The online home for the writings of Keelan Cook. A website for those who love the church and its mission.
It’s been called a “quiet revival,” or the “revival generation.”1 Perhaps we now have numerical evidence to back up that experience. It appears Next Gen is showing up for church. More than that, they’re now showing up more than their older counte...
Few terms have captivated the missional imagination of the church in North America like the Nones. The term None became our shorthand for the nonreligious, or those who would not select any particular relgion on surveys about faith. This was a cha...
I wonder if you think like I do. When I read through the gospels, I often wonder what it would have been like to walk alongside Jesus in the flesh. Even more, what would it have been like to walk alongside Jesus in his resurrected body? What was i...
During my time serving overseas as a missionary, I lived in rural West Africa. Rustic doesn’t quite describe the living conditions. No electricity. No running water. That meant water had to come out of the ground, and it had to do so by hand. I h...
We live in an anxious age. If you don’t believe me, check out this book, or this article, or this article that even discusses a rise in anxiety before the pandemic, or this research. And if you don’t trust any of those sources, here’s Fox News say...
“How can we say, ‘let the nations be glad,’ if we’re not?” A few weeks ago, one of our other pastors at church made that statement during a sermon. Tony was preaching on Psalm 138. He made a really good point. The Great Commission is not a burde...
Eschatology weirds a lot of Christians out, nowadays. For the uninitiated, eschatology is the study of last things. In other words, it is the theology about how the world will end, or what happens when Christ comes back. It is a subject that hist...
Americans love our categories. We love our boxes and labels. Even today, with the postmodern push away from classification, we Western thinkers still organize information by placing “like items” together in taxonomies. Categories can be helpful to...
I recently participated in my church’s women’s retreat. The theme for the retreat was “Story,” focusing on The Story (the gospel), and how we view our own stories in light of the gospel. Scripture lays out one big story of creation, fall, redempti...
Yesterday, the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina released an explainer video that is just too good not to share. This is the kind of video you need to show in your church. The video discusses the current state of missions in North Americ...
Last week, a friend made mention of this article in her social media, and I felt it was worth sharing. While the news cycle was inundated with shock at the outcome of the presidential election, this little article slipped through at NPR, and it is...
I serve as the George Liele Director of the Center for Great Commission Studies and as a professor of Christian Missions at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary.
I also serve as Assistant Professor of Christian Missions at the seminary. Previously, I served as the Associate Director for the Union Baptist Association in Houston, TX.
My areas of focus cover both North American and International missions. I teach and write on church renewal and replanting as well as developing healthy sending culture in churches. I have a passion for mobilizing the church to the nations, and a love for missions history.
I lead the Peoples Next Door project, which is an initiative to equip local churches in North America to engage in cross-cultural missions among the least-reached peoples that now live in our communities. I’ve been a church planter in West Africa with the IMB and facilitated ethnographic research in Washington, DC with NAMB.
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