At first glance, Todd Bridges seems like an unlikely candidate to fill the new role at Covenant as the Coordinator of Intercultural Engagement.
He acknowledges the initial doubts students may have: “I’m not a missionary kid. I’m not a third culture kid. I grew up in Tuscaloosa, Alabama … Everybody looked like me, talked like me, acted like me … I played baseball. I played basketball. I was in the ballpark everyday … I was a classic American boy.”
However, Bridges is passionate about sharing his story of how God took him from a place of cultural unawareness and gave him a love for engaging with other cultures and a deep heart for domestic and global missions.
It all began when he was working towards his undergraduate degree at the University of Alabama and was invited by his college ministry pastor, Dave, on a Spring Break mission trip to Mexico in 2002.
While this Mexico trip would change his life path, Bridges initially resisted the idea: “I said, ‘Dave, I don’t want to go to Mexico, I want to go to the beach with my friends.’ But through God’s grace that beach trip did not work out for me, and I found myself on a 24-hour bus ride down to Mexico. And it changed my world.”
As Bridges entered another culture, served people vastly different from himself, and played simple games with village children, his outlook on life changed, and he developed a love for missions. In his own words: “The Lord started transforming my heart.”
In Mexico, he also met his wife Jessica, who was serving as an eight-month missionary intern. For nearly twenty years, they have been married and faithfully serving the Lord together. The Bridges have seven children—Gabriella, Ysabella, Anabella, Orie, Hosea, Daniella and Joella.
After returning from Mexico and finishing his undergraduate degree, Bridges attended Bible college in Dallas, Texas. While there, he began teaching English as a second language to international students. Since then, he has taught both Spanish and English in various settings—in high school, at the university level, as a private tutor, and on the mission field. He received his Master’s degree in Education Curriculum Focusing on TESOL from Concordia University-Portland and is finishing his doctoral work in Higher Education Leadership from Concordia University-Chicago.
For the last seventeen years, Bridges has served as a missionary with Worldwide Evangelization for Christ (WEC). He and his family have been called to serve overseas in Equatorial Guinea and—most recently—Indonesia, where Bridges taught English to students at Petra Christian University in Surabaya.
Though being a declared missionary is illegal in Indonesia because of the laws against proselytizing (evangelizing), Bridges used his job as an English teacher to disciple students at the university. He and his family also found other opportunities for ministry, such as organizing Bible camps throughout Indonesia, helping children at study houses in the poorest neighborhoods of Surabaya, and volunteering at orphanages.
Bridges comes to the Covenant community as the Coordinator for Intercultural Engagement after serving in Indonesia for six and a half years and teaching non-native students at the University of Alabama. He hopes to share his love for culture and missions with the student body.
He desires for the Covenant intercultural program to bring students together in genuine love for each other. When asked about the goal of the program, Bridges said: “We’re celebrating other cultures. We’re not celebrating other races because there’s only one race—there’s only the human race. But there are different cultures, and so we’re all one body, and we can learn from each other.” The intercultural program is a space where we can celebrate our unity in Christ but also recognize the different cultures and experiences that contribute to our uniqueness.
As part of his job, Bridges heads COR 337—the Intercultural Experience class. He is excited to help students find opportunities to complete credit for this course and increase their cultural awareness. In addition, Bridges hopes to foster a deeper passion for missions at Covenant and even organize mission trips. “I am passionate about mobilizing students to serve the nations domestically, locally or internationally,” he said.
Bridges prays that students know that they are called to meaningful work for the sake of Christ’s Kingdom. Bridges knows that “the majority of students will not go overseas and serve in other countries.” However, this should not prevent us from realizing that God has called each of us to faithful Gospel ministry.
Bridges encourages our Covenant community to move away from our cultural seclusion and unawareness and see the world as it is: in need of the Gospel. When we look out at the world, we see people’s desperate needs—not just materially but spiritually. For Bridges, loving our “different” neighbor means loving their broken soul. He tells us: “You can’t just go rescue people out of poverty and slavery without giving them hope for their soul. God is after our souls; He’s after our hearts.”
While embracing a global perspective should convict us to be mission-minded, Bridges says embracing a global perspective also gives us a beautiful picture of the Christian faith: “The Christian faith is not mono-cultural. It is every tongue and every tribe. One Gospel. One Body. One race. Multiple cultures of every tribe but all brothers and sisters in Christ.” Our faith is strengthened by believers all around the world.
Above all, Bridges wants his story to remind us that “we are made to proclaim the Gospel—that’s in America, that’s wherever you are at.”