UCCF's contribution to the Worldwide Church: part 2

Last month, Lindsay Brown focussed on UCCF's influence in Britain; in this second article, he looks at UCCF's contribution to the church worldwide.

Under God, UCCF has been one of the greatest influences in the history of mission in the 20th century - a fact of which few British evangelicals are aware. In this article, I have space only to trace its impact on the growth of evangelical student ministry around the world. It was one of the ten founding members of the IFES, which now brings together over 300,000 students in 150 countries. UCCF continues to play a significant part in developing student ministry in many nations. The link between a strong student ministry and faithful church teaching hardly needs to be spelled out.

Thousands of British graduates have, in addition, contributed to the advance of the gospel through mission agencies, after first hearing the challenge to go to the ends of the earth in their Christian Unions.

Remarkable strategy

In short, world mission is in the lifeblood of IVF/UCCF, and has been from the start. Howard Guinness, who graduated from London University in 1928, just three months after IVF/UCCF was founded, was sent out that summer as its first missionary. Under the visionary leadership of Douglas Johnson, students raised £70 and despatched Guinness to Canada 'with a one-way ticket and an overcoat' to found an Inter-Varsity Fellowship there! It was the beginning of a remarkable missiological strategy. With God's help, Guinness quickly established the kernel of a movement which would work to pioneer Christian witness in all its universities. By the late 1930s, Canadians themselves were sending graduates south to pioneer the US Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. Howard Guinness sailed next to Australia, charged with the same task.

Two principles were being established. First, that national student movements would help pioneer a witness to Christ among students in other countries, as they were able; secondly, that indigenous leadership would be nurtured. Both principles remain today. The Cambridge Seven, and the St. Andrew's Seven before them, illustrated how we need to give our best people in the cause of the gospel, and that mission is a demanding calling on every level.

East Asia

Two major figures in East Asia's church history were student leaders in Cambridge in the 1930s: David Adeney and Leslie Lyall. Both joined the China Inland Mission (now OMF International), and helped establish the China Inter-Varsity Fellowship. It was soon to become the largest evangelical student movement in the world, and a founding member of IFES.

As the whole nation suffered under the Japanese, and contended with the strains of nationalist rule while Maoists gained strength, the Adeneys and Lyalls gave students their best energies, surely sensing the difficulties ahead. Leslie Lyall was to keep news of the Chinese Church in the minds and hearts of western Christians through writing and research while David Adeney went on to travel extensively in East Asia, pioneering student ministry in several countries.

Prophetic clarity in Africa

Under God, an Oxford graduate, Tony Wilmot, played a seminal role in the way world mission is now understood. In the 1940s and 50s he urged Christian students to think strategically about taking their professions overseas. With prophetic clarity, he could see purpose in that for the cause of the gospel. This was new thinking.

He went on to spend 30 years in Africa, working in the public and corporate sector, and became a founding father of the then Pan-African Fellowship of Evangelical Students. He went on to found the Nairobi Evangelical Graduate School of Theology (NEGST) so Africans could study at graduate level within an African context. Tony's contribution to African student ministry was far-reaching; but his pivotal role in giving a fuller-orbed view of serving in world mission was to permeate far more widely. I hope his life story will one day be published.

'To the ends of the earth'

The pattern of serving the worldwide Church continued in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. John White, the famous author and a graduate of Manchester University, was one of the pioneers of evangelical student ministry in Latin America in the 1960s. Today movements exist in every country on that great continent. That same decade Alastair Kennedy, a graduate of Edinburgh University, was used by God to begin student ministry in Cote d'Ivoire, West Africa.

Today the work has spread to 20 French-speaking countries across Africa. In the 1970s, Colin Chapman, a Cambridge graduate, helped lay the foundations for student ministry in Lebanon, Jordan and Egypt, and graduates from here play influential roles across the Middle East today. In the 1980s, Christine Jefferson-Davies, an unassuming London graduate, played an outstanding role in pioneering evangelical student witness in Hungarian universities before the fall of the Communist states. At risk to herself, she travelled extensively encouraging the beginnings of what is today a large student ministry all across Hungary. All these individuals were captured by a heart for world evangelism while they were undergraduates.

From the 1950s God brought the world to the UK in the form of international students. UCCF leaders such as Freddy Crittenden and Oliver Barclay saw the strategic opportunities this provided for global witness. Students who became believers here could take the gospel back to their own countries. Derek Mutungu became a Christian at Bath University and returned to pioneer a thriving student ministry in Zambia, his home country, in the 1970s. In the 1980s, Antoine Rutayisire came to Christ in the University College of North Wales, at Bangor. He returned home to Rwanda to found the student movement. Today, after civil war in the 1990s, the Christian Union in Butare University is probably the largest in the world; each Saturday over 1,500 students gather for Bible teaching, and daily prayer meetings draw up to 500. Antoine now co-ordinates Africa Enterprise in East Africa.

'Rich toward God'

Christian Union members in the UK learned that mission is an integral part of their faith. Students often started to pray for the Church around the world by praying for fellow students in other countries. The flame was fanned by visiting speakers, world mission conferences in Swanwick, and later by opportunities for ministry among international students, and short-term openings during summer vac and after graduation. Through the CUs thousands of students have been faced with the possibility of serving overseas as Bible teachers, in publishing, in radio - or through secular professions.

Within ten years of the fall of Communism in 1989, student ministry began in 20 more countries. This expansion occurred largely under the leadership of Jonathan Lamb, one time CU President at Exeter University. He placed recent graduates, many from the UK, in university cities, so they could work to establish indigenous student ministry. The first fruits for the Church are now appearing, with Christian publishing houses in several nations, and young pastors in training, who have a good grasp of Scripture's authority.

It has been a remarkable story, by any reckoning. Many pioneers of student ministry across Eastern Europe and Eurasia in the 1990s have been British graduates in their early 20s. Pete Lowman, a Cardiff graduate, who now pastors Wycliffe Baptist Church in Reading, travelled extensively throughout Russia in the 1990s, laying the foundations for an indigenous Russian student movement, something which looked impossible even in the late 1980s.

UCCF continues to send us a stream of graduates, committed to seeing the gospel seeded in the universities of these countries. They could be forging ahead in lucrative careers, but have chosen instead to be 'rich toward God'.

Robin Wells, UCCF's third General Secretary, recently wrote a book called My Rights? My God? It is a unique resource for students and graduates looking at the real possibility of serving cross-culturally. It is a call to sacrifice. High aspiration, along with insights into student culture and a grasp of the post-modern mindset make it a powerful contribution to world mission. It brings a blend of doctrine and experience, and in it young missionaries share their hopes and fears. We hear more and more of the 'right' to have choice, and the 'right' to a comfortable lifestyle. May many, many of this current generation of students prefer their God over their 'rights'.

New initiatives

As I mentioned in my last article, UCCF launched a major gospel distribution program in September called LIFE (see life-online.org.uk) with the hope of funding 400,000 gospels altogether, to give away. How does that link in with world mission? First, we pray overseas students may find Christ as they read these gospels. Secondly, we pray that future missionaries and evangelists may be converted. Thirdly, this genius of an idea has been taken up more widely, and with the help of Scripture Gift Mission, we are about to embark on a similar project in 30 countries in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East.

For ten years, UCCF has trained interns through its Relay program. Three years ago, it launched 'Relay Homestart', training new graduates in the UK for their first year, then overseas beyond that. Andy Showell-Rogers, former President of Southampton CU, was the guinea pig, and is now serving in Lithuania. The program currently has 15 participants, in or on their way to 12 countries; these include host countries in hard, materialistic, postmodern Western Europe; in some of the toughest situations in Central Asia; and in Shinto-Buddhist Japan. Our IFES movement in the Ukraine has modelled its own Relay program on it, and the first generation of Ukrainian Christian students are now helping to pioneer student work in satellite nations of the former USSR.

Readers of EN, please encourage your churches to pray for and support UCCF, asking God to continue using its staff and students for world evangelisation, as he has done up to now. May the world Church in the 21st century bear the fruit of their labour.

Lindsay Brown,
General Secretary, International Fellowship of Evangelical Students