson as the J.M. Frost assistant professor of leadership and church ministry and Hal Pettegrew as the Gaines S. Dobbins professor of leadership and church ministry.

Classes will resume on their normal schedule at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary Tuesday as electricity was restored to campus late Sunday afternoon.

Administrators cancelled Monday classes to give students ample time to return safely to campus, which had been without electricity since Jan. 28 due to a severe winter storm.

Faculty and staff should report to campus for normal office hours on Monday and residents may begin moving back into on-campus housing at noon on Monday.