NGU Hosts Evangelical Missiological Society Meeting
Posted on: April 22, 2025
Dr. Travis Kerns
Tigerville, SC—North Greenville University hosted the southeast regional meeting of the Evangelical Missiological Society on April 5.
The conference was attended by more than 60 participants from universities and seminaries across the southeast region.
“I think this was a huge success for NGU,” said Dr. Matthew Hirt, assistant professor of intercultural studies at NGU, who helped organize the event. “Everyone was incredibly impressed with the university’s hospitality, facilities, and location.”
Dr. Travis Kerns, associational mission strategist for the Three Rivers Baptist Association, delivered the plenary address, speaking on the topic of “Unqualified Apologetics as the Framework for Connecting Ecclesiology to Mission.”
“Over the last few hundred years, apologetics has morphed from a layperson’s pursuit into an academic specialization with hundreds of books, conferences, and academic degree tracts available,” Kerns argued. “When an untrained, ‘unqualified’ layperson sees the sheer amount of material available, he/she may feel completely overwhelmed and inadequate to engage in personal evangelism with family, friends, and co-workers due to a lack of knowledge. This necessarily leads to a lack of evangelistic zeal in our churches and slows, or stops, the movement from pew to field among everyday Christians.”
Kerns said the key to reversing this trend is discipleship and emphasizing scripture.
“Scripture alone is adequate to equip (you) for every good work (2 Tim 3:16-17), including giving a reason for their hope in Christ (1 Peter 3:15). As churches train laypersons in this way, and by following Paul’s example in Acts 17:16-33 of answering questions with Scripture, we will see a renewed confidence in gospel proclamation and an increase in movement from pew to field.”
Following the opening talk from Kerns, dozens of missionaries and scholars presented papers spanning a broad range of mission topics in the Robert W. Plaster Free Enterprise Center.
Regional universities represented at the conference included: Columbia International University, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, Freed-Hardeman University, Samford University, Johnson University, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, Liberty University, Charleston Southern University, and Asbury University.
