During this course, we will hear from a different speaker each week. These speakers have extensive experience and knowledge of missions. Here is our list of Spring 2007 speakers.
(If there is no menu to the left, please click here and then choose "Speakers" from the menu.)
| Jan 15/16 |
"The Living God is a Missionary God" Steve Strauss |
| Steve Strauss was led to Christ by his mom when he was a young boy. The life and ministry of his dad, a pastor, had a strong influence on his Christian growth and desire to serve the Lord. Steve and Marcia met at Bryan College and were married in 1976. While at Dallas Seminary, God used a short-term mission trip to Liberia and mission-minded friends to direct the Strausses to a ministry of church leadership training in Africa. For nineteen years Steve and Marcia served in Ethiopia, where Steve had pastoral duties at the International Evangelical Church and helped start three programs to train African pastors, evangelists, teachers, and other church leaders. Steve completed a Ph.D. in Intercultural Studies from Trinity International University in 1997. Dr. Steve Strauss became SIM USA Director in November 2001. The Strausses have three adult children: Cara, Mark, and David. Besides spending time with his family, Steve's greatest joy in life is using Scripture to motivate people to catch God's heart of love for every people group on earth.
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| Jan 22/23 |
"The Story of God's Glory" Coty Pinckney |
| With a doctorate in the economics of poor countries, Coty worked with developing country governments in Africa and Asia for two decades and served as Dean of the Center for Development Economics and as a professor at Williams College in Massachusetts. During the 1990's God called him out of economics into a full-time preaching and teaching ministry. The Pinckneys served as missionaries in Cameroon during 2001/02, where Coty taught at the Cameroon Baptist Theological Seminary. Twenty-four years after his graduation from Davidson College, Coty returned to the Charlotte area in 2002 to plant a church associated with John Piper's Bethlehem Baptist Church. Coty also partnered with David Voth of Steele Creek Church to bring the Perspectives course back to Charlotte after a long hiatus. He presently serves with Ken Lotze as coordinator of Perspectives Charlotte. Coty and his wife Beth have six children, and live in Harrisburg, NC.
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| Jan 29/30 |
"Mandate for the Nations" Phillip Nelson |
| God has allowed Phillip Nelson to preach the unsearchable riches of His grace for 38 years, 28 of those as a pastor. Through ministry with SIM, he is strategically and comprehensively mobilizing African American churches and others for missions involvement.
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| Feb 5/6 |
"Unleashing the Gospel" David Cashin |
| Dr. Cashin is professor of intercultural studies at Columbia Biblical Seminary and School of Missions. Dr. Cashin obtained his bachelor of arts degree in history from Gordon College and his master of arts and doctor of philosophy in indology from Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden. While in Sweden, Dr. Cashin served as pastor of two churches. He wrote and taught courses and seminars in Islamic history, theology and Muslim-Christian relations. For nine years Dr. Cashin served in Bangladesh as missionary, church planter, educator and development worker with SIM International. He is fluent in Bengali and Swedish and has extensive knowledge of seven other languages. In the United States Dr. Cashin served as press secretary to the U.S. Center for World Mission and as director of research at the Samuel Zwemer Institute of Islamic Studies. Prior to joining the faculty of Columbia Biblical Seminary and School of Missions, Dr. Cashin was principal of Valley Christian School in Northampton, Massachusetts. Dr. Cashin is the author of The Ocean of Love: Ali Raja's Agam and Jnan Sagara, The Ocean of Love: Middle Bengali Sufi Literature and the Fakirs of Bengal, The Secret of the Blessing of Abraham, and Study Guide for the Blessing of Abraham. He also has published numerous articles on Islam and other subjects. Dr. Cashin and his wife, Margareta, reside in Columbia with their three children, Thomas, Peter and Michael.
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| Feb 12/13 |
"Eras of Missions History" Bob Stevens |
| Bob has served as the USCWM's Regional Director since 1988. In this role, he works with local churches and individuals to raise awareness of the world's 1.2 billion people who have yet to hear the Gospel, and to release resources to be used in reaching them. Bob has helped over 10000 students in the Southeast take Perspectives. He is the co-editor of a COMINAD book, African-American Experience in World Mission: A Call Beyond Community. (COMINAD is the Cooperative Mission Network of the African Dispersion; the book can be ordered through Send the Light at 1-866-732-6657). The Southeast Regional office has also completed a Russian translation of some of the Perspectives material along with an English users guide. Bob and his wife Ellen have four children, and make their home in Raleigh, NC.
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| Feb 19/20 |
"Your Kingdom Come" Josef Tson |
| Dr Josef Tson is from Romania; his parents were among the first in the country to become evangelical Christians. After studying at Oxford in the early seventies, Josef returned to communist Romania where he pastored a church that underwent great revival. He was arrested and severely interrogated several times; God used these trials to help Josef understand the biblical response to suffering and oppression. Eventually he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Suffering, Martyrdom and Rewards in Heaven.¯ In 1981 he and his family left Romania for the US, where Josef became president of the Romanian Missionary Society (www.rmsonline.org). In the remaining years of the communist government, the RMS focused on translating theological works into Romanian, smuggling these books into the country, and broadcasting the Gospel via radio. After the fall of communism, the Tsons returned home in 1990. He then was involved in founding the Baptist Bible Institute in Oradea (now Emmanuel Christian University), a publishing house, and a number of radio stations. He continues to speak and teach in Romania and around the world. Joseph is married to Elisabeth; they have one daughter and one grandson.
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| Feb 26/27 |
"The Expansion of the World Christian Movement" Dr. Michael Barnett |
| Mike Barnett is the Elmer V. Thompson Professor of Church Planting at Columbia Biblical Seminary and School of Missions, Columbia, South Carolina. He earned a B.A. in Geography from the University of Houston, and a M. Div. and Ph.D. (Church History) from Southwestern Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. Mike and wife Cindy served 12 years with the International Mission Board working in Northern Africa and the Middle East. Prior to IMB service, Mike was a minister of missions and church planter in North America. He has a business background and continues to work in international business development. Mike's teaching specialties include church planting, leadership and teams, creative access/business as missions, and the history of global Christianity. He has published chapters, articles, and papers on these subjects and is co-author of Called to Reach: Equipping Cross-Cultural Disciplers, a Broadman & Holman book to be released in January, 2007. Mike and Cindy enjoy spending time with seminary and university students. They are avid gardeners, snow skiers, cyclists, sight-seers, and coffee drinkers. God's call on their lives is to equip followers of Jesus Christ for being on mission with God among all peoples on earth!
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| Mar 5/6 |
"Pioneers of the World Christian Movement" David Livingston |
| David Livingston grew up in Denver, Colorado, and came to Christ through the ministry of believing neighbors who took him and his older sister to a Bible-preaching church. David attended Bethel College in St.Paul, Minnesota, where he fell in love with the doctrines of grace and a Reformed view of God and life. His call to vocational Christian service came gradually over his college years and was solidified during his post-graduate studies at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. He has served in three churches since entering the pastoral ministry in 1971. In the first, he met and married his wife Karin; in the second, three of their four now grown daughters were born; and he is in the 20th year of serving in the third, Bethlehem Baptist in Minneapolis, Minnesota. David completed a Doctor of Ministry degree in 1990 at Bethel Seminary on the subject of “Assurance of Salvation in the Obedience of Faith.” He and his entire family spent a year in short-term missions in northern Nigeria in 1992-3, an experience that has helped all of them to be “world Christians” today. David loves the Perspectives course and has been delighted to be called upon to teach the biographical history lesson on missionary pioneers for over a decade.
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| Mar 12/13 |
"The Task Remaining" Carl Ellis |
| Carl Ellis is an author, speaker, and President of Project Joseph, a ministry that equips Christians to engage in current challenges to the church with a particular focus on Islam. During the past 30 years, Carl has been involved in various types of ministry: campus, prison, and urban, pastoring local churches, and administrating graduate school. Carl holds degrees from Hampton University ( B.A.) and Westminster Theological Seminary(M.A.). He is a D.Phil candidate at Oxford Graduate School in Crystal Springs, Tennessee. He is the author of Beyond Liberation (1983); Malcolm:The Man Behind the X (1993); Free at Last?:The Gospel in the African-American Experience (1996) and, with Larry Poston, The Changing Face of Islam in America (1999). His latest book, Going Global: Beyond the Boundaries, explores the amazing role of the African-American church in the Great Commission of Jesus Christ.
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| Mar 19/20 |
"How Shall They Hear?" Joanne Shetler |
| Joanne served as a Bible translator for the Balangao people of the Philippines, completing the New Testament in 1982. Together with Patricia Purvis, she has written the story of the resulting people movement in the book And the Word Came with Power. She served as a plenary session speaker at Urbana 1984. In recent years, Jo's primary work has been helping others find the doorway into the cultures with which they work. Along with colleague Amy West, she is involved in Worldview and Cultural Orientation Workshops and Seminars, Ethnotheology Think Tanks and some Spiritual Conflict Seminars for Wycliffe colleagues and other missionaries. She continues to consult on the translation of the Old Testament into Balangao.
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| Mar 26/27 |
"Building Bridges of Love" Dennis Cochrane |
| Dennis Cochrane and his wife, Nancy, served as linguists and Bible translators among the Duna people in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. This work required them to create an alphabet, conduct grammar analysis, and compile a Duna-English dictionary for this previously unwritten language. They also prepared literacy materials to help teach the Duna people to read and write their own language. Finally it was Dennis' joy to give the Dunas the first portions of God's Word translated into their language. A church was born as several thousand of these people came to know Christ. Today dozens of congregations meet regularly in thatch-roofed chapels to worship the Lord and study His Word in their language. Dennis now serves in missions mobilization for Wycliffe, helping the church in the US understand the challenge and task of world missions and Bible translation. Dennis is a graduate of Columbia International University and Wheaton Graduate School of Theology, with further studies in linguistics at the University of North Dakota.
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| Apr 2/3 |
"Christian Community Development" Tim Hanauer |
| Tim served overseas with Frontiers as a creative entry missionary in a small Moslem country in Asia. He currently serves on the advisory boards of the US Center for World Mission Southeast as well as Del Corazon de Jesu Christo, an agency in the Dominican Republic. He designs projects for Del Corazon as well as for the Mushayamunda Development Trust in Zimbabwe. In the US, Tim serves as missions chairman at Pinedale Christian Church in Winston-Salem, and as President of Green Industry Systems, Inc, a mobile landscape design and digitial imaging franchise that he founded. Tim and his wife Martha have two sons, Christopher and Jason.
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| Apr 16/17 |
"The Spontaneous Multiplication of Churches" Dr Bobby Gupta |
| Paul Rajkumar Gupta (Bobby Gupta) was born to a zealous missionary couple, Dr. and Mrs. N. Paul V. Gupta. In March 1970, Paul surrendered his life to Christ and in accordance to God's call for ministry became a student of the Word. He completed his Diploma in Biblical studies from the Hindustan Bible Institute in 1975; B.Th from Piedmont Bible College, North Carolina in 1977; M.Div in 1980 from Talbot Seminary, and his Th.M and Ph.D in Intercultural Studies from Fuller Seminary in 1992 Paul Gupta was ordained as a pastor by the Bethany Bible Fellowship, Westminster, California. In 1983, he joined the ministries of Hindustan Bible Institute, India and took on the responsibility as the President and Director in 1984. Dr. Paul Gupta founded the Indian National Evangelical Fellowship (INEF) in 1985. The strategy to spearhead the spread of the gospel was implemented by recruiting missionaries to work in different parts of India. INEF currently has 553 missionaries who have planted 2,870 churches in 18 states of India and in Nepal with a membership of over 125,000 believers, over the last 18 years. He developed the HBI International ministries now known as HBI Global Partners that exists to glorify God by mobilizing the North American church to partner with national ministries to fulfil the great commission in India and beyond.
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| Apr 23/24 |
"World Christian Partnership" Tom Telford |
| Mr. Tom Telford was born and raised in the family of a pastor and well known evangelist. Becoming a Christian later in life, Tom was constrained by the biblical mandate to take the Gospel to the whole world. Tom is self-educated in missions and has invested his adult life in helping churches maximize their potential for world evangelization. Mr. Telford is currently the Vice President of Mobilization for United World Mission. Prior to that he served 15 years with ACMC (Advancing Churches in Missions Commitment) as North Northeast Regional Director and Supervisor of Regional Ministries. With ACMC Tom inspired, challenged, and trained hundreds of churches in strengthening their commitment and approach to missions. His task is essentially the same at UWM. Tom is a sought after missions speaker and consultant for churches throughout the eastern United States. He has lectured on world missions and the local church at Seminary of the East, Philadelphia College of the Bible, Westminster Seminary, and Columbia International University. He is a regular Perspectives speaker. Tom coauthored Missions in the 21st Century with Lois Shaw (Shaw Publishing Company). His second book, Today's All-Star Missions Churches, is published by Baker.
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| Apr 30/May 1 |
"Pioneer Church Planting" Rev. Peter Stam |
| Rev. Stam committed his life to God for foreign missions when he was a high school student. His ministry includes two years as General Secretary of the Student Foreign Missions Fellowship (the missions branch of Inter-Varsity), eighteen years with Africa Inland Mission (AIM) in what was then the Belgian Congo, and thirteen years as Canadian Director and ten years as US Director of AIM. After "retirement", he served for five years as Minister-at-Large for AIM and three years as Pastor of Missions at Fourth Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC, and recently as Pastor for Missions at Myrtle Grove Presbyterian Church in Wilmington. He continues to serve as a mobilizer for missions, preaching and teaching regularly. |