Dr. Andrea Mullins is publisher and director for New Hope Publishers, a missional publishing house based in Birmingham, Alabama. She works at New Hope with a team of highly motivated and skilled believers whose lives illustrate commitment to God’s mission. She authored two books acquired by New Hope before she joined the staff and has written hundreds of articles for WMU® curriculum resources as well as other Christian magazines. She is convinced this was one of God’s provisions in preparing her to serve as New Hope’s publisher. She has been married to her husband, Mike, for forty-two years. Their wonderful daughter and son-in-law have given them three amazing grandchildren.
She blogs at http://newhopepublishers.wordpress.com/.

I thrive on missions and have led conferences and Bible studies in every state and in several countries. One of my greatest adventures was the accomplishment of a doctor of ministry degree through Bakke Graduate University, a course of study that took me out of the classroom and into the streets for urban ministry as far away as Delhi, India. Most recently I led a team of nineteen to participate as missions volunteers in the Vancouver Winter Olympics.

My recent Vancouver Winter Olympics experience reminded me that we should hold on to our dreams—especially when God is the dream giver. Long before I came to New Hope Publishers, I read a powerful secular novel about a missionary in the Amazon. I thought: This is the way missionary stories should be written—compelling, thrilling, and challenging reader attitudes and assumptions in such a way that they hunger to be more conformed to the mind of Christ.

Years later I became a publisher. From the beginning, if New Hope ever added fiction to its categories, it would be missional. The goal would be to lead God’s people toward His concern for a lost and hurting world. I dreamed New Hope would one day publish compelling fictional accounts of missionary stories.

New Hope Publishers was established to extend the mission of our parent company, Women’s Missionary Union (WMU), an international missions organization that equips and involves believers in ministry and missions across our nation and around the world, and lends support to missionaries through prayer, giving, and going. We share the WMU mission to challenge Christian believers to understand and be radically involved in the mission of God. Our intention is to meet readers where they are, take readers to where God is at work in their lives, and then take readers to where God is at work in His world. And God has been gracious to send our way many authors who share this commitment not only in their writing but in their lives.

Having served with our parent company for more than twenty years, my life ministry has been about missionaries, people groups, the poor, and the disenfranchised. I’ve led missions teams to take the gospel to serve in some of the hardest and most exciting places. Yet selling missions books can be among the more challenging feats for any publishing house. Most readers don’t look for books about missions. I believe it’s because they don’t realize that what they long to be about in their Christian faith is missions.

I’ll never forget the meeting I had with Kathi Macias, her agent, and her publicist. We were discussing several nonfiction books we were working on together. She asked if we would consider fiction. I said, “If we did, it would need to be missional.” She placed before me a sheet that described the Extreme Devotion series of four books about the persecuted church and began to tell me the story behind each title.

Though our intuitive nature can’t guide our publishing decisions, I truly felt God’s hand on that moment. I sensed this was in God’s plan for New Hope, handed to me in perfect order and ready to

go. I didn’t have to dream it up or wonder what it should be. All the while our Lord had been crafting New Hope’s first fiction stories in Kathi’s heart.

My staff will tell you I am incredibly persistent if I believe we should accomplish something, and this was certainly one of those journeys I was committed to complete. Because of this, Kathi and her agent were patient beyond words as we took our time to open the door for the first fiction titles at New Hope Publishers. Our WMU leaders are both practical and visionary, but this was something new and I wasn’t sure how everyone would respond; therefore, I asked Kathi to do more than I have ever requested of an author. And we at New Hope spent more than a year doing our homework to be sure we would be ready to launch a fiction line. Are we ready? Well, I’m not sure, but we are giving it our best effort.

Working with Kathi on the Extreme Devotion series, we have been amazed as world events have worked in our favor. For instance, the World Cup will be going on in South Africa the week of the ICRS; No Greater Love takes place in South Africa. Mexico is also a center of interest as the Mayan calendar ends in 2012, leading some to believe this marks the end of the world. More than Conquerors is about a pastor in Mexico and the influence of the Mayan culture.

We use the word missional to describe “Fiction with a Mission.” The mission is to engage readers in stories of romance and intrigue with the goal of transforming our readers’ hearts and minds in such a way they commit to living radically for God’s mission in this world.

New Hope Publishers will be selective in the fiction we publish. After all, the Lord has brought us four great books that have set the bar high in both quality and content. Our sole aim is to bring God’s mission to readers in a format that is indirectly transformational. I can’t wait to hear the responses from readers who make changes in the way they think about and understand the world, pray, watch the news, choose places to go, spend time, and give money to because they read one of Kathi’s books. We at New Hope are fully convinced that her books are valuable to God’s kingdom work.

Since we’ve been working with Kathi for more than three years, I’ve learned that Kathi writes out of the purest of motives. Her concern for those who face persecution every day because they love Jesus Christ embodies Kathi’s characters and their choices. Throughout her creative process, she has engaged readers who live in the countries and cultures where the stories take place, ensuring the details and cultural expressions are accurate. These will be books that our international publishers will easily take into their national languages. Honestly, I get so excited about this that I can’t keep from smiling as I write.

We already have the next series of Fiction with a Mission under discussion, but our goal for this year is to introduce readers to the Extreme Devotion series—books they will not want to miss.