What does First B Jackson teach about missionaries?
Drawn from the messages where it was actually addressed: the words said from the front, the passages taught, and where to hear the whole thing.
At First B Jackson, the teaching on missionaries starts with the conviction that God is sovereign over the movement of peoples and that He has always used ordinary, obedient people to carry the gospel forward. Ken McEwen, speaking from decades of planting Hispanic churches across Wyoming, walked through scripture to show that the scattering of peoples across the earth is not an accident. From Babel to the persecution that drove the early church out of Jerusalem, God has consistently moved people to advance His purposes. That same pattern, Ken argued, is playing out right now in American cities and small towns, where unreached peoples once found only in remote corners of the world are now close neighbors.
Norris Williams, who grew up connected to First B Jackson and now works across the Middle East, Africa, and beyond, brought the same conviction down to the ground level. The work he described is not lived by high-profile figures but by an insurance salesman in Lebanon, by women forming churches after their husbands are killed, by a former Hezbollah fighter leading Bible studies in places Norris himself cannot enter. The method running through all of it is immediate obedience and replication: read a passage, respond to it, share it, and help another group start. Norris traced that pattern directly back to how the gospel spread in the first century.
Pastor Mark, preaching through Acts 12 on the same morning the congregation commissioned Anders and Brooke to Zambia, showed that missionary work has never been a story of unbroken momentum. The chapter moves through death and imprisonment and divine judgment before landing on a single summary line that holds everything together: the word of the Lord continued to grow and to be multiplied. That line, Pastor Nathan echoed in his teaching on Titus, describes what First B already tries to do with missionaries passing through, giving them every resource so they lack nothing. The church's teaching on this is consistent: God builds His church through people who show up and obey, some well-known and some barely mentioned, and the word keeps moving regardless of what surrounds it.
Taught from Acts 12:24 · Acts 1:8 · Acts 8 (persecution and scattering) · John 15 · Titus 3:12-15
The passage taught · Acts 11:29-30
29 As any of the disciples had plenty, each determined to send relief to the brothers who lived in Judea;
30 which they also did, sending it to the elders by the hands of Barnabas and Saul.
World English Bible
Messages that go deeper
- April 13, 2025 The Word of the Lord Continued to Grow Acts 12 traces James's death, Peter's miraculous rescue, and Herod's end to show that no matter what opposes God's people, his word keeps growing.
- August 12, 2018 Paying Attention to People Paul closes Titus with a list of names, some famous, some unknown, and a call for believers to notice people around them and meet needs as God provides.
- November 12, 2017 God Moves People for Redemptive Purposes Ken and Lori McEwen share how God sovereignly moves people across nations, and what it looks like for a local church to love and serve immigrants with the gospel.
- September 25, 2016 Bear Much Fruit Missionary Norris Williams shares how disciple-making movements are bringing thousands of Muslims and refugees to faith in Christ across the Middle East and Africa.