October 1, 2026
Rylee Henderson was seven years old when she responded to the Vacation Bible School invitation at Peavine Baptist Church in Rock Spring, Georgia. “The ABC’s of salvation made sense to me,” she said. Some years later, while at Middle School Youth Camp, the then-rising seventh-grader was impacted by the missions emphasis and the focus on praying for the lost.
In response to her counselor’s question about her takeaway from the retreat, she replied that she “might want to be a part of reducing lostness.” Pursuing opportunities to do that while still in high school, she took part in a medical mission trip to Honduras with her grandmother’s church, Bowdon Baptist. Jeremy Elam, former Children’s Pastor and now Connections Pastor at Peavine, said of Rylee, “From the moment she accepted Christ, her life took on a clearly missional direction. Even in her school years, she and a small group of friends began a Bible study and were continually seeking opportunities to introduce others to Jesus.”
Still seeking direction about how God would use this passion for missions, Rylee enrolled at Georgia Tech to pursue an engineering degree. She soon discovered the Baptist Collegiate Ministry at Georgia Tech, led at the time by Campus Minister Warren Skinner and first-year campus intern Eric Swenson. There, Rylee was welcomed and challenged to live out her faith.
Discipled by several older students who helped her grow in sharing her faith and in her prayer life, she joined the leadership team and began to see how pivotal a time college was for students. As she shared her faith with classmates, she met students grappling with the nature of truth and coming to a personal understanding of what they believed.
Rylee continued attending her home church whenever she was back in Rock Spring, but while at school, she began attending M28 Church, a young congregation planted in partnership with Georgia Baptists 12 years ago in Atlanta, not far from Tech. “Experience with a ‘new’ church was really good for me to see how to reach a community and the city around us," she said. "I found a body of believers that cared for one another and a church that has a heart for the nations.”
Matt Dye, pastor at M28, said of their ministry with college students, “We never could have imagined how many college students the Lord would send to us, but it has been a joy as they are such a part of our church. Our aim is to pour into them for the season they are with us, and we intentionally are praying and encouraging them to discern if God might be leading them for more than a college degree during their college years.”
The Baptist Collegiate Ministries of the Georgia Baptist Mission Board calls their summer missions program Send Me Now. And with a growing understanding of how God was using her to share gospel truth in a campus setting, Rylee joined a Send Me Now team in the Summer of 2023 that went to do that in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
The team was led by David Roland, Campus Minister for the BCM at Shorter University. David had joined a Partnership Trip to BA that the GBMB Church Strengthening Missions Team had organized in May of 2022, and he was taking a group of students that summer to work with the International Mission Board team in BA, which had just launched a strategy to help churches reach the over 500,000 university students that were in the BA area. For Roland, who has seen five students from the Shorter BCM serve as Journeymen through the IMB, Rylee’s journey reflects the incredible importance that Send Me Now, Semester Missions, and short-term missions can play in nurturing the call to missions and ministry. In his time at Shorter, Roland has seen such involvement foster a vision for missions abroad as well as at home.
For Rylee, on that trip with the team to Buenos Aires, “God opened my eyes to the fact that there are students all over the world who are in the spiritual situation that I saw at Georgia Tech, yet they do not have the same opportunities for spiritual growth. Believing students there were not often equipped to meet that need. A big part of my discipleship in college was having others take me along with them to share the gospel. And they lacked student organizations (like BCM). Students in BA shared with me that they saw other students who were not believers, but they did not know how to reach them.”
The Send Me Now team joined the IMB team in BA, which had connected with Christian students from partnering churches. Their team prayer-walked campuses, evangelized in public spaces, visited in churches, and shared about reaching university students. Rylee came away from that trip with the confirmation that university ministry was “on my heart for ministry and missions and that there was a real need internationally to engage university campuses.”
During college, long-time BCM Campus Minister Warren Skinner retired and Eric Swenson, who had previously interned with Warren, became Campus Minister at Georgia Tech. Needing an intern and seeing how God was leading Rylee, Eric offered Rylee the newly titled Campus Missionary position. So, as she started her new position with an engineering firm upon her return that summer, she also began to serve part-time as Campus Missionary at Tech. After a year serving part-time, Rylee left her engineering job in the Fall of 2024 to serve full-time as Campus Missionary at the Georgia Tech BCM, take some seminary classes, and continue the application process with the International Mission Board to become a career missionary that she had begun the previous Spring.
Today, Rylee Henderson has completed two years as BCM Campus Missionary and is currently in IMB Field Personnel Orientation in Richmond. In January, she will go to language school and is expecting to be on the field by January of 2027.
This summer, Georgia Baptist Collegiate Ministries is again sending a Send Me Now team to Buenos Aires. Unlike the shorter trip the original team made, this team that will arrive in BA this June will spend five weeks as Summer Sojourners serving with the IMB, focusing on reaching university students, and encouraging churches in BA that are striving to do the same.
Rylee shared that as she started the IMB application process and was asked to decide about where she would like to serve, she recalled how God spoke to her heart about missions at age 12. She always thought she would serve in a more rural setting, but her experiences with BCM and in Argentina made her realize the need among university students to be equipped to share the gospel and make disciples. As she looked over the opportunities to serve with the IMB and prayed for God’s leadership, the university students she had met in Buenos Aires came back to mind. The position for a Career Missionary targeting the university segment in BA was still open.
Georgia Tech Campus Minister Eric Swenson said he is seeing more students with stories like Rylee’s. They arrive at college having professed faith in Christ and taken the first steps of discipleship and witnessing through their local church. Maybe they have had missions involvement, but perhaps they have come from a congregation or life situation where that was not a possibility. Baptist Collegiate Ministries and collegiate churches become the next step in that process.
These students are able to put into practice a lifestyle of sharing the Gospel every day with a diverse community and in settings often quite different from where they grew up. Programs like Send Me Now and short-term mission trips provide opportunities for any student to go.
From the gospel being preached to a seven-year-old girl in VBS to a career missionary preparing for the field, God used three Georgia Baptist churches, a campus ministry, and the cooperative effort of a state mission board as the pipeline that raised up, called out, prepared, and sent. This synergy is by God’s design. This is why the GBMB Church Strengthening Missions Team encourages the local church to intentionally create a missional strategy that includes a focus on sending as the ultimate strategic goal. Pray, give, go, and send. This is the challenge that Christ gives to His church, and one that young adults like Rylee are accepting.
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Keith Ivey has served as a Missions Consultant on the Church Strengthening Team of the Georgia Baptist Mission Board since 2019. He can be reached at kivey@gabaptist.org.
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