On the sparsely populated Syrian-Iraqi border, far from modern Damascus and seventy-five miles east of the Syrian town of Qamishli, a grandfatherly figure climbed aboard a small motorboat. He looked out across an arid, rolling terrain on a beautiful clear day in June 1996, five years after the Gulf War. The mans Kurdish escort steered the boat across the Tigris River at a point used by smugglers. The tiny vessel kept slipping sideways and fighting upstream on the swift current. Finally the boat landed on the far bank, in Kurdish-held, northern Iraq. The American then joined grateful Cooperative Baptist Fellowship (CBF) representatives, who were inspired and encouraged by the visit amid rumors of an imminent thrust northward by Saddam Hussein. The Muslim escorts, special bodyguards of a Kurdish faction who carried multiple passports and identities, had no way of knowing the solitary stranger, Dr. R. Keith Parks, had contributed as much to the gospel's penetration into so-called "closed" countries as any missions leader in the twentieth century.

That fact remains little known even among most missions-minded Christians. Although his name is easily recognized by many, longtime Southern Baptists, Parks receives little notice for his indisputable role in the shaping of contemporary pioneer missions. Without his direct empowerment of Baptists in frontier missions, more than 200 million non-Christians in Asia and elsewhere would have significantly fewer opportunities to hear the gospel today. Overcoming institutional resistance and even some missionary opposition, he championed a bold new approach for Southern Baptists to pioneer fields that revolutionized the success rate for penetrating vast numbers of ethnic homelands where traditional missionaries were not welcomed. For the first time in Christian history, no tribe or ethnic group in the world was absolutely beyond the potential reach of the gospel.