by Rev. Casey Southerland
PMU Field Director in Cincinnati, OH
the Missions Banner, April/May 2025
In this Banner overviewing PMU’s Home and Foreign Missions, I will be explaining my role as Field Director working out of the Home Office in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s no overstatement to say that the ministry of the Field Director relates to every aspect of PMU’s work. Clearly, this represents a broad range of responsibility, but it is also a uniquely blessed role as I get a close-up view of how the Lord is working to fulfill His mission of blessing the nations through our agency.
As the Field Director, I work under the Governing Council and closely with the PMU President to support and oversee the work on our home and foreign fields. My chief desire as the Field Director is to lead our Great Commission labors so that God’s glory is magnified, and His people can serve with faithfulness and joy.
A large part of my work is done in promoting our current missions and recruiting senders and goers for future Great Commission efforts. This means regularly visiting churches, schools, and conferences to present our missions. These are opportunities to show how we, PMU, churches, and individual supporters, labor together in taking God’s glorious grace to the ends of the earth, establishing healthy churches where the means of grace can be accessed and enjoyed and where He can receive the glory due to His name.
One of the ways I work to mobilize Christians to engage in missions is through Team Timothy. These teams are short-term missions to support and encourage our existing missions or take advantage of another opportunity to engage in an aspect of the Great Commission. Like most things, promotion and recruitment have elements of both trial and blessing. The trial here is time away from my family, and the blessing is being used in the cause of missions and meeting many saints and servants of Christ with whom I get to fellowship.
Another part of my work is exercising oversight of our mission fields and home office. This means working for and with our council, our missionaries and our staff to ensure that we are all pulling in the same direction in our efforts to “declare God’s glory among the nations” (Psalm 96:3a). It also means regular calls to missionaries and visits to their fields which often includes the joy of hands-on participation in their work.
In addition to the Field Director, the Office, includes two part-time staff members which are supported by the General Fund. Kelly Southerland is our Office Manager and Publications Specialist. Tom Wright is our Bookkeeper. Together we help to lighten the load of the financial, communication, and administrative demands on our missionaries. The office processes all of PMU’s financial support and keeps the ministries and their praises and prayer needs before our supporters. The office staff also manages an array of logistical needs related to missionary funds, reimbursements, publications, furloughs, annual budgets, short-term teams, and the behind-the-scenes legal and operational requirements that very few will ever know about. Although there have been difficulties faced in this side of the ministry in the past, rectifying the IRS’s loss of PMU’s tax-exempt records, and addressing the delays and setbacks with immigration regarding our church planter, Andy Yong, we praise the Lord for resolving these issues, and for allowing us to witness the commitment to global missions that exists in our BP churches and PMU supporters. It is a true blessing and a privilege to work alongside these partners in the gospel.
