ALUMNI PROFILE
Cameron Mullens (ThM, 2011)
SERVING THE WORLD IN A CITY Cameron Mullens paces across a room in a worn, weathered church building. He gestures and scrawls on the whiteboard in front of more than a hundred students. Women with heads covered with teal, crimson, or black glittery scarves sit in one section, while other women scatter themselves among the rest of the group. On one side of the room, brilliant marigold Congolese attire contrasts with the black robe of an Ethiopian priest. Some men stand in the back of the room, while an older man on the end of a row clutches his prayer beads. The students repeat after Cameron, as he reads a Bible story phrase by phrase in simplified English: “Mary and Martha were friends with Jesus. Their brother was Lazarus.” As the group reads over the story, Cameron and others act out parts. He discusses the biblical account with the students. After highlighting Jesus’s identity and the salvation he offers, Cameron concludes the lesson—as he always does—with the words, “Learning English is good, but learning about Jesus is much, much better.”
A JOB NO ONE WANTED
An unlikely cross-cultural worker, Cameron has lived in north Dallas his whole life. After marrying his high school singing partner, Kaitlyn, he started his seminary studies while he worked with church youth. His wife’s compassion and her first teaching job at a school with a diverse student population led her into a refugee ministry among her students’ families and friends. Her growing outreach included teaching English and helping these new residents fill out job applications, apply for a driver’s license, or register children for school. Their tremendous needs led Kaitlyn to quit her teaching job to work with these newcomers full-time.
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Cameron helped her during evenings and on weekends, but they both knew she needed someone to interact with the men, teach, and transport students. Cameron couldn’t escape the conviction that he was that man. He said, “When I gave up my job with the church youth, many people immediately applied for that position, but no one else applied to raise support and work with refugees.” Cameron considered his new vocation a complement to his seminary studies. He said, “Interacting with refugees expanded my view of the body of Christ today, while my church history classes gave me a view of the other two thousand years of the church.” He expected a significant part of his role with these displaced people to involve evangelism, but he found himself interacting with a Burmese pastor and two Sudanese pastors. All of them professed Christianity and led about three hundred people in their congregations, but they all lacked basic biblical knowledge. Two of the pastors did not know the significance of the death and resurrection of Christ. All three men welcomed Cameron’s devotion into their lives. And he realized his work was influencing not just these men, but also their congregations. By the time Cameron finished seminary, the Mullenses regularly invested their lives in about two hundred refugees through English instruction, after-school programs, practical help, and Bible instruction. In 2011 they founded For the Nations Refugee Outreach (FTNRO), and since that time, the staff has grown, as has the number of newcomers they reach. In 2017, FTNRO reached 2,000 new residents in four locations in and around Dallas. The staff now numbers twenty-four, including Tristan Guthrie (ThM, 2003) and Todd Lindquist
