Rodgers brings decades of mission experience to the classroom

Kevin Rodgers came to Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (SWBTS) in 2024, fresh from the African mission field where he served for almost three decades as a seminary lecturer, church planter, team leader for the International Mission Board (IMB), and more. His students are excited by the real-world experience the professor of missions brings to the classroom.

Rodgers, who also serves as intercultural studies program coordinator, teaches missions at both Southwestern Seminary and Texas Baptist College (TBC), and while he loves both, he said, “I love the college because I love the idea of shaping future missionaries, … kids who are kind of at a crossroads in their life, trying to figure out what they’re going to do. I love being a part of that, and I love trying to steer them to the nations. I think that’s important.”

Rodgers knows about being a kid at the crossroads because he’s been there himself.

Though his parents are strong believers today, he said, Rodgers didn’t grow up in a Christian home. His father was a state park ranger in North Carolina, so the family moved around a lot, “which was all great training when you’re going to be a missionary someday,” he said. His mother, a high school and college math teacher, had been raised United Methodist and would take him and his sister to church from time to time, “but I don’t ever remember hearing the Gospel. I don’t ever remember receiving Christ,” he said.

His call to faith came at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he continued the partying ways he’d begun in high school.

“There was something missing from my life. … Of course it was the Lord, but I had no idea at that time,” he said.

His solution to his problems was to find a girlfriend, so he walked up to the girls’ floor of his co-ed dorm and chose the first pretty girl he saw. He and the girl did eventually start dating, but it ended over spring break. She accepted an invitation to Daytona Beach, Fla., with Campus Crusade for Christ (now Cru) and rededicated her life to the Lord. When she returned to campus, she broke up with him.

Though he was devastated, Rodgers said, he noticed something different about her.

“I don’t exaggerate when I say this: You could see the countenance of the Lord on this girl’s face,” Rodgers said. Something in her life had changed, he added, and he was drawn to it. He asked her what was so meaningful to her that she’d be willing to throw their relationship away.

The girl gave him a tract of the Four Spiritual Laws and walked him through it, he said, adding, “That was the first time I heard the Gospel.”

Rodgers said he took the tract back to his dorm room and “read that over and over and over again, and eventually gave my life to Christ and was just radically, radically changed.”

He and the girl didn’t get back together, though. “She was smart enough to know that this guy needs to grow some,” he said.

Rodgers became involved in Campus Crusade, was discipled and learned how to disciple others, and learned how to share the Gospel, study the Bible, and walk with the Lord, he said.

“I didn’t set out to win her back,” he said. “I was just so in love with Jesus, and He had really transformed my life, delivered me from drugs, alcohol, a foul mouth, so many other things. … He was everything to me.”

He and the girl, Suzie, did eventually get back together and have been married since 1988. The couple has three children.

They were attending Freedom Baptist Church in Wilmington when Rodgers felt the call to ministry. He joined the staff of the church and, after a year or two, felt called to go to seminary. While attending Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary in Memphis, he learned about missions and felt compelled to go to the mission field.

“It was there at seminary when I took classes like I’m teaching here now, you know, evangelism, intro to missions, those kinds of things,” he said. “That’s where I really began to get exposed to missions, through my professors who had served overseas. … And when I would hear missionaries preach in chapel, I was just overwhelmed with the lostness and enamored with their stories.”

Rodgers and his wife went to Zambia, Africa in 1997, where he lectured in an African seminary for a couple of years. While he loved the experience, Rodgers said, he wasn’t sure it was what God was calling him to do. He and his family moved back to North Carolina and “were just kind of seeking the Lord.”

However, through “different Bible studies … we both realized God was calling us back to the mission field for a career,” he said.

They returned to Zambia as church planters in 2000. In 2016, Rodgers was asked to move to Kenya to take over the East Africa Cluster and start a theological education team for the IMB in Africa, which eventually led to the formation of the Africa Baptist Theological Education Network (ABTEN). He eventually transitioned out of leadership and focused on theological education.

Having already served in Africa for about 27 years, Rodgers’s plan was to stay there indefinitely. They had started the Lead Global Training Center with the IMB and “were training the next generation of African missionaries to go to the ends of the earth,” he said.

Then people began to tell him about a job at Southwestern and encourage him to apply.

“What got our attention was that we had multiple connections from multiple places start telling us the same thing,” he said, adding he began to wonder if God was trying to tell him something. He did apply and began working at the seminary over the summer as associate professor of missions and intercultural studies program coordinator. During the seminary’s board of trustees meeting Oct. 23, he was elected to the faculty and promoted to professor of missions.

Rodgers said he’s excited to be at Southwestern and feels it’s the right time and the right place. He said he’s been impressed with the caliber of students at both the seminary and the college.

“It is so valuable to have a professor who has the experience he does teach concepts that relate to intercultural engagement,” said John Taylor, an intercultural studies student who is taking two TBC classes under Rodgers. Taylor, of Mansfield, Texas, said the course material is great, “yet the true gold comes when Dr. Rodgers shares some of the personal experiences and wisdom God has given him from the mission field.”

Grace Gaines, an intercultural studies major from Glen Rose, Texas, said being in Rodgers’s classes in TBC is like experiencing other cultures without actually being there.

“The principles he seeks to teach regarding missions and ministry, evangelism, and discipleship are reinforced by illustrations and examples from his own and other missionary experiences that demonstrate the power of God through believers and the love of Christ lived out,” Gaines said. “His heart for both lost sinners around the globe and for students seeking to minister to those very same lost people is evident in both the classroom and in day-to-day conversations, in passing or during office hours.”

Ezekiel “Zek” Mosley, a Christian Studies major from Spur, Texas, is taking two classes under Rodgers in TBC. He’s excited to learn about the topic in each session, primarily because of the way the professor teaches, he said.

“Oftentimes, Dr. Rodgers is able to share a unique personal experience of his that pertains to the lesson and gives a very personal touch to all his lectures,” Mosley said, adding, “I get to learn about the religions and cultures of the world that are present today and how to share Christ with them in a caring, missional way. As a student developing my call to missions, I find that I greatly enjoy and appreciate these aspects of Dr. Rodgers’s classes.”

Rodgers’s goal in the classroom is to help his students understand “their place in the world, their place in the Great Commission, … to understand the potential that they have to shape the nations and to affect the world,” he said.

“I also want them to be people who really abide with Christ, and I want in my teaching and in my example to be somebody who they see is the real deal, that’s actually living out what he’s teaching in the classroom,” he added.