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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Boldness Beyond Sight: Rooting Mission in God's Word

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...

Drawing Water from the Well

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...

Live as though You Cannot Die

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...

Let's Get Serious about Relationship Evangelism

This article has been a long time coming. If you are a long-time follower of my writing (and I mean long time), you may recall an article I wrote back in 2015 titled, “A Word of Caution Concerning ‘Relationship Evangelism’.” In that article, I wr...

Reflecting on 100 Years of Cooperation

I’m presently making last-minute travel arrangements to head to Dallas at the end of the week. This year marks my 11th year in a row attending the Southern Baptist Convention’s annual meeting. It’s my 13th meeting in total. Yes, I go because of my...

Eric Mason Delivers an Excellent Word on Diversity

[vimeo 157340906 w=800 h=440] Eric Mason - Seeing Through the Lens of the End - Revelation 7:9-14 from Southeastern Seminary on Vimeo. I love our chapel services at Southeastern. Every semester, we have the opportunity to hear from some of the m...

A Word of Advice from the Father of Missions

  A little over 200 years ago, William Carey wrote an essay that changed Christianity. It was called, An Enquiry into the Obligations of Christians to use Means for the Conversion of the Heathens. It had a convoluted title, but it made some rea...

Breaking Down the Refugee Crisis

  Now that we have rounded the corner on a new year, I thought it good to grab some fresh factoids about the refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe. Of course, the situation over there will not be back to “normal” for a long time, as mill...

Why No Single Church Can Reach a City

Cities today are big places. Let me put that into perspective. In the first century (when Paul was walking around), the biggest city in the world was supposedly Rome and it had… wait for it… 450,000 people.* The shining beacon of urban accomplishm...

How One Church Prepares Its Missionaries Before They Go

In previous posts, we’ve talked about the need to be proactive instead of reactive concerning missions sending from your church. This means working in advance to cast vision, assess, and equip people from your own church to be international missio...

It is Easier and Harder Than Ever to Be a Missionary

  Today is an interesting time for global missions. In many ways, it is easier than ever for us to get to the nations. Consider that early missionaries would travel on a dirty ship for two months through storms to get to their field, and then ...

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