Where are You Going This Year? SEBTS Students Fulfill the Great Commission

The following stories offer glimpses into the Great Commission ministries of a few of these students, representing thousands of Southeastern alumni who are currently fulfilling the Great Commission across the country and around the world. Will you join in praying for them and join them as you consider how God might be preparing you to GO.

They are GOing. Where are you GOing this year?

The Robinsons

Disciple Making in La Mesa, CA

“Southeastern taught me that every waking moment is an opportunity to be Jesus,” Sean Robinson recalled about his time at Southeastern. “It helped me to see that opportunities to speak Christ, to live Christ, and to magnify Christ are available every day.”

Sean learned this Great Commission disposition in the context of Southeastern’s vibrant Great Commission community — a community that loved, discipled, and mobilized he and his wife Adrienne to live on mission for Jesus. “What was so formative was the genuine love for Christ and one another that was evident on campus,” noted Sean. “I am so grateful for the wisdom and knowledge (the ‘how to’ of ministry) that I learned at Southeastern. However, I walked away forever changed by the people (or the ‘with whom’) at Southeastern. The people I got to learn under, the people I got to do life with, and the people I got to grow closer to Christ with stand out the most to me. I experienced a true sacrificial love from start to finish.”

After graduating from Southeastern in 2018, Sean and Adrienne Robinson carried this Southeastern DNA to Southern California to serve The Hill Church, a church plant in La Mesa, CA. Located in a diverse, urban, and deeply secularized community, The Hill Church is a successful replant in the greater San Diego area. Sean currently serves as the Minister to Students and Community Life at The Hill Church, modeling a lifestyle of evangelism, discipleship, and sacrificial love as he equips students to live for Jesus.

“We would love prayer for bridges to be built among the three schools that neighbor our church: La Mesa Dale Elementary, La Mesa Arts Academy, and Helix Charter High School,” shared Sean. “Please pray that a disciple-making movement would take place at these locations and that we would be faithful as The Hill Church to raise up disciple-making disciples.”

Angel Jimenez

Teaching the Gospel in Knightdale, NC

“The Lord used Southeastern to shape, humble, and surrender my life to Christ and to be malleable in his hands so that I would proclaim the gospel to the Latino Nations,” shared Angel Jimenez.

Angel came to Southeastern in 2005 with a heart for Latino ministry, and God gave him opportunity to serve Iglesia Jesucristo El Rey Soberano, a Latino-Hispanic church plant in the area, while he was a student. Even after graduating, Angel was so blessed in ministry by his Southeastern training that he returned to Southeastern in 2018 and graduated in 2022 with an even deeper passion for doctrinal fidelity and Great Commission ministry.

“My undergraduate and graduate training at Southeastern was as fruitful for me as it was for my congregation,” recalled Angel. “As I grew, the knowledge of Christ in my congregants also grew. The more I was trained to be able to identify false gospels, the more they were able to stand their ground in Christ. The more each class pulled back the curtains of Christ as he truly is, the more I was able to point my congregants to that Christ.”

While he was a student, Southeastern encouraged Angel to apply his training in the disciple-making context of the local church, and Angel continues to faithfully serve the Latino community, teaching, preaching, leading worship, and making disciples at Iglesia Jesucristo El Rey Soberano.

“Pray that our teaching leaders would be faithful to Scripture and Christ,” shared Angel. “Pray that we would be filled with a passion for others — a passion to proclaim the Gospel wherever we go. Pray that we would be bold to proclaim and not be afraid of the attacks we will receive from proclaiming Christ. Pray that we would be willing to let the Spirit move through us as we continue to surrender to his call, spreading the gospel and making disciples of those who hear and believe.”

The Wests

Church Planting in Queens Park, London

“While at Southeastern, I started seeing that missions is all of life, and all of life is worship,” recalled Thomas West. “All of life has a missional intentionality to it, and it’s lived out before the face of God.”

Knowing he had been called by the Lord to preach, Thomas and his wife moved to Raleigh, NC, so he could pursue a Master of Divinity at Southeastern. While at Southeastern, Thomas was challenged in his classes and in relationships with professors to see missions as an all-of-life act of worship to a sovereign God. The Wests also got involved in ministry at Providence Baptist Church in Raleigh and through a training and sending partnership with The Summit Church, the Wests were better equipped for ministry and church planting. After eventually graduating with his PhD at Southeastern, Thomas and his family stepped out in obedience and moved to London in 2019 to plant a church.

“God used that season of our lives to form us and shape us and make us ready to move to a very desperate place like London to do gospel ministry,” noted Thomas. “The nations are gathered in places like London, and it was that vision that I was able to catch in my time at Southeastern that pricked my heart and ultimately led us to go.”

Serving as pastor of Redeemer Queens Park, Thomas is now leading a congregation of 44 disciple-making Christians in the heart of one of the most diverse cities in the world. Together, they are modeling Christian community and sharing the transforming truth of God’s word in a culture that often feels like Christianity has nothing to add to their lives.

“London has 11 million people and over 300 languages, and 51 percent are foreign-born immigrants,” shared Thomas. “Yet the International Mission Board estimates that London is less than 2 percent reached with the gospel. We cannot change the hearts of the people that we are trying to reach. We are utterly dependent on the grace of God to remove the blindfold that people are wearing. So, pray that God would help the blind to see and the deaf to hear the gospel and that God would bring people to saving faith.”