I attended the EMS (Southeast) Conference on April 5, 2025 at North Greenville University. I have never attended a missiology conference before— in fact, I don’t go to mission conferences all that often. I hoped this would be a good and new experience for me.

Truthfully, it was a good experience. I am not sure how many attended… perhaps 50? 60? There were also some online, but I have no idea how many. The event started with a plenary gathering with a presentation by Travis Kerns.

Kerns was supporting a view that evangelism is tied to apologetics. I must admit that I have never been sympathetic to this viewpoint. I have generally felt that apologetics is better a giving comfort to adherents rather than changing the view of “opponents.” That being said, I feel that Kerns made a strong case for his perspective, and I can see that some of the difference in opinion comes from where apologetics tends to get lumped. Often apologetics is seen academically as part of Philosophy. Kerns would prefer that it was seen as part of Missions/Evangelism, or at least more generally with Theology.

After that plenary gathering, the rest of the day the group could choose one of four rooms for a paper presentation. Each presentation was 25 minutes long with an additional 10 minutes for questions and answers. This allowed for a lot of presentations. There were several interesting presentations that I attended. I am not even sure I can say which ones were more impactful. Three that come to mind were all in the afternoon.

1. I attended one on considering Cultural Intelligence (CQ) as applied to “Kingdom culture.” The notes handed out were very accessible… and I feel like I will gain from exploring this more.
2. Another was on the issue of “embodiment.” I had no really understanding of this. I was familiar with Virtual Reality churches as well as online faith gatherings and communities. The issue has to do with the link (or the failure of link) between the online person (or persona) and the embodied IRL person. While I must say that I was aware of this disconnect, I never really thought about its impact on Christian community online.
3. Perhaps the one that hit me most was one that surprised me. It addressed the disconnect between “White” church and “Black” church missions. It is noted that black churches in the US typically are not strongly involved in international or cross-cultural missions, in comparison to white churches. However, that fact obscures some important facts. First, most leaders of white churches see “missions” as called by the Great Commission (particularly the Matthew version). Leaders of black churches in US commonly see their missional calling set by Luke 4— that is, Christ’s declaration of His own calling. This one clearly links proclamation with liberation. With this in mind, it is pretty clear why black churches are very active helping out their community and more holistic in their strategies. Additionally, their work is less guided by pragmatics. Rather than saying that one side is all right and one side is all wrong… both can value from learning from each other. (That being said, I feel that black churches may be closer to the heart of God in many ways as opposed to many white churches… but I could be wrong.)

I found it to be a valuable time. That being said, I will bring up a few criticisms, while noting that there were valid reasons for pretty much all of them.

A. 25 minutes is not really long enough to present a full paper. Almost all of the presenters struggled with the time constraints with some kind of buckling under the limitations. This goes along with the next point.

B. There was no real down time. Outside of the quite adequate lunch break and two short coffee breaks, there was no real time to chitchat. Perhaps it was enough for the purpose of the gathering but for an outsider such as myself, more opportunities for formal as well as informal interaction would be helpful.

These issues were based on the role of the gathering. Primarily it was to present and respond to papers that are to be submitted to the national gathering. They had a lot of papers to review. Ideally, an extra day would have helped… but that would cost more and challenge the schedules of many (including myself).

C. Different presenters were given freedom on what materials would be shared. Some printed off papers, some made available illustrations, or QR codes to the presentations. Others really did not provide anything. It would be nice to standardize this… making them available to all who attend.

That all being said… I look forward to, hopefully, attending more of these sort of events in the future.