Teaching the Nations

Three EdD alumni are discipling generations of teachers

Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary’s (SEBTS) Doctor of Education (EdD) program offers advanced students a terminal degree that prepares them to teach and develop other ministry leaders, teachers, and counselors to serve in churches, schools, seminaries, universities, and para-church organizations. Southeastern’s EdD graduates are sent out as educators equipped to disciple the nations all around the world and in the United States. Learn how God is expanding Christ’s kingdom through the ministry of these EdD graduates — administrators and teachers like Alemseged Ketema in Ethiopia and Yiyoung Yuk in Iowa or pastor-teachers like Bryan Presson.

Alemseged Ketema

Dean of Graduate Studies at the Evangelical Theological College, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

I am an administrator and teacher at the Evangelical Theological College (ETC), which was constituted thirty years ago to train leaders in the growing underground church of Ethiopia — many of whom were facing imprisonment, flogging, and death under the communist regime. Since its establishment as a ministry of the International Evangelical Church in 1983, it has trained leaders for all the denominations that serve in the country.

After completing my studies at Southeastern, I was selected as the Dean of Graduate Studies at ETC, overseeing its five graduate programs. Ethiopia has very few people who are trained at a doctoral level with the capacity to teach at the graduate level. Therefore, since I studied at Southeastern in the EdD program, I have been able to start the MA-EdL program and teach as well. The courses I took at Southeastern have enabled me to read broadly, enriching the content and delivery of the courses I am teaching. Dr. Ken Coley has modeled well how to steward one’s teaching and relationships with students.

Theological education is a relatively new development in Ethiopia, emerging in the last forty years. Many of our pastors are not trained. Many of the educators and leaders in our Bible schools and colleges have not received sufficient training. The theological resources for our context in Ethiopia are few. To address these issues, we are working to offer quality training at the grassroots level and at the graduate level. There is only one theological institution currently offering doctoral level training in the whole country, so we are planning to start a doctoral program at ETC where students will be encouraged to do research and be equipped to teach.

We believe that seminaries exist to stand alongside the Church as it strives to fulfill the Great Commission. I have had the privilege of seeing my students graduate and go to provide leadership in hundreds of local churches. Some of our graduates have started Bible schools at the diploma level for their churches throughout Ethiopia, and some of these schools are developing into colleges that offer undergraduate theology programs, which we believe is a strategic way to multiply faithful teachers in our context. To know that the Lord has allowed me to contribute to the ministry of these graduates is overwhelming.

Yiyoung Yuk

Education Director at Emmaus Bible College, Dubuque, Iowa

I serve as a K-12 ESL education director at Emmaus Bible College. The mission of our college is to educate and equip learners to impact the world for Christ, and one of the ways we do this is through our four-year ESL Education program, which is designed to equip graduates with the professional knowledge, skills, and dispositions of effective K-12 ESL teachers with a heart for serving others. I teach and train teachers so they can make disciples of all nations and serve students from all over the world. Emmaus graduates are missionary educators in public schools and Christian schools in the U.S. and all over the world, such that every classroom is a Great Commission classroom just as Southeastern taught me.

Through my studies in the EdD program at Southeastern, I clearly discovered my vision as an educator. God used the program to equip me with the skillset, knowledge, and experience to teach and engage students’ hearts. As a Korean woman in higher education, sometimes I struggled with insecurity, and there were times I questioned God’s calling in my life. However, the Kingdom Diversity Initiative at Southeastern encouraged students like me to become more involved in Great Commission work around the world. Every semester, I felt empowered and encouraged by other female students and faculty who genuinely encouraged me to pursue God’s calling and use academic gifts to advance his kingdom. In service of the Great Commission, my EdD research attempted to bridge the scholarship on ESL and on missiology by studying the results of Bible storying among ESL participants. I conducted my research in the U.S., France, and China and tried to examine the participants’ change through a missional grid, discover growth in their linguistic strengths through Bible storying, and measure the strength of active learning skills used in Bible storying.

The EdD cohort model helped me to finish the race strong. I was trying to finish my dissertation in a second language as a full-time mom and full-time faculty member. There were times I thought this was an impossible task, but God provided a cohort and a team of educators who decided to go the extra mile to make it possible. We would text each other, talk about dissertations, and push each other to keep going so we could graduate together. Dr. Coley’s visionary leadership and creative pedagogy inspired me to be more creative and challenged me to be a life-long learner. His words of encouragement stayed in my heart and bloomed. He modeled the kind of teacher I wanted to be. The EdD program at Southeastern prepared my heart and mind for ministry and gave me a practical toolbox to train teachers, empowering them to follow the footsteps of our master teacher, Jesus.

Bryan Presson

Pastor of Friendly Avenue Karen Church, Greensboro, North Carolina

In 2009, after almost twenty years of cross-cultural ministry in Southeast Asia, my family and I relocated to Greensboro, North Carolina, to work in church planting among the Karen — a Burmese people group who had been resettled through the U.S. Refugee Resettlement Program. We quickly realized the need to train pastors and leaders. So, we opened a local teaching center at Friendly Avenue Baptist Church in Greensboro. We taught and continue to teach the program in both English and their native language, providing students a 24-credit-hour Diploma of Christian Studies upon completion of the program. Feeling called to church plant or become missionaries to their homelands, current students and graduates are serving as pastors, assistant pastors, church leaders, youth leaders, and music ministers at churches in North Carolina.

To be better equipped as an educator in the Christian context, I entered the EdD program at Southeastern. Because Southeastern is a Great Commission seminary dedicated not only to sound biblical instruction but also to theological integration, spiritual formation, and critical thinking, I knew Southeastern would be a good place to pursue an advanced degree. Little did I know how much the pedagogical insights I received in the EdD program would impact my role as a cross-cultural instructor and communicator.

As a missionary immersed in the language and culture of my host people group, I knew the importance of contextualization. I found that many of the concepts I learned through the EdD program regarding the teaching-learning process — concepts such as change being the goal for the teaching-learning process rather than content delivery, learner-focused teaching through engagement, differentiated instruction to improve learning outcomes, active learning techniques, and formative assessment — while being sound pedagogical practices in any context, take on particular relevance in the effort to contextualize teaching cross-culturally.

Even the cohort model used in the EdD program has been modified for our context. The students go through the program as a group, taking the same courses — which supports the collective nature of Southeast Asian culture — and investing in each other by working together, praying for one another, and planning future ministry together.

So, through the providence of God to bring refugees to North Carolina; to have a church planted to reach them; to have a training center to equip future pastors, church planters, and missionaries who use insights learned through the EdD program at Southeastern, the Great Commission is being fulfilled on a small scale to impact the nations by the grace of God.