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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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...

Curious, Crystals, or Combative: Navigating the Nones

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...

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...

Nearsighted churches vs. farsighted churches

Eyeballs are fascinating. They take in all of this information around us and translate it into a vision that is meaningful. They give us the information we need to see the road ahead and watch out for hazards. They interpret our surroundings and s...

New findings about declining (and growing) churches

If you follow Thom Rainer’s blog, you have most likely seen this. If not, get ready to dig in to some important information on local churches in North America. For the last couple of weeks, Rainer’s blog has been dropping the findings from a recen...

Having a Bold Witness, Even When It Is Unpopular

For the Christian, the question is not if we will suffer but when. Of course, that statement is contingent upon the kind of lifestyle we choose to live. Perhaps a better way to say that is the Christian who lives as the Bible tells a Christian to...

In the News: Immigrants Are Reshaping American Missions

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Missions is changing. We need to keep up too. Too many of our traditional, American evangelical churches have a static understanding of the Great Commission, especially when it comes to missions. We nee...

Interactive Tool: Choose your escape route

Last year about this time, the BBC created an excellent interactive educational tool to help people experience some of the struggles involved in refugee migration to Europe. If you’ve not played with, I would suggest doing so. You can find it here...

Ministering with Our Eyes Open: Three Questions We Must Ask Ourselves

Acts 17:16-34 gets a lot of love. In my brief existence, I have heard it used as justification for all kinds of things. Growing up in my extra-conservative church as a young boy, I heard preachers use Paul’s indignation at the culture in Athens as...

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