09/09/2025
Who: YOU are invited to join with other Cooperating Baptists from across Oklahoma in an evening of inspiration, celebration, and fellowship!
What: CBF OK’s annual Celebrating Excellence Banquet, honoring five award recipients and a keynote speaker over a reception and meal.
When: Sunday evening, November 2nd. Check-in, reception, and silent auction begin at 5:00 P.M. Banquet, meal, and special program begin at 6:00 P.M.
Where: Sam Noble Museum of Natural History (2401 Chautauqua Ave, Norman, OK 73072).
Why: To celebrate the excellent work of Christ in CBF Oklahoma and beyond!
How: Register by fully COMPLETING the registration form. Tables of 8 are $600 or individual tickets are $75.
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About the keynote speaker:
Rev. Dr. Robert P. Sellers grew up in Pensacola and Tampa, Florida, as the son of a Baptist pastor-scholar and wife. He attended Mississippi College during the years of “Mississippi Burning,” where his passion for racial justice began to be heightened. During college, he served as Youth Minister at Woodland Hills Baptist Church, Jackson. After graduating from college in 1967, Rob was a Summer Missionary in the Philippines, where for eleven weeks he worked alongside career missionaries in multiple ministries in many cities. After one year at Southern Seminary, he returned to Southeast Asia as a Missionary Journeyman student worker in Indonesia. It was there that he fell in love with the beauty of diverse religious cultures and traditions and with the gracious people of Java. It was also the place where he first heard the name of Janie Tyler, who began her Journeyman service in Cali, Colombia, in 1969. Rob and Janie met at Glorieta in 1971 at Foreign Missions Week and recently they celebrated their 53rd wedding anniversary.
Back at Southern Seminary to complete his MDiv, Rob was Minister to Youth at Broadway Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. When he and Janie married in 1972, they lived three years in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Rob was Minister to Youth at St. John’s Baptist Church and Janie was Baptist Campus Minister at UNCC. They were appointed by the Foreign Mission Board, SBC, as career missionaries to Indonesia in 1975 and spent 23 years together working in that fourth largest country in the world, which is also the most populous Muslim nation on the globe. Their work centered on youth education and training, both through Indonesian-language churches and as professors at the Indonesia Baptist Theological Seminary. Ministering to both Indonesian and Chinese seminary students, ex-patriot youth from multiple nations, and MKs (Missionary Kids) from scores of families serving several Christian mission organizations, was especially rewarding. They became fluent in Bahasa Indonesia and worked and taught in the language. Both of their children, Tyler and Marnie, were born in the Kediri Baptist Hospital in East Java, and they grew up grateful to be MKs and fascinated by and committed to their Third-Culture Kid lives as bilingual and bicultural “citizens of the world.”
During an extended home leave, Rob and Janie earned graduate degrees at (the old) Southern Seminary – he a PhD in theological ethics, New Testament theology, and world religions, and she a Masters of Christian Education. They then returned to Java to teach again in the Baptist seminary and in the Indonesia Branch of the Asia Baptist Graduate Theological Seminary. When they lost their visas to Indonesia in 1997, they settled in Waco, where Rob taught as a visiting professor at Baylor, both at Truett Seminary and in the Religion Department of the university. In 1998, they moved to Abilene, where he became Connally Professor of Missions and professor of theology at Logsdon Seminary at Hardin-Simmons University. He took students on numerous month-long Study Abroad classes to Eastern and Western Europe, Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia. He brought many prominent world religionists to Logsdon – including Diana Eck of the Pluralism Project at Harvard, Marc Ellis and Jon Johnson of Baylor’s faculty, and Arun Gandhi, the grandson of the Mahatma. In 2014, he was inducted into the “Martin Luther King, Jr., International College of Ministers and Laity” of Morehouse College, and in 2015, the HSU faculty chose him as the university’s Piper Professor candidate for statewide recognition. Rob retired after teaching 18 years at Logsdon, largely because he was becoming very involved in the interreligious movement far beyond Abilene.
Locally, he was actively engaged in Abilene as president several times of the Abilene Interfaith Council. Nationally, he was a member, representing CBF, of the Interfaith Commission of the National Council of Churches USA, where he wrote the draft of five essays explaining and commending interreligious relationships for all the denominations and communions affiliated with the National Council. Internationally, Rob was a member for ten years of the Interfaith Relations Commission of the Baptist World Alliance. For seven years, he was a trustee, vice chair, and then chair of the Board of the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, and under his leadership the 6th convening of the Parliament was held in Toronto in 2018.
After being a cross-cultural missionary for 25 years, his new “mission” in life is teaching others about the importance of working cooperatively with persons of multiple faith traditions to create a better world. In his work with the Parliament, Rob gave presentations at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Princeton Theological Seminary, Wake Forest Divinity School, Campbell University, the Connecticut Council for Interreligious Understanding, the Interfaith Alliance of Central California, the North American Interfaith Network, and numerous other venues foreign and domestic. He was invited to be a non-Muslim observer and speaker for meetings of the Society for the Promotion of Peace in Muslim Societies in Morocco – when the Marrakesh Declaration was ratified in 2016, and in Abu Dhabi, UAE – when the Charter for a New Alliance of Virtues was discussed and approved. He also was an invited participant at the Alliance of Virtues Conference in Washington, D.C., in 2018 – a gathering of international leaders of the three Abrahamic religions.
Rob has visited, studied and taught in more than 40 countries and traveled thousands of miles representing the interfaith movement. Since retiring, more than 75 articles he has written have been published online by Baptist News Global, Good Faith Media and The Interfaith Observer. Meanwhile, Janie served on both the Texas and National CBF Coordinating Councils, and was an officer of the Board of Trustees of the Baptist University of the Americas for nine years. Now, Rob and Janie are retired and live in Waco where they can be near their children and five grandchildren. They are active members of First Baptist Church, Waco.
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