Beeson podcast, Episode 460
Kyle Young and Russell Mann
September 3, 2019


Announcer:          Welcome to the Beeson podcast coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla.

Doug Sweeney:       Welcome to the Beeson podcast. I'm Doug Sweeney, the new dean of Beeson Divinity School, and it's my joy to be sitting here today in our podcast studio as one of the new hosts of the Beeson podcast. If you listened to last week's episode that featured a conversation I had with my predecessor, Dr. Timothy George, then you know that Timothy wrapped up nine years as podcast host last week and passed the mic to me and my colleague, Kristen Padilla, who serves with excellence as the head of our marketing and communications department.

Doug Sweeney:       Before I started as Beeson's dean at the beginning of this July, I had a phone call with Timothy about the work that he's done over these 31 last years, and during that call he shared with me about the history of the podcast. I began to think and pray about the future of this ministry and then began speaking about it with my new colleague, Kristen, whose department organizes this show behind the scenes. A few priorities arose rather quickly to the surface of our hopes and prayers for the future of the podcast.

Doug Sweeney:       First, I do want to continue this ministry, building upon the wonderful foundation that's been laid over the past nine years. Second, I want to narrow our podcast focus just a bit featuring conversations with Beeson faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends about the good work God is doing in their lives, through their ministries and in the kingdom at large. And third, in an effort to make our podcast even more conversational than it's been, I've invited Kristen herself to serve as co-host with me. I thought it'd be wonderful if we could have a godly Christian woman to help me lead these conversations, making them warmer, more lively, and accessible to a wider range of people. So Kristen, welcome to the Beeson podcast. Thank you very much for being my co-host. It's great to have you here sharing this ministry with me.

Kristen Padilla:    Thank you, Doug, for this kind invitation to serve as your co-host. It has been a joy to have you at Beeson Divinity School these past couple of months. Your presence here is a blessing to us all, and I look forward to serving in this way with you on the podcast.

Kristen Padilla:    We have a great conversation for you today with two of our outstanding MDiv students, Kyle Young and Russell Mann. Every summer, we have master of divinity students all over the globe serving in cross-cultural ministry contexts, something that we believe is important at Beeson Divinity School and therefore require of our master of divinity students. Kyle and Russell both served in Latin America for six weeks, Kyle working in Bolivia and Russell serving in Ecuador. So we have asked them to the podcast today to share with you about what God did through their experience this summer. So let me say to you, Kyle and Russell, bienvenidos to the Beeson podcast.

Kyle Young:         Muchas gracias.

Russell Mann:       Gracias.

Doug Sweeney:       All right, so I'm think I may be the only one here who does not speak Spanish, so I'm here to reassure our listeners that this conversation will take place in English so that Doug can understand. I thought we might begin by just having these two guys introduce themselves to us. Kyle and Russell, would you tell us a little bit about yourselves, how you came to know Jesus, how you felt a call to gospel ministry, how you got to Beeson. Kyle, maybe we could start with you first.

Kyle Young:         Certainly. I grew up in a family that loved the Lord and took me to church from a young age. When I was seven, I accepted Christ as my savior and was baptized and really ever since then have been on a path of spiritual growth and maturity, and I think from a young age as well, really viewed seeing my parents and grandparents especially model this well, all of life as ministry. And so whether it was being a student or being overseas, that gave me a love for his word and for his people. And I think those two things have kind of been consistent throughout.

Kyle Young:         After college, I was teaching high school for a few years in Bolivia, and during that time really sensed God kind of narrowing my call to focus more on shepherding, and I also felt a call to return closer to home. Tupelo, Mississippi is where I grew up and that's where my family is today. I have a younger sister and I have two younger brothers who were adopted about two and a half years ago, and I think that was in large part, part of the reason God called me home. Beeson is only two hours away from Tupelo, and I was familiar with the school because I was a Samford undergraduate and my pastor is a Beeson graduate, so Beeson has been a very special place and very much a part of my call to ministry.

Doug Sweeney:       That's wonderful. Russell, how about you? Would you introduce us to yourself, tell us a little bit about your background and how you became a Christian and how you got here to Beeson?

Russell Mann:       Yeah, sure. I'm a lifelong Alabamian. I'm originally from Huntsville, Alabama. I'm about an hour and a away. And I, like Kyle, grew up in a Christian family. Went to a church that preached the gospel to me, and I believed in the gospel and then was baptized at age 10. And then it was a few years later when I was around 16 years old that I was at a youth bible study that was centered around the idea of missions. And this was the first time in my life I had thought about God's plan to use his people to spread his good news all over the earth. And that really took root in my heart during that time, that opportunity that God has given us, even though we don't deserve it, to get to show him to people who have never heard about him.

Russell Mann:       And so from that moment on, I kind of began to think about a future in ministry or cross-cultural missions. And so then fast forward to the time when I was at the end of college at Auburn ... I went to Auburn University, and I majored in supply chain management there. And for awhile, I was considering going straight to do something in missions with that degree because I originally got that degree because you can do it anywhere in the world. But then I felt a call to go to seminary to prepare for whatever God had for me next and get educated so that I could best share him with the world.

Russell Mann:       And so I had never even heard of Beeson before, even though I'd lived in Alabama for like 22 years at that point. I had never heard of Beeson, but my wife had. And so she, one day was like ... She knew I was looking for seminaries and so she said, "Let's just stop at Beeson on our way home to Huntsville and check it out." And so we did that.

Doug Sweeney:       I'm glad you did.

Russell Mann:       Yeah. So we did that and I loved it from the moment I stepped foot on campus here. I love the small size and the intimate fellowship that comes as a result of that, and the interdenominational aspect, which I think is really important if you are planning a future in cross-cultural ministry and missions, and so now I'm in my third year here.

Doug Sweeney:       That's great. All right, so let's get into the stories about what the Lord did through your lives and your ministries this summer. Kyle, can we start with you? Yours is pretty interesting because you had been to Bolivia already and you returned this summer to Bolivia and if I'm right about this, I think you even saw some of the same people this summer that you had seen years before. Can you let our listeners in on this? How'd you get to Bolivia in the first place? What'd you do the first time you were there and what was it like returning after several years to some of the same people you'd served in the first place?

Kyle Young:         This was a very special trip for me. After I graduated from Samford, I accepted a call to go work in La Paz, Bolivia as a high school social studies teacher with an international Christian school that's part of Nix. I knew when I graduated that I had studied history in Spanish and God had given me a love for ministry in Latin America for the Spanish language, and this was a door that he very clearly opened up kind of unexpectedly to teach history in a Spanish-speaking context. I taught four high school social studies courses. I taught in English, but most of my students, they were all bilingual and came from a Bolivian background.

Kyle Young:         While I was there, I got involved in a bible church as well that was really close to the school called [inaudible 00:09:20] Bible Church, and worked with some missionaries from SIM. And so taught high school social studies there for the three years, was involved in church, and then this time when I went back this summer, I worked primarily with the church that I had been involved in, but I timed it to where ... So when I left, I guess three and a half years ago, my last group of students, the last group of students that I taught were freshmen when I left and they were seniors this year, so I got to see them graduate, which was really special. I also got to visit with a lot of the same families from the church that I had been involved in there and do a lot of ministry with some of the missionaries and the elders, both foreign and local, at the church this summer.

Doug Sweeney:       Can you tell us a little bit about some of the fruit that you've seen born as a result of what God did through you in Bolivia? The next thing I want to ask you is how has this experience changed you? But before we get to you, let's talk about, more importantly, how did God use you to minister to the people you were with?

Kyle Young:         In a lot of ways, this was a really encouraging trip for me, very renewing in a lot of senses to get to see some of the fruit of the labor there. I think I realized just from conversations I had with parents and students that I saw this this summer, even of parents that I didn't know super well when I was there before, just really talking about how much of an impact myself and my colleagues had made on their students and the efforts we had to talk with them and disciple them was really neat. One of my first days there, I saw a former student and he came up and asked me if we could talk about matters of faith after graduation. And so just to have kind of that established relationship and just see God open up those doors again was really neat and so that was really encouraging for me.

Doug Sweeney:       Yeah, that's great. All right, now my followup, so what difference has this made in your life? Has God used these experiences to change you, to change your heart, to change your priorities?

Kyle Young:         God has used my ministry in Bolivia to encourage me in a lot of ways, to spur me on and a lot of ways to see different aspects of the church and I think it's also helped me see ... So currently I work with a Hispanic ministry here in Birmingham. I think so often when we go overseas, we're trained to think contextualization, "How do I make this message relevant to this particular group of people, this particular culture?" And one thing that's helped me do is kind of see my own culture or wherever I am through a different lens, to see whether it's working cross-culturally or with whatever specific group of people, I need to learn what are the needs and the desires of that specific group of people and to be able to best appropriate the gospel to them. It's kind of shifted my paradigm of how to do ministry in a lot of ways, of how to see the needs and meet those needs, whether it's here or overseas.

Kristen Padilla:    Russell, we're going to turn to you, and we'd love to just hear about your time in Ecuador this summer. You are married to Christina, and I think it's an interesting story that the two of you went together. You both have a heart for Hispanics. And so tell us about how God has drawn you as a couple to Latin America and what you did this summer.

Russell Mann:       Yeah, so my wife is a high school Spanish teacher, so she had the summer off, which was great, so we could go on this together and she helped me a lot because I'm not fully fluent in Spanish yet. She was definitely a help to me. But anyway, she actually got passionate about Latin American culture because her pastor's wife in high school was her Spanish teacher, and it was through taking classes with her for four years that she developed a heart for the Spanish-speaking world and why she decided to become a Spanish teacher.

Russell Mann:       And so it was really through her influence that I too became passionate about this. Because of her job and the students she works with, because of the proximity of our lives just to many Hispanic people here in Birmingham, we developed a passion for this part of the world and these cultures, and it's really cool to see how God did that, because even though I had had an interest in missions for awhile, it was not really a particular part of the world that I had felt particularly drawn to until I married my wife. And so it's cool to see how God used us coming together to unite us on that mission.

Kristen Padilla:    You went to Ecuador to work with missionaries who provide theological training. Could you tell us about what that looked like for you and Christina?

Russell Mann:       Yeah. The organization we went with is called Reaching and Teaching, whose primary aim is to provide theological education throughout the world to pastors and other church leaders who just have no access to it, which most pastors in the world today do not have much access to theological education. And this was something I wasn't really aware of when I first got to Beeson or even until the past few years thinking about missions. I always thought missions was kind of going to a remote place and planting a church, and I had never considered how my seminary education might be best used to help pass on the things I had learned to church pastors and leaders who could then pass them on to their people. And so that sounded very exciting to me and that's why I wanted to go with this organization to see if that's something that I would enjoy, which I found out that I definitely do.

Russell Mann:       But anyway, the team in Ecuador that we went with, there's four missionary families and they focus on providing theological education throughout Ecuador in both formal and informal ways. So they started a seminary in the city of Cuenca recently and their goal was to eventually get accreditation with the seminary and have it be one of the most impactful evangelical seminaries in Latin America. And so they're doing that, and then they are also doing this more informal training throughout the country where they go and train pastors for a week at a time and they'll train them three times a year for a week at a time. And after three years, they'll have completed this plan program with them and they'll receive a certificate that they've completed this training. And so I got to help take part in many of those trainings throughout different cities in Ecuador, and I got to teach on a whole variety of topics and help just with what they were already doing, just kind of jump in and teach on the next thing. I taught on everything from the Book of Esther to church history, which was fun for me coming from Beeson.

Russell Mann:       And one of my favorite things I got to do while I was there was to preach at a baptism service to six ... or six people were about to be baptized, and I got to encourage them in their faith and I was really honored by that, and that's something I'll never forget. And then also the youth of the churches there, because of my age, wherever we went, they would bring in the youth and they would be like, "All right, share with them about" ... Usually it was about things like relationships and dating and marriage. They wanted to know how me and my wife viewed those things from a Christian perspective, so we really got to form relationships with them and share about those things with the youth there.

Kristen Padilla:    And so if you were to tell us one thing that you've taken away from this trip as you're coming back to a new academic year ... Classes start tomorrow ... what is something from this experience this summer that you are bringing with you back to Beeson?

Russell Mann:       I think the main thing I realized, probably because I've never been out in the country this long, is just both the difficulties and rewards of life in a foreign context. I think I was given more of a realistic picture of both what missionary life looks like and what people who are in the States who are not from here, what their lives are like. I got to experience a little bit of that home sickness and just desiring things that aren't there.

Russell Mann:       And through that difficulty, I think I'm better equipped now than I'm back to empathize with people that I'm around here in Birmingham every day and understand a little bit of what they're feeling and can better show compassion to them now, and also realize that that difficulty on the mission field, you can allow it to drive you to Christ and I saw the missionaries there as they were facing that home sickness, leaning into their faith in Christ in ways that propelled them to bear fruit and that was really encouraging for me. Even as I face difficulties here, how am I going to respond to them? How am I going to respond to the emptiness I feel? Am I going to lean on Christ or not?

Doug Sweeney:       How about you, Kyle? Any takeaways that our listeners might well benefit from based on your experience in Bolivia?

Kyle Young:         I think, like I mentioned with contextualization, it is so important to listen to and understand the needs and the desires of the people that we work with, especially in an increasingly globalized world. For a pastor in an urban setting especially really may mean learning a little bit of Spanish. The world is kind of overlapping and so I think that this dichotomy, that contextualization is something that foreign missionaries do is something that is increasingly going to be important for local pastors, especially in urban settings as the world and our cities become more and more diverse.

Doug Sweeney:       I have just one last application-oriented question for the both of you. I'm remembering that a lot of North American churches do mission trips south of the border to Spanish or Portuguese-speaking countries or more rural places in central and South America where there are other languages spoken. We know you two are young. You're not pretending to be the world's leading experts on missions or ministry south of the border, but has your experience taught you anything that might be worth sharing with pastors, other friends of Beeson, regular church folks who were excited about doing a short-term missions trip to central America somewhere or South America? What should they bear in mind as they go?

Kyle Young:         My love for Latin America came from a short-term mission trip, and so I think really that experience that I had when I was 15 is really what propelled my love for Spanish and Latin America and I think God oftentimes uses these trips and these experiences in people's lives to show them something bigger and maybe call them in a certain direction. I think it is also really essential with short-term mission trips to make sure that you're going to support the local missions that are already happening there so that it's not this kind of, "We're going to be the North Americans to come in and do something for a week," but how can we come in and serve alongside those who are already here, who already know the culture a lot better and be an encouragement to them?

Russell Mann:       And for my experience I would say a few things. First of all, think about how your church can help with things like theological education that I experienced. I think that's one of the best ways to use the resources that we have in the US and pass them on for the good of the people in the other countries is to help teach them and train these pastors so that they can train their people that they're pastoring every day.

Russell Mann:       And then another thing I would say is couple your going with also sharing here, sharing life here with Hispanics, because they're here in our city, in our country. My wife teaches students from over 10 different Latin American countries every day, and they're here. And I would say if you want to learn how to best engage them when you go, then be around them here. Share conversations with them here. And what I think you'll discover is that you have just as much to learn from them sometimes as you do to contribute. The Hispanic culture has a lot to teach us about simple dependence upon God and about faithfulness to your community and things like that that we need to learn as the American church. And over the next few decades, the Hispanic evangelical church in the States is going to just greatly impact what faith looks like in America. And I think we need to learn how to have conversations across those ethnic lines to strengthen the church as a whole, as we're unified in Christ.

Doug Sweeney:       That's great. A lot of wisdom has just been shared from two young ministers of the gospel who are here studying with us at Beeson Divinity School. Thank you very much, Kyle Young and Russell Mann, two MDiv students here at Beeson, for being willing to go on the air with us and share your experiences with our audience. Thank you. Thank you for listening. God bless you. Bye for now.

Kristen Padilla:    You've been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquarello. Our co-hosts are Doug Sweeney and myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at beesondivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.