Beeson Divinity School has always prepared students to serve in cross-cultural missions and taughtthem to have a global mindset in ministry. Now, Beeson is home to several international students,with plans to bring in more from around the world in the coming years.
Five international students shared their journeys to Beeson and their experiences at the school forthis year’s magazine.
SZ | China
(Editor’s Note: To protect the identity and safety of this student, initials will be used in place of a name.)
For the first 22 years of her life, SZ was an atheist, influenced by the Chinese public school system and the state-controlled media. After graduating from college, she began her career as a mergers and acquisitions analyst in Singapore, where Christian worship is allowed. Her boss, who was a churchgoer, invited her to join him for a service.
“I went because I didn’t want to offend him,” she said. “I went to the church mostly to argue with Christians and tell them why they were wrong.”
After joining an evangelistic group, SZ said God “showed Himself to me in a very personal way,” making her realize how much He cared for her. “My thought system was a black box,” she said. “When God showed up, it was the first crack in that black box, and light came in.”
SZ continued to attend church and felt a desire to learn about the Bible. A year later, she was convicted of her sin and turned to Christ for salvation.
Early on in her Christian walk, she felt a call to serve the church, and as the years went by, the call became so strong that "it was impossible to do other things,” she said. She began serving in an underground Chinese church as an unpaid staff member while working as an assistant at a local university and was encouraged by church leaders to earn a theological degree.
SZ enjoys reading and said while she couldn’t get many theological books in China, she found a copy of Augustine on the Christian Life: Transformed by the Power of God by Gerald Bray, who serves as a research professor at Beeson.
Looking to learn more, she searched for Bray’s name on the internet, which brought her to Beeson’s website.
Seeing the three words at the top of Beeson’s homepage, “In-Person. Interdenominational. Evangelical,” SZ knew she had found her next step. “When I looked at those three words, something resonated with me. This is my dream school,” she said.
Adjusting to life in Birmingham was a challenge, SZ said. Having only lived in larger cities with public transportation, she could not drive, and finding somewhere to live was difficult. On top of that, she said adjusting to learning theology in English while also learning biblical Greek was stressful. "I'm so grateful to God and the Beeson community,” she said. “The staff, my classmates and the professors all helped me and carried me through my first semester and beyond. Beeson is hard, but it’s not so hard when I’m doing this in community.”
The future is unclear for SZ. She was recently told her home church won't have a position for her due to a new law outgrowing churches gathering online, which has led to shrinking church membership and the inability to support her as a staff member.
Being a Christian in China is “challenging,” SZ said. Police often raid church services and government officials will lie about seeking Christianity in order to find out where Christians meet. “Yes, security is important, but there are more important things,” she said. “We don’t want people to perish. We are willing to take risks to share the Gospel.”
SZ still plans to return to plant a church in her home country, though she knows she has much to learn before she takes that step. “I want to go back, because I care deeply about my people, and I want to do a good job, which means I need to be better than I am now,” she said.
Beeson is playing a major role in that growth. “Beeson is a tremendous gift and blessing from the Lord. There were moments when I would question myself: ‘Why didn’t you go to Singapore? Why did you come to the U.S.?'" SZ said. “But it allowed me to taste and see the goodness of God. He always shows up. He never fails.”
Emily Kueh | Malaysia
Chinese tradition encourages new mothers to stay at home with their baby for the first month of the baby’s life. It’s a time dedicated to recovery and connection. Growing up in that tradition, Emily Kueh said since that confinement period ended a month after she was born, she has been in the church—spending more time there than anywhere else outside of school.
“There was never really a time I didn’t know about Jesus Christ as my Savior and Creator, but how that really played out early on in my life was ambiguous,” Kueh said. “I remember learning Scripture but living however I wanted.”
At 18 years old, Kueh moved to Kuala Lumpur for her undergraduate degree.
There she found a church in the Reformed tradition, a church that did not apologize for calling Christians out for sinful behavior and admonishing them to live holy and loving lives. "I went and checked it out, and I never left since that Sunday," Kueh said. "That church became where I first understood what the body of Christ should look like. It was almost like a newfound faith."
Even though it's been five years since she left, Kueh said members of her Kuala Lumpur church are still her people.
In 2020, Kueh attended the KL2020 Gospel & Culture conference for Chinese pastors in Malaysia, which included well-known preachers like the late Tim Keller, Stephen Tong, D.A. Carson and others. At that conference, Kueh found out about Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia, and knew shortly that God was calling her to go. "I wouldn't have been able to do it without the support of my parents, my pastor and countless nights of tears and prayer. God sustained me through every moment," she said.
At Covenant, Kueh found a much different culture than her own but also found great professors who had a heart for students and an unwavering regard for the truth. After graduating, Kueh didn't expect to stay in the U.S., but plans changed. "I had my perfect plan laid out in front of me, and all of that basically went away overnight," she said. "I was shocked that going home was not what God had in mind."
A friend told her about Beeson, and Kueh applied, finding in Beeson something like what she experienced at Covenant: an in-person, rigorous education that forms students holistically. Kueh said the more time she spends in the Birmingham area, the more she's able to find what she needs. She is finding her place, especially at Beeson, where she spoke highly of learning from the wisdom of the faculty.
Going forward, Kueh wants to be a musician, primarily in the church—piano, organ and voice—and is benefiting from Beeson having a piano, an organ and, as of 2026, a choir that sings during chapel services in Hodges Chapel, the school’s sacred place of worship. Kueh also loves biblical research and the biblical languages and said she can imagine using it all together in the future for the praise and glory of God.
Joanna Leffler | United Kingdom
Joanna Leffler was brought up in a Christian family in the UK, where her dad served as a vicar. “I always grew up in the faith and, to an extent, I always believed,” said Leffler, who recalled becoming serious about the call to follow Jesus when she was 9 years old.
While studying biology at the University of Durham, Leffler experienced a period of doubt, as she tried to reconcile what she was learning in class with what she had always been taught in church.
There came a point where she didn’t know if she even believed in God anymore. During this time, she met a woman at her church named Meghan Kirk, who, along with her husband Alex, walked alongside her, calmed some of her fears and dealt with the untruths she had started to believe.
“There was one evening when Alex went through Psalm 22 with me. He told me why I didn’t need to be afraid of textual criticism and whether Bible translation was reliable, and why I could trust what was in the Bible,” Leffler said.
Kirk used Hebrew in their conversations, which sparked a desire in Leffler to learn biblical Hebrew. Coming out of her doubt, Leffler felt a desire to serve in ministry. She started a small group the following year and became an intern at her church after she graduated. “I loved doing the ministry training scheme, doing one-to-one discipleship, reading the Bible with different girls and doing international student ministry,” Leffler said.
Meghan Kirk foresaw Leffler thriving in ministry. So when Beeson hired Alex as an Old Testament professor in 2024, Meghan asked Leffler to consider crossing the Atlantic with them. Leffler waited a year while she finished the church internship, but her plans in 2025 "disappeared." One week after Leffler's plans changed, Meghan called and told her about the Our Risen Lord full-tuition scholarships, which Leffler received.
Despite the challenges of adjusting to a new country and new form of education, she is loving her time at Beeson. "I'm learning a great deal and can see how the things I'm learning are going to be useful. I love how pastoral the professors are and the way they have pastoral situations in mind as they're teaching," Leffler said.
Leffler said writing popular-level books might be in her future, and she also enjoyed doing college ministry and would enjoy doing it again. "It's a pivotal age, during which people need discipleship," she said. "I'd love to go back home and be part of discipling the people who've grown up through the church and the people who have come to faith at university."
Deb Salazar | Peru
At 19 years old, Deb Salazar met missionaries who had come to Peru. They invited Salazar and her classmates from the Peruvian-North American Cultural Institute (ICPNA) to watch a Christmas movie at their house. It offered an opportunity for Salazar, who was studying English at the ICPNA, to learn more of the language and build friendships.
It also introduced Salazar to the Gospel. “I wasn’t interested in God before. I had a very legalistic view of Him,” she said. “They presented another kind of God, one who is ready to save you and transform you.”
Salazar became a Christian and began serving the Lord by translating for English-speaking missionaries who came to Peru. "My Christian walk has been a daily understanding of what it means to walk with Him, what it means to surrender," she said.
Salazar wanted to earn a master’s degree in Christian counseling to help care for missionaries like the ones who shared Jesus with her, as well as others in the church. Through an interaction with missionaries from Christ Church Birmingham, she learned about Beeson and soon found herself on campus in the Master of Arts in Christian Counseling program.
The adjustment had its rough moments, she said. She’s missed home and Peruvian food. But she knows the Lord is at work. “I belong where the Lord wants me to be," Salazar said. "Wherever the Lord is, that's my home."
She has benefited from the Beeson community, from building friendships with staff and students to being mentored by Beeson faculty. “It was mind-blowing for me to hear (Dean Douglas) Sweeney say, ‘Let me buy your lunch with the teachers,’” Salazar said. “Mentorship is huge for believers. I want to meet with the teachers and get to know them and learn. They don’t think, ‘We are above you.’ We’re a team growing together.”
Salazar approaches the future with trust in the Lord and a desire to obey Him. “I just want to be a faithful student and see what the Lord has for me,” she said.
Peter Bollipalli | India
After his undergraduate education, Peter Bollipalli felt defeated by the brokenness of the world. He grew up in India in a Christian home and attended church regularly. But in college, he fell into worldly habits and walked away from God. “I had seen too much and was too broken to trust anyone,” he said.
Although his heart was broken, Bollipalli knew that if he had "any hope of being loved," it would come from God.
After completing his undergraduate degree, Bollipalli moved to Birmingham to earn a master’s degree in data science from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), where he met Stephen Merwin, a campus minister at Reformed University Fellowship–International (RUF), who showed him how to be a disciple of Christ. Through this relationship, Bollipalli grew as a Christian, met mentors and felt God calling him to ministry. While interning with The Navigators, he realized how "little knowledge of God I have," but even then, he also saw how God can use that little bit of knowledge to bring nonbelievers to Himself.
Bollipalli is loving his time at Beeson and has learned from both fellow international students and his American peers.
“I could not ask for a better experience at this stage in my life,” Bollipalli said.
At RUF, Bollipalli witnessed ministry to international students at UAB, in addition to one-on-one discipleship, both of which interest him. While unsure what he'll do after graduating, he knows God will use his time at Beeson to further His Kingdom. “I’m really thankful to God that He put me here to learn more about Him,” Bollipalli said. “I want to be faithful to walk in the direction God points me to, and He will give me the strength to walk in it.”