A need that, undiminished,
Rebukes our slothful ease
We who rejoice to know Thee
Renew before Thy throne
The solemn pledge we owe Thee
To go and make Thee known
Facing a Task Unfinished — Keith and Kristin Getty
One job completed. Another teed up. Another in the wings. It’s not that our work is fruitless, far from it. It’s just that we’re charged with a task unfinished. A great task, perhaps the greatest that human hands might undertake.
Serious Joy Scholarship Update
First, let me report to you of the job most recently completed. God, in his mercy, was pleased to supply full funding of The Serious Joy Scholarship for the school year ended June 30, 2025. For the fourth time in eight years, Bethlehem College and Seminary has, by his grace, achieved its “at-scale” goal of securing funding sufficient to provide $10,000 annual scholarship support to 250 degree-seeking students. This was God’s work. We planted and watered. He gave the growth. We are grateful to him for every means and disciple relationship he employed.
Now, On to Other Work
“Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate, not missions, because God is ultimate, not man.”
—John Piper, Let the Nations Be Glad.
Each summer the friends of Bethlehem College and Seminary turn themselves toward the job of supplying the Alex Steddom International Student Fund with sufficient financial resources to equip a few well-trained men to herald biblical truth among their neighbors in theologically famished regions of the world. The program is an outgrowth of an expansive, decades-long Bethlehem embrace of both theological education and the Greatest Commission task.
Would you consider a gift to satisfy this program’s modest requirements during this brief summertime campaign?
Originally, the Alex Steddom International Student Fund sought to identify men in such regions, bring them here to Minneapolis, then send them back to their native lands and people groups. Dr. Dieudonné Tamfu was a product of this earlier initiative, recruited from a remote village of Cameroon, educated here and at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, served as a local pastor, then returned to Cameroon’s capital city to plant a church and launch an extension of Bethlehem Seminary.
Over time, the costs of transporting these men and their families to the U.S., providing for their tuition and living expenses, and staging their ultimate return have grown. However, a substantial enough number of graduates have returned, or plan to in the near-term, that our focus has shifted to providing this education in-country, where they live and minister.
How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”—Romans 10:14-15 ESV
A vibrant local church, seminary, publishing, pastoral training, and church-planting ministry is now flowering in East Africa by virtue of your generosity. And just a few days ago, Pastor Edison DSouza M.Div. ’25, returned with his family to Mysore, India, to take up his pulpit again, and dream toward replicating the Cameroon model in a part of the world’s most populous nation. Pastor Boaz Prince is completing his fourth year of seminary here with plans to return to his region of India and take up ministry again.
When you see a happy, generous people, you know it’s a people changed by God who have a passion for seeing God’s glory go out to the world, and it does something to you. You just know that you’re serving the living God, and I love that about what’s happening here. The Alex Steddom International Student Fund is not an initiative of rich people. It is an initiative of Christians who love the Lord and say, “We want to give out of an overwhelming generosity, because God has done this in our heart.” —Pastor Edison DSouza, M.Div. ’25, Cross Culture Church, Mysore, India
We want to encourage men like these as they eschew the comforts of American life to return to the hard soil from whence they came to plant and water for the sake of the gospel.
By focusing our resources in-country, we’ll support the educations of three times the number of students we did during the time in which we brought them here. In the scheme of things, it is a remarkably modest “ask”—just a little over $100,000 in total—with not just eternal returns, but with fruitfulness we are able to see on our watch.
When we get to September and are asked, “What interesting thing did you do over the summer?”, might we act now to be able to say, “I helped spread a passion for the supremacy of God in all things for the joy of all peoples through Jesus Christ by supporting the Alex Steddom International Student Fund and its aim of in-country seminary education.”
What a way to redeem the so-called “Dog Days of Summer.”
This is a brief campaign before we return to the heavier lifting of The Serious Joy Scholarship, but we hope you have desire and capacity to answer this call in this season—for God and his glory.
You may complete an online gift transaction at bcsmn.edu/steddom.