Him We Proclaim

The online home for the writings of Keelan Cook. A website for those who love the church and its mission.

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Spiritual Readiness in Wartime

Paul was clearly very familiar with armor. Even a quick read of his letters reveals a familiarity with warfare, based on his use of imagery to explain aspects of the Christian life. But his understanding of the military is perhaps most clear in hi...

Go Deep: Moving Beyond the Surface in Evangelism

I recently spoke to several hundred students at a conference on the importance of evangelism. During my time with those students, I asked them all a simple question: Has there ever been a time when you felt like you should tell someone about Jesus...

The Invisible Battle: Living as Citizens in a Kingdom at War

Our world is not as it seems. We go through our days, worrying about the present circumstances, one eye on our social feed and the day’s news cycle. Inevitably, there is another political controversy. Someone of notoriety that you’ve vaguely heard...

The End of Church in America?

“Is this the end of the church in America?” You have heard the question. Perhaps you have wondered yourself. I am sure you have read the articles like I have. It seems every few months something in the news cycle (or on the news cycle’s demented ...

Next Gen Goes to Church

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...

Covenant Membership is a Contextual Process

Monday, I ran a guest post by Trevor King on the importance of covenant membership, and I highly recommend you read it here. In it, Trevor makes a compelling claim about the biblical nature of a covenant membership process for local churches, and ...

7 Reasons for Covenant Church Membership

In Ephesians, Paul writes, “So then you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with the saints, and members of God’s household, built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus Himself as the cornersto...

Languages Are More Important Than You Think

Languages are fascinating. For all of you who endured through Spanish or French in high school, you may disagree with me, but there is a reason that we take foreign languages in school. Language is a fundamental part of being human. It is one of ...

Communicating across cultures is hard, but it is not impossible.

If you have ever preached on a short-term mission trip, then you know the feeling. You are up front, a bunch of unfamiliar faces staring back at you. Next to you stands your interpreter, awaiting your words so he or she can translate them into th...

How to Know if Your Church is Missional

The term missional is overused. It happens a lot with new words that are initially helpful. We see the word as clearly describing some admirable trait and we adopt the word, but the meaning starts to expand. People continue placing it as a label ...

How to Ask Someone About Their Religion (And Actually Discover What They Really Believe)

I get this question a lot, so I thought it fitting to address it in a post. With the remarkable diversity we find around ourselves today, we can no longer assume we understand someone’s religious background. This is obvious when we talk about dis...

Hello, I’m Keelan.

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.

More about me