My name is Keelan Cook. I’m married to Meredith and we have two little kids, Nora and Ezra. I recently took the role of George Liele Director for the Center for Great Commission Studies at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary where I also serve on faculty teaching Christian missions.
Before we moved back to Wake Forest, we lived in Houston, TX where I served with the Union Baptist Association as an associate director. I’ve worked overseas as a missionary in a Muslim region of West Africa, and I’ve done a good bit of research on diaspora and urban missions.
I continue to do a lot of research and writing because of my particular ministry assignment, and I regularly pray it is a benefit to the local church. I hope this space provides an easy way to share that work with others and as a source of edification for you. If you want to know more about my current and previous work, feel free to browse my Curriculum Vitae.
About the Website
This website serves as a tool for pastors, ministers, students, and laypeople alike to be better equipped for that most important task given by Christ to his church. I want all that I do to point to the priority of gospel proclamation among the nations in the mission of the church.
You’ll notice a reference to Colossians 1:28 in the title for this website.
We proclaim him, warning and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. I labor for this, striving with his strength that works powerfully in me. ~ Colossians 1:28-29
I pray that’s the purpose of this website, to warn and teach, to be one more tool in order to present others mature in Christ.
However, this site views that purpose through a wide-angle lens. Future posts may deal with pastoral ministry, theology, church history, current events and cultural exegesis, or even practical advice for students on how to be faithful in their studies. This website will accomplish this in at least three ways:
The Blog
Articles have always been the backbone of this website. The site’s main interface is a blog where I plan to continue writing for the church and hopefully incorporating other voices as well along the way. In addition to this new content, this website hosts hundreds of articles I have written over the course of a decade.
I want all of that content to be as accessible as possible, so the new format allows multiple ways to interact with these articles. First, you can find the normal blog feed of articles on the homepage. There, you will see a couple of featured posts at the top. These may change over time. Below them will be the regular roll of articles organized by date.
In the Resources menu, you can also browse the articles organized by the topics they cover. Simply click on the Topics menu item in the resources tab, and you can navigate that way. Finally, you will also find a Videos page that filters all the video posts onto one page for viewing. These videos are mostly sermons I’ve preached, panels or interviews, and other teaching moments.
The Commonplace Book
In addition to complete articles, I am trying something new on this site by including a live look at many of my research notes with an online commonplace book. On this portion of the site, you can scroll through linked notes of research and smaller, often incomplete notes concerning church and mission. I am hopeful that this experiment serves as another resource in addition to helping me “think in public” along with the input of others.
You can find my commonplace book here: Public Notes. And to read more about what this is, check out the About Page.
Thanks for reading!
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