Burns journeys from across the pond and back in pursuit of faithful coaching, disciple-making

Editor’s Note: The following article originally appeared in the spring 2026 issue of Southwestern News.

From a young age, Rob Burns knew he wanted to be a professional soccer player. He spent his childhood growing up in a suburb of Birmingham, England, on the field, playing for hours to achieve his goal. Little did he know the role these formative years would play in the eventual founding of multiple, powerful ministries.

Burns came from a household of academia, his father being a professor.

“I grew up in an academic’s home, you know, lots of conversation, lots of thinking about the world,” Burns recalls, though he would choose a different path. “I decided I wanted to be a soccer player.”

While not religious, his family was loving and supportive of his goals growing up, his mother always believing in him and his father never missing a chance to see his son play.

From age 10 to 19 years, Burns was a part of a youth soccer league that was run by a professional club, the Wolverhampton Wanderers. Burns decided to pursue his undergraduate studies, choosing studies in sports, though his father recommended business.

“I remember him saying to me, ‘Oh, that’s a degree in jogging,’” Burns says, remembering his father’s initial reaction. “He just had a great sense of humor.”

To meet his father in the middle, Burns decided to study the “body and mind,” pursuing a sports and psychology degree at the University of Staffordshire in Stoke-on-Trent, England. Going into university, Burns recalled chasing what seemed to be important pursuits.

“If you think about in society and with your peers, what’s going to make you popular?” Burns recalls asking himself. “Guaranteed, sport’s going to make you popular. Being good with the girls is going to make you popular. And being smart, that’s going to make you popular. And I thought that that would not only make you popular, but successful and happy.”

He began modeling alongside his studies and soccer pursuits, and spent his free time in pubs with friends meeting women. Burns remembers thinking how idyllic it must have looked to some on the outside, though looking back, all he could recall was the immense pressure and self-doubts that came with the lifestyle.

“A professional soccer coach is not there to make you feel good,” Burns says. “So, while others are looking on and saying, ‘Oh, wow, you must have a great life, you’re with the professional club,’ I was being being judged and criticized all the time. My self-esteem wasn’t great.”

Though Burns would go on to play soccer at a high level, semi-pro league after graduating, a significant knee injury made it clear that his dreams of becoming a professional soccer player would not be fully realized.

Burns also remembers feeling disheartened during this time due to the superficial nature of dating in the world of modeling.

“You’re dating them because of how they look, and they’re dating you because of how you look,” Burns says bluntly. “You can imagine, you’re getting dumped all the time and you’re dumping others all the time. So, what is that doing to your self-esteem?”

These troubles would come to a head when Burns discovered he’d failed his entire first year of school.

“In my first year of my degree, from an academic’s home, I failed the whole thing,” Burns says. “And my worldview of what it was going to take to be happy and successful—in sports, in work, in dating lots of pretty girls—was smashed into small pieces.”

Burns was permitted to continue in his studies, though now uncertain of his path moving forward. However, it was at this time that he met Jenny by a chance encounter.

It was Burns’s 23^rd birthday and he was having a party with friends. Though he did not know her, Jenny approached him, thanking Burns for his invite. While he could not recall inviting her, he was happy to meet her, and she asked him one question that would be burned into his memory.

“‘Are you a Christian?’” Jenny asked.

Burns responded instantly.

“‘Of course, I am,’” he says of that conversation. “‘I was born in a Christian country.’”

“‘If you were born in McDonald’s, would that make you a hamburger?’” she retorted before walking off.

Burns remembers standing there, his friends laughing at him, but personally moved by the question.

“‘Is she saying I’m not a good person?’” Burns remembers asking himself, saying he pondered her point of Christianity not being a result of your place of origin.

“It wouldn’t leave me,” Burns says of the questions in his mind. “It was God.”

A few weeks later, Burns encountered Jenny again on campus, seeing her as she walked to the Christian Union building. He recalls seeing the genuine, not superficial beauty beaming from her face.

“Her face was shining like an angel’s face, and it wasn’t about being pretty and beautiful,” though Burns says she is that as well. “It was about having the purpose of God on your life. And as she walked across, there was this whisper in my heart that said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to have that? Wouldn’t you like to have what she has?’”

Burns approached her and after a few wise-cracks told her straight-forwardly that he had been insulted by her comment about his Christianity, but wanted to hear more.

For the next eight months, Burns and Jenny met over coffee and went for walks, him speaking of his own worldly philosophies and her sharing from her Bible. She began taking him to church where he was further exposed to the Christian worldview. Burns recalls seeing people truly worshiping the Lord.

“I’m listening and I’m thinking, these people mean it, this is really something,” Burns says. “Because if this is true, I wouldn’t mind some of that, because I’m desperate inside. I’m empty.”

He approached Jenny with these feelings, hesitant at first  because of fear that he would be separated from his non-believing parents. She explained that as a Christian, he could simply share the Gospel with them himself (which he would successfully do as they were each saved a decade later). Burns also felt that if he accepted Christ into his life, he would have to fully pursue a life of ministry, which at the time he only understood to be through priesthood.

“The only understanding I had is a guy in a frock, a guy in a dress with a collar, not a good look when you’ve been wearing Hugo Boss suits,” Burns says jokingly. “And she just laughed at me, and she said, ‘You know what, Rob? You might be called into ministry and wear a tracksuit full time.’”

After receiving these affirmations from Jenny, who would later become his wife, in May of 1987, Burns found himself in his pastor’s office giving his life to Christ.

“I gave it all to the Lord,” Burns says. “I gave all of my swagger, I gave all of my bravado, I gave all of my trying to prove myself to others. I gave it back to God, and He gave me Himself, and I’ve never been the same.”

A little over a year after graduating, while waiting for God’s call on the next move in his life, he received an offer to play soccer and coach at an academy for the Houston Dynamos in Texas. Burns accepted and moved to the United States.

Once in Houston, he immediately got to work, playing during the week and coaching kids aged 5 to 19 on the weekends. He appreciated the manicured soccer fields and the nature of the work, but soon after starting he felt a crystal-clear call from the Lord.

“He said, ‘Rob, this is why I gave you the gift of soccer, and this is why I gave you the gift of communication, and this is why I gave you the gift of Me,’” Burns says of that moment. “‘I want you to come here and share the Gospel using the game of soccer.’ And so, I knew it was clear.”

When the Dynamos went out of business a few years later, Burns used his connections with the players on the team to form a new soccer ministry in Houston called Youth Sports International (laying a foundation for what is today known as SportsQuest). From 1991 until his departure in 1996, Burns’s ministry would see more than 1,100 soccer players and their parents come to know Christ.

During that time of sports ministry, Burns began to feel the call to attend seminary, beginning with another verbal cue from his now wife, Jenny.

“You put more energy into your five-minute Bible talk than you do in your soccer coaching session,” Jenny commented on his Bible lessons with the young athletes.

And just as the questions she’d asked him so many years before had stuck with him, this statement now rang in his mind as well.

“It really made me ponder, you know, why is that?” Burns says. “Why do I love to do that so much?”

He did feel teaching soccer was important, especially for the students in his program as they were all “select players,” ones that had high chances of playing in high schools and universities. However, he admitted to himself that he was finding more excitement in the Bible studies.

He went to his peers with this realization, receiving agreement that perhaps soccer was not the end goal of the Lord’s plan for his life. He continued to question what that goal may be when, while participating in a Bible study at church, he was asked to explain “what he was made for” in one sentence.

“I struggled with one sentence, because if you give me two, I’ll mention sport, if you give me one, I don’t mention sport,” Burns says. “And I found myself saying, ‘I was put on this earth to share the Gospel with lost people, people who don’t know Him, to disciple people into walking with God closer, and to multiply leaders that they might do that with someone else.’”

After hearing this answer, an elder from his study group invited Burns to lunch, where he asked plainly what Burns was doing to prepare for that calling. Burns said he read his Bible every day, shared the message, and preached. But when the elder asked if that was enough, Burns admitted it was not.

“‘Son, it’s time to go to seminary,’” the elder told Burns.

After praying about it with Jenny, Burns left Youth Sports International and moved to Fort Worth, enrolling at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in 1996 to pursue his Master of Divinity in missions and evangelism. Soon after enrolling, Burns became one of Roy Fish’s youth evangelists, traveling with the legendary evangelism professor to share the Word.

“He would take me in his black Cadillac,” Burns says. “… At regional evangelism events, I would speak to the youth in college. He would speak to the adults. I would juggle my soccer ball and share the Gospel. We’d see hundreds coming to the Lord.”

While in seminary, Burns also founded a new ministry running soccer camps at Highland Park Presbyterian Church. He spent his days driving from class to the soccer fields near the church, promoting the program and recruiting staff, writing curriculum for it, and working to help it grow into a proper soccer program. Burns ran the program until his graduation in 1999, when it was taken over by Park City Baptist Church and operated for another 18 years.

During his seminary years, Burns credits Wedgwood Baptist Church as being his home church in the United States. While in seminary, Burns preached occasionally at Wedgwood and was mentored by the senior pastor, Al Meredith, who serves on the Southwestern Advisory Council.

“We used to meet at 5:45 a.m. on a Friday morning, we would go for two hours, and it was like heaven came down,” Burns says. “That man knows every secret, that man knows every part of my life, laid bare before that man, and he loved me, and he challenged me, and he was used by God to deepen my walk, and he’s done it ever since.”

While at Wedgwood, Burns met Jeff Laster, a fellow Southwesterner who was on staff at the church at the time. They bonded over church and school as they each pursued their degrees.

“His heart still is mentoring people,” Laster says of Burns’s evanglisitc nature. “Just mentoring other pastors and pouring into them and helping them become better evangelists and better ministers.”

Even with all the other opportunities he discovered in the Fort Worth area, Burns says he holds his time at Southwestern in high regard.

“I have every respect,” Burns says. “I couldn’t have asked for a better seminary. Couldn’t have asked for more love, couldn’t have asked for more support, couldn’t have asked for more quality. It was a precious season of my life. It was about three and bit years of absolute joy to be at Southwestern Seminary.”

Though not immediately clear where, Burns knew he wanted to do missionary work somewhere after graduation, so he visited the International Mission Board (IMB) mission office and said: “I hate to say this, because I know you could send me anywhere, but my wife and I want to lay this out—we’ll go anywhere.”

Six months went by before Burns received an offer to meet with the IMB Head of Western Europe.

Burns and his wife were excited at the prospect of moving to Spain, Italy, or France, but when they met with him, they were surprised to learn the offer was for a job in Bridgend, South Wales.

“You offer the world to God, and He then puts you 100 miles from where you were born,” Burns says of their reaction. “That is underwhelming, to say the least.”

Though disappointed at first, Burns and his wife remained faithful and optimistic, taking the position. Following his graduation, Burns was ordained as a minister by Wedgwood Baptist Church, who sponsored and sent him as a missionary to Bridgend with the IMB.

For the next decade, Burns and Jenny worked for the IMB in Wales, starting a program that saw 200 interns participate, playing a part in many church plants and serving in areas of business and education as well as in church leadership positions. Burns said his philosophy of training is based on the  Head, Hands, Heart principle.

“We started a program that involved learning with the head, practicing with the hands, reflecting with the heart,” Burns explains. “And that started when I was with the IMB, where the student came and did a university level qualification, but then did 35 hours of missions with the church, and then was mentored and coached by me, one on one, and we called it Head, Hands, Heart.”

In 2011, the Burnses retired from their work with the IMB and founded Missional Links Wales, a ministry he has spent the last 15 years fostering and growing into a robust church partnership program. Through Missional Links Wales, Burns saw “Welsh and USA churches working together in unity and with determination and passion in a missional movement that brings spiritual transformation to the nation of Wales.” In the summer of 2026, this program will transition to being the responsibility of the Welsh and U.S. churches.

When Burns founded Missional Links, Laster served on the advisory board and helped send American mission teams across the Atlantic to serve. Laster, who continues to work closely with Missional Links, is proud to see the continued affect the ministry has had, not just in Wales, but in his own Fort Worth community as well.

Laster says Burns’s ministry has allowed him to witness “the fruit of these kids who go over and spend a year there growing, being able to grow in the faith and share the Gospel and just stretch the things that they maybe thought they couldn’t do.”

Burns continues to enjoy teaching, preaching, coaching, and mentoring. He has three sons, all grown and carrying their family’s legacy with them, one as a head teacher, another a school counselor, and the third a semi-professional soccer player and Wales national leader of Ambassadors Football, a soccer ministry located in 35 countries.

Burns is also transitioning into a new honorary position as the chairman of the Evangelical Alliance Wales advisory group, part of the World Evangelical Alliance which unites churches for Gospel witness and discipleship.

“So in this new transition, while it’s education, preaching, training, influence, and coaching, I think my influence is going to spread a little more as chairman of the Evangelical Alliance advisory board,” Burns says.

Though his journey began with self-centered pursuits, Rob Burns’s life was transformed by God and he continues to faithfully share the Gospel, disciple people, and multiply leaders.