A Missionary in All Areas
I am retired from teaching missions in the classroom at Southern Nazarene University in the Oklahoma City area. In addition to classroom teaching, I also helped direct the university’s short-term missions’ efforts around the globe. These included a large annual evangelistic/medical/construction thrust to Mexico. While teaching at SNU, I also spent extended periods of time in Bulgaria, Venezuela, and Ecuador.
My wife Barbara and I spent 15 years as missionaries for the Church of the Nazarene. We spent a decade in Italy (most of it in Florence) and then five years in Haiti where Christianity is seeing explosive growth. My major responsibility there was a pastoral training program, but I also served for a period of time as mission director.
I’m a Nazarene preacher’s kid who was born in Arkansas but grew up in Oklahoma. I graduated from Southern Nazarene University and Nazarene Theological Seminary. While a missionary to Haiti, I completed a doctorate in missions at Denver Seminary. I’ve always enjoyed writing so have done a lot of writing on missions, mostly for Nazarene publications.
Barbara and I have two grown children, both of whom live in the Oklahoma City area, and we have seven grandchildren.
One wonderful thing our missionary service has done for us is it has made us multi-lingual. Besides English, we can also get along in Italian, French, Spanish, and Haitian Creole.
The greatest NBC-related blessing I've received is having one or more students in almost every Global Evangelism class turn from having little or no interest in end-of-the-earth outreach to becoming actively involved in "making Christlike disciples in the nations" through intercessory prayer, sacrificial giving, passionate mobilizing, and even actually going.
My reasons for retiring from face-to-face classroom teaching included eyesight and hearing issues. Neither of those is a problem with online teaching since screen fonts can be enlarged and speaker volume can be turned up. This online teaching has allowed me to carry out my world missions call as I seek to recruit others to embrace Christ's Great Commission.
I have enjoyed these two decades of online teaching for NBC. In all those years I have not once missed meeting the 5-days-out-7 attendance requirement even with quite a bit of overseas travel. I treasure the memories of responding to NBC students on class discussion boards while in out-of-the-way places like a small town at the edge of the Amazon jungle and a mountain village in northern Haiti.
Dr. Howard Culbertson, Missionary leader, trainer, teacher, writer, evangelist, constructor, medical team supporter and mobilizer.
Published: 12/16/2019
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