History of the Donald Owens School of World Missions

 The Donald Owens School of World Mission (DOSWM) was officially launched in September 2004. It was a unique blessing for the found of APNTS, Dr. Donald D. Owens, General Superintendent Emeritus, to be present on September 21-23 to deliver the first lecture for the School of World Mission. “APNTS is located in the heart of urban Manila with a very diverse student body,” stated Owens. “It is an ideal place to teach missions.”
The vision for the school of world mission was born in April 2004 when APNTS celebrated its twentieth anniversary. Members of a planning session that included Dr. Owens, Dr. Donahue, Dr. Cobb, Dr. Fukue, Rev. Dave Hane and Dr. Cunningham envisioned that the Donald Owens School of World Mission would Provide a venue for educating regional missionaries. Planning session participants also expressed their hope that the Donald Owens School of World Mission would help the Church of the Nazarene develop new approaches to missionary work and to the process of discovering, developing, and deploying missionaries for the twenty-first centry.
Plans for the Donald Owens School of World Mission include sponsoring lectureships and drawing in visiting professors, as well as offering summer mission institutes. It will also help to coordinate distance and extension education mission programs. Most importantly, the School of World Mission is intended to inspire passion for the mission of God.
More specifically, the planning committee envisioned that the school would:

  1. Educate regional missionaries (non-formally as well as formally);
  2. Become a primary missionary training center for other prospective Nazarene missionaries;
  3. Remain a place where each course is relevant to missions in the region and directly addresses the regions that APNTS serves;
  4. Provide a means of procuring funds and endowments, as well as gaining visibility for the missions programs and funding lectureships and visiting professors;
  5. Initiate summer “institutes” consisting of a mission track of three summer courses, possibly attracting non-Nazarene missionaries and utilizing non-Nazarene resources;
  6. Foster distance and extension mission program in coordination with regional communications;
  7. Enable holistic ministry and evangelism for the seminary community and interaction with districts;
  8. Develop multiple internship sites;
  9. Develop new missions paradigms for the twenty-first century that design new approaches to missionary work and the processes of discovering, developing and deploying missionaries;
  10. Excite a passion for the mission of God.

A by-product is that a quality mission training program at APNTS will help keep Asia-Pacific leaders serving on the Asia-Pacific Region. Dr. Robert Coleman delivered the second lecture series of the Owens School of World Mission in January.
APNTS currently offers the Master of Divinity degree, the Master of Arts in Christian Communication with a concentration in cross-cultural communication, the Master of Science in Theology with a concentration in missions, and a Graduate Diploma in missions.
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