To the Ends of the Earth: Making Disciples in the Kingdom in the Sky

Forty years ago, there were ways to reach the Basotho people, Stan explained, but it required riding a horse or access to a small plane and the ability to land that plane on strips of gravel and grass.

“It’s a beautiful country. It’s an open country,” Stan said. It’s also a particularly difficult country to traverse.

Stan, an alumnus of Southeastern Seminary, and his wife, Angie, serve as team associate missionaries with the International Mission Board (IMB). They first visited Lesotho in 2009 and have lived there since 2016.

“From the beginning, our desire and our mission was to make disciples that make disciples,” Stan said.

They do this primarily by planting churches through evangelism and discipleship and ministering to existing local churches in the area.

“We have small groups of faithful believers spread across four different districts within Lesotho, and so we travel out to church plants or established churches in various villages, trying to visit each of those at least once a month. One is about 10 minutes away. The furthest one is about two hours away.”

There’s a village that the Burlesons can see just behind their house — “It’s just as the crow flies,” Stan said — but the trip to reach it takes more than an hour. There is a water reservoir and a dam, both colossal in size, spanning the distance between.

And yet even this, a mild traveling hinderance, stands as a marker of God’s sovereignty. Without the construction of the Katse dam several decades ago, the roads in and out of the mountains of Lesotho wouldn’t exist. They originally brought in construction crews and equipment. Now they bring gospel workers — Stan, Angie, the missionaries before them, and the volunteer teams that have come since.

Over the years, Stan and Angie have learned to watch and to wait, to see how God sovereignly meets needs in ways that they never could.

“If God calls you to come to Lesotho or to another part of the world or another state, just be obedient,” Stan encouraged. “Just say, yes. You don’t have to be fully equipped. You don’t have to be fully prepared. The Lord is going to provide that for you. And in my case, he took me to seminary.”

You don’t have to be fully equipped. You don’t have to be fully prepared. The Lord is going to provide that for you. And in my case, he took me to seminary.

The Greatest Need

When Stan and Angie first arrived in Lesotho in 2016, joining the missionary couple already there, they had little formal theological training.

They had both attended Wayland Baptist University during their college years, and before committing to full-time ministry in Lesotho, Stan had led over 20 teams to the area from their sending church. By the time Stan and Angie fully surrendered to ministry in Lesotho, the circumstances did not allow time to pursue seminary training, even if they wanted to.

“Something we talk about a lot is how we could care for humanitarian needs every day that we’re here, 24/7,” Stan said. “But by far the greatest need is Jesus.”

Lesotho suffers from one of the highest percentages of AIDS and HIV cases in the world. As a result, there are many orphans in the Basotho communities.

“We’re working with the churches, helping them develop their vision for orphan care,” Stan said. The numbers are so overwhelming and the need so great that the best way to begin this type of ministry is with small, intentional steps.

Partnership with local churches represents the majority of the Burleson’s work in Lesotho. What used to be a ministry of evangelism has now become one of discipleship, of teaching and training local believers. For Stan and Angie, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers need to be equipped.

Unbeknownst to the Burlesons, God’s providential hand would soon bring their personal ministry endeavors to an abrupt standstill.

An Unexpected Opportunity

In the spring of 2020, Stan and Angie traveled back to the States for their youngest daughter’s wedding and, like the rest of the world, suddenly found themselves sheltering in place at the start of the Covid pandemic. They wouldn’t return to Lesotho until over a year later due to closed borders and their residence permit having expired while they were away.

During this unexpected pause in their ministry, Angie found a job teaching at a nearby elementary school, and Stan became increasingly aware of the surplus time in his schedule.

“Once she got that job, it was like the Lord kept putting the thought of seminary in my mind,” Stan said. “It felt like he was saying, ‘Here’s an opportunity for you to get better equipped. Here’s your time when you don’t have to do everything else. You can just focus on this.”

In fall of 2020, Stan enrolled in the Master of Divinity with missiology at Southeastern. He was particularly drawn to Southeastern because of its Great Commission emphasis.

While he and Angie lived in Texas in a space provided by a member of their sending church, Stan began taking classes online. It was exactly the incentive he needed to commit to pursuing a degree, even after their return to Lesotho the next year.

On their way home, through miraculous intervention and the prayers of many ministry partners, the Burlesons were able to obtain a router from a local cell phone provider that successfully brought unlimited signal into the Lesotho mountains, and for the rest of Stan’s degree until he graduated in 2023, God provided all the Wi-Fi he needed to watch his lectures, submit assignments, and finish his theological education.

Prepared for Practical Application

Thinking back on his time in seminary, Stan recalled receiving emails from Southeastern that asked him, “Have you been on a mission trip this year? Tell us about it!”

He laughed and said, “I’m living a mission trip every day of my life right now — and it was a blessing to be doing so because I got to put my learning into practice immediately.”

I’m living a mission trip every day of my life right now — and it was a blessing to be doing so because I got to put my learning into practice immediately.

He reflected back on his four Old Testament and New Testament classes and how they provided essential foundations for him, strengthening his understanding of “the whole breadth of Scripture.”

One class in particular, his biblical counseling course, left an unanticipated impact on Stan.

“I think it was a class that I needed personally to grow in my own life — in addition to my growth in ministry — because we do a lot of counseling. We do a lot of listening.”

In recent years, Stan and Angie received even further counseling training through the IMB, giving them the tools to teach a trauma healing course called New Hope. One of the primary ways in which they use this course and their training is through ministry at a nearby prison.

“We visit once a month,” Stan said, “and though inmates are coming and going, we’ve seen some amazing stories of transformation in the men.”

“We walk into the gate,” he said, “and they lock it behind us. We’re there with about 150 guys, and they see the truck pulling up, and they’re waving. They’re excited to hear the gospel. We don’t get to have a lot of one-on-one time with them yet, but by their responses and their answers to the questions, you can tell that their lives are changing.”

Part of the Burlesons’ prison ministry provides prisoners with Bibles after they’ve memorized different passages of Scripture.

“When they get released, they get to take the Bible with them. They don’t take much of anything else,” said Stan, “but they have the word of God in their hands.”

Over the past years, Stan has also noticed how his counseling class with Southeastern helped provide him with the necessary framework to interact with and lead a variety of different people on a day-to-day basis — all from different backgrounds, cultures, and experiences.

When they get released, they get to take the Bible with them. They don’t take much of anything else, but they have the word of God in their hands.

“The Lord has continued to have us invest in teams and churches from the States,” Stan explained, “and one of the biggest things that we do is we ask churches, like ours, to adopt an area and become missionaries to that area.”

Today the Burlesons work with five partner churches, including their sending church, which each send teams 3-4 times a year to minister to their area.

While leading these groups, Stan found his evangelism and discipleship class particularly helpful as he trained team members in simple methods of evangelism, such as sharing a 15-second testimony.

“I felt like everything within the class was something I could put into practice immediately,” he said.

He Will Supply Every Need

Towards the end of Stan’s degree at Southeastern, God continued to demonstrate his sovereignty and provision through several challenging situations.

As the Burlesons prepared to return to Lesotho following their hiatus in the States, they were informed of the death of their team leader, one of the missionaries who had served in Lesotho before they first arrived.

“He was an amazing teacher of the word,” Stan recalled. “It was a gift. He loved it, and I just felt horribly inadequate to do that in his footsteps. But I began to realize very quickly, I didn’t have to be Jim Flora. I have to be Stan. I have to be who God has created me to be, and seminary equipped me and gave me the confidence that I could be who the Lord wanted me to be.”

The following year, the Burlesons’ lease abruptly ended, leaving them with few housing options and an abundance of opportunities to trust in the Lord. The cascade of events that followed resulted in something greater than they ever could have imagined: the purchase of land in a nearby village, the formation of deeper community and trust, and the creation of their current ministry site called The Gathering Place.

“The Lord provided every little piece,” said Stan. “It wasn’t always easy. Obviously, God doesn’t promise us it’s going to be easy. There were days we wanted to throw in the towel, but he provided over and over again in his perfect timing.”

Now, as Stan and Angie seek to train up church leaders, guide local fellowships, and minister to the orphans and prisoners in their area, God continues to remind them of the purpose of their work.

“One of our greatest joys,” Stan expressed, “is watching lives be transformed as people come to faith in Christ and grow in that faith.”

One of our greatest joys is watching lives be transformed as people come to faith in Christ and grow in that faith.

Stan recalled one moment in particular that has stayed with him over the years.

As he and his translator prepared to ride away on horseback from one of the villages they were visiting, a woman called out to them, asking them to stop.

“Don’t leave yet,” she told them. “I want to follow Christ.”

Thinking back on that encounter, Stan said, “That woman is still faithful. She’s still in the church.” In moments like these, God’s grace overwhelms him. “I don’t deserve to be the person getting to do this.”

“The Great Commission says to teach what you’ve been taught, and so that’s what we try to tell people here. You don’t have to know everything. The Basotho don’t have commentaries and references, Bible dictionaries and every book you can possibly imagine. But they have one book: They have the word of God.”

The same holds true for the churches that the Burlesons partner with from the States. As Stan reminds them, the Great Commission is not just for the missionary few. It applies to every believer and every follower of Christ, and God will provide what his people need for the gospel to go forth. What a gift it is to serve as laborers in the fields of God’s harvest!

 

Join us in praying for the work of the Burlesons, their partners, and the Basotho believers. Pray for discernment in their gospel ministry and for continued commitment to the Great Commission, especially among local churches.