At 19, Brian William got baptized in an old-school Pentecostal church, felt the Holy Spirit, and woke up with the appetite for his old life simply gone. What followed was a wild, unscripted decade: leading most of his college basketball team to faith, preaching on tables (and getting thrown out of an IHOP), attending a Mandarin-speaking Chinese church that taught him what family and discipleship actually look like, and eventually helping plant a church in India that now supports around 30 pastors. Brian, a pastor and missions leader, makes the case that the Black church's underrepresentation on the foreign mission field, roughly 1%, isn't about resistance but about exposure and opportunity. He unpacks his "neighborhoods and nations" framework, why a single mom raising kids in the gospel carries the same value as a missionary in a restricted nation, and why he thinks the future of the church looks less like the megachurch and more like Acts 2.
In This Episode:
▫️Conversion preceded technique. Brian's evangelism flowed from a single overwhelming encounter at 19, not training — his teammates were won by a visible change in his life before any words.
▫️Exposure, not resistance, explains the gap. He argues the ~1% Black presence in foreign missions is a problem of opportunity and exposure, not any inherent reluctance — and that platforms and messaging can change it quickly.
▫️Representation opened the door. A book cover he mistook for a Black man being baptized (K.P. Yohannan's story from India) is what got him to read — a concrete example of why representation in missions media matters.
▫️"Neighborhoods and nations" — no hierarchy of calling. A mother discipling her kids, a single person, an entrepreneur, and a cross-cultural missionary all carry assignments of equal value; the whole point is refusing to rank them.
▫️Family and proximity disciple better than content. A Chinese church's shared meals taught him that formation is incarnational — books, podcasts, and sermons help, but life-on-life is the real thing.
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