Home / News and Information /

BPC alumna joins Mission to Unreached Peoples as a missionary

Erika Parks

DALLAS—Brewton-Parker College alumna Erika Alcorn Parks, a veteran of 20 years of Baptist mission service in Southeast Asia, will become a missionary of Mission to Unreached Peoples (MUP), effective Nov. 1.

Her husband Dr. S. Kent Parks, also a 20-year veteran of Baptist missions, will become the agency’s international director.

MUP, a broadly interdenominational agency, bases its U.S. office in Seattle, Wash., and a Canadian office in Abbotsford, BC. Kent and Erika will establish the international office initially in Dallas, Texas, and will work in close relationship with the other two offices.

Erika, a native of Valdosta, is a 1975 graduate of BPC, with an associate of arts degree. She also earned a B.S. degree in elementary education from Valdosta State University and a master of religious education degree from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, Texas. She is a former elementary school teacher in Valdosta and Savannah.

The 25-year-old MUP agency focuses on spiritual and physical ministries to unreached peoples around the world, and currently has 300 personnel who raise their own support and serve a number of people groups in 22 countries.

At MUP, the Parks will focus on helping stimulate a global movement to raise up thousands of strategy teams to reach the almost two billion people who are from the least evangelized people groups.

The MUP network will continue to expand its role and vision and work to multiply its connections with other like-minded organizations and churches in North America and in other countries, Parks said.

“MUP is multi-denominational but part of our hope is that we could offer another option to Baptist churches who still want to prioritize sending long term workers to unreached people groups,” Parks said. “We will retain our strong Baptist ties and identity.”

Kent and Erika Parks bring a lifetime of experience to the MUP agency, including Baptist missions service in Indonesia and Malaysia, most notably as unreached people group strategy coordinators and as innovators in initiatives to reach the nearly 28 percent of the world “that has little or no access to any form of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

They have two daughters in college, Katy and Lindsay.

-BPC-