The theme for this year is Proclaim, a call for students to go out and preach the gospel ― a clear intent for Biola’s annual Missions Conference.

Theme Verses

For the 87th anniversary of the conference, the three theme verses are Isaiah 6:8, Romans 10:12-15 and Revelation 21:3-7, each expounding on what it means to proclaim the gospel to all the world.

“[Proclamation] is not Bible-thumping people in the heads and…we’re not trying to shove anything down people’s throats or be obnoxious but it’s when you love someone or something, you can’t help but talk about it,” said Jake Nagy, senior intercultural studies major and co-director of the conference.

Speakers

Mark Cahill, Ajai Lall, Megan Fate, David Nelson and Prashan De Visser will be the five keynote speakers for the conference this year. They come from a variety of backgrounds including the NFL, international missionary work and local evangelism.

As previously announced, the band leading worship for the conference is Kings Kaleidoscope, a 10-member band from Seattle, Wash.

“We gave them a call and they were very interested in coming to Biola and ever since then  we’ve been working out the details for them to come here and it was such a God thing because I know they’re hard to book,” said  Molly Shadden, senior biblical studies major. “They’ve been doing a lot of concerts but they’re going to be leading worship for us, it’s not a concert by any means. They’re going to be leading us in hymns and songs of praise, so we’re really excited about that.”

Essential Part of Missions

Nagy explained the importance of worship and why it is an essential part of missions internationally and of the upcoming conference.

“Missions exists because worship doesn’t and the reason why we do Missions [Conference] is because we want to see worship spread amongst all nations, amongst all people and so we’re the student missionary union, we also want to be the student worship union,” Nagy said. “We want to see our students come together to worship the Lord and in that worship be set out to cultivate worship amongst all people.”