Volume 69, Number 3
Campus Newspaper of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary • Fort Worth, Texas
Thursday, September 26, 2013
A LOOK INSIDE »
THE SCROLL
Chocolate Connection Photos pg 4 »
Seminary team trains Florida church in evangelism By Keith Collier | SWBTS In the span of three hours, more than 100 middle school, high school, and college students from Bell Shoals Baptist Church in Brandon, Fla., brought the gospel to nearly 2,300 homes in a nearby Tampa neighborhood, Sept. 14. The door-to-door blitz was the culmination of an evangelism training weekend led by faculty and students from Southwestern Seminary. In sum, teams visited 2,292 homes, which yielded approximately 230 conversations and 120 complete presentations of the gospel. As a result, six people prayed to receive Christ on their doorstep. “We wanted to do everything we could to go into our community and reach people with the gospel of Jesus Christ, and we really wanted to do something in partnership with Southwestern Seminary,” said Stephen Rummage, pastor of Bell Shoals Baptist Church. The team from Southwestern consisted of two evangelism professors—Matt Queen and Dean Sieberhagen—along with 18 students from the seminary. They trained Bell Shoals students on Saturday morning and led teams out in door-to-door evangelism in the afternoon as a lead up to National Back to Church Sunday on Sept. 15. “We chose Southwestern because we know that Southwestern has a hot heart to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with people,” Rummage said. “We know what they’re doing in their community around Southwestern Seminary to reach people with the gospel, so we wanted a little bit of that spirit here in our community as we seek to reach the people around us with the gospel. “I’ve known Matt Queen for a long time. He was one of my students when I was a seminary professor. I know about his commitment to evangelism and to personal
By Sharayah Colter | SWBTS
soul-winning, so I really wanted our students here to have an opportunity up close to find out what it’s like to be around people like Matt and like the students who are studying with him at Southwestern, who are sharing the gospel diligently, boldly
and through the power of the Holy Spirit.” Rummage was initially amazed at the size of team that was coming from Southwestern and the students’ willingness to pay their own way to fly to Florida and train members at Bell Shoals. Evangelism pg 2 »
International Church Planting Week focuses on Central Asia
Dean Sieberhagen grew up in a nominally Christian home and accepted Christ at age 11. When it came time to go to college, he followed the lead of his father and studied business and commerce at Rhodes University, later going on to join the accounting faculty as a professor. Not long after he married his wife Sandra, however, the couple became impressed that the Lord had other plans—plans that involved work of a quite different and difficult sort. “God began to burden our hearts for those who have never heard about Jesus,” Sieberhagen says. “We reached a point where we just couldn’t accept anymore that there were people who had not yet heard. So, God’s call on our life became to those who have never heard.” For the past 13 years, the Sieberhagens served with their four sons as missionaries in an undisclosed location in Asia, working to share the Gospel with an unreached people group who had never heard of Jesus Christ or His free gift of salvation. “[The Lord] opened the door to do the 2+2 church planting program at Southeastern Seminary and as part of that program to go with the IMB (International Mission Board) to an unreached people group in Central Asia,” Sieberhagen says. Sieberhagen pg 2 »
NEW D.MIN. DEGREE TRAINS MINISTERS TO ENGAGE CULTURE By Benjamin Hawkins | SWBTS
By Keith Collier | SWBTS Tents lined the seminary lawn Sept. 6 as the International Church Planting Week kicked off with a campout for world missions. During the evening, students and faculty heard from three College at Southwestern students who spent the spring semester overseas with the International Mission Board (IMB) and earned course credit as part of the seminary’s Hands-On project. The campout also included a focused time of prayer and praise. International Church Planting Week is an annual emphasis week coordinated by Southwestern’s World Missions Center designed to encourage students to consider the call to international missions and to provide information on how they can be
GET TO KNOW YOUR PROFESSORS: DEAN SIEBERHAGEN
involved. This year’s focus was on people groups in Central Asia. Missions professor Dean Sieberhagen picked up the week’s focus on Central Asia during a chapel sermon, Sept. 10. Sieberhagen and his family served for more than a decade as missionaries to the region with IMB. “I feel especially blessed,” Sieberhagen said during his sermon introduction. “I think you can argue with me as much as you’d like, but I’ve [been able] to do the two greatest jobs in the world—I’ve served as a missionary in central Asia, and now I get to teach missions and see young people go out and serve all over the world. I don’t know that there’s any better profession than that.”
Sieberhagen preached from Luke 19 on Jesus’ encounter with Zacchaeus. “Zacchaeus was trying to see who Jesus was,” Sieberhagen said. “And that is the question for every person alive today because we can easily talk with Muslims, or Buddhists, or Hindus about God—there’s all these generic words for ‘God.’ But it comes down to ‘Who is Jesus?’ And you have not done mission work until you have confronted people with ‘Who is Jesus?’” Sieberhagen explained that he has met many “Zacchaeuses” during his missionary work who have sought the Lord and been radically changed by God. “If any of you have ever met a Muslim who has come Central Asia pg 3 »
A new Doctor of Ministry degree at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary will train ministers to engage the culture and reflect the light of Christ in a dark society. “This is a time of real darkness in our country, and you have a lot of people who are arguing against God, who are arguing against morality,” Craig Mitchell, associate professor of cultural studies and director of the Richard Land Center for Cultural Engagement, says. “With this program, what we have in mind is to develop leaders who can speak not only to theological issues but also to political and economic issues.” “The Christian worldview relates to far more than arguments for D.Min. pg 4 »