After speaking at the Christian Union meeting, I strolled through the town to the student flat where I was to spend the night. Later that evening, with the CU president, I helped as a post graduate student from China become a Christian. Students and others in both English universities where he had studied had befriended him and shared the gospel. I just happened to be there, like a midwife, at the time when he was ready to be born again.
Before we broke up, I suggested the CU president lead us in prayer, which he did ... in fluent Chinese! Not a miracle, just a lot of hard work. Chinese is his degree subject: we had met before in China where part of his course was spent in a university in Beijing! I hope that he will soon be working in China, and living for Jesus there.
Some months earlier I had spoken at the same university at a party for international students. As I chatted to a Japanese19 year-old, he showed me the charm he carried for protection. I told him that the God who made everything loved him. He was stunned. 'You mean there is a God who is interested in me?' he asked. He joined a 'Discovering Christianity' group which some Christian students were running. One of those British students, now graduated, is in Moldova, pioneering Christian student work there, and keeping in touch with Japanese friends through e-mail.
World mission alive
On many of our university campuses, world mission is alive and well, not as a vague plan for the future, but as a present reality. Such cross-cultural friendships can naturally lead on to mission abroad. The one prepares for the other and gives an appetite for it.
Not that students have all the answers: they are often well out of their depth. I have heard a student explain the gospel to a Shintoist as though she were a nominal Anglican. Another invited a Muslim to 'open his heart to Jesus' though he did not believe that he died on the cross. Yet another naively proclaimed the conversion of a Taoist who had put an offering for Jesus on her god-shelf! But many are glad to accept help and advice from outsiders - a mature Christian from another country, or a returned missionary who can often speak a useful language and model sensitive, cross-cultural disciple-making. The team of International Student Christian Services (ISCS) is particularly good at making these links.
When I led that Chinese scholar to Christ, the English Christian who had introduced him to me asked if he might use my Chinese-orientated illustrations of the gospel with others. (As if I would copyright them!) Working this way is a good partnership: students have opportunities that stretch them to the limit; missionary fellowships have experience, but need the contacts. Not surprisingly, some of these working partnerships continue long after the students graduate.
A few years ago, at a church in Chiang Mai, North Thailand, a staffworker with the Thai Christian Students (Thai UCCF) introduced me to a Thai woman due to leave for study in Scotland the next day. She has proved to be specially gifted in international outreach, and got others mobilised. At one point she thought she should apologise to the Navigator staffworker for disrupting his Bible studies by bringing along so many foreign unbelievers! Of course, he was thrilled that at last someone was bringing them in. The vision for international outreach is not peculiar to British students, it belongs to all Christians who are in tune with the Holy Spirit.
Not true
I get exasperated when mission personnel tell me students are no longer missionary-minded. It is simply not true. All over the place, they are actively involved in it, here in Britain. As our universities try to make ends meet by marketing themselves internationally, Christian students find their classmates come from all over the world. Many form real friendships that naturally lead to sharing the good news.
Christians are acquiring skills at university that logically prepare them for today's missionary opportunities. They have academic qualifications, as medics, engineers, lawyers, administrators, journalists, and artists, that open all sorts of doors. Many students are becoming highly competent in significant world languages: Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, as well as many European tongues. Some can even pray in the new language before they ever think about missionary training. A Japanese friend and colleague claims that the OMF missionary who speaks the best colloquial Japanese learnt it as an undergraduate in England.
The long and the short
Today's students are encouraged to look at the whole world for job opportunities. They have to face the fact that Britain cannot employ all her graduates! So it is hardly surprising that many Christian students are looking at the world to see where they fit, for both work and mission.
This is different from the common preoccupation with short-term opportunities overseas. Some students can still afford to travel during their long vacations, and many churches are more willing to finance short trips than long-term service, even though the latter is usually better value for money. Some short-term trips are a preparation for a life-time commitment to world mission at home or abroad; others are superficial adventures with little lasting impact. But, although there are still those who ask what they can do for a month or two before they settle down, many committed Christian students are seeking to make their whole lives count in mission either through their professions or in abandoning them for the sake of the gospel.
Serious openness
World mission has long been the third aim of the university Christian Unions, and while missionary prayer meetings have shrunk from the days when I was a student, and the missionary meeting is often seen as the time to make a trip home, there remains a serious openness to the missionary call. Some missionary society leaders doubt this because fewer young people attend events that they arrange. Recently we had to cancel an OMF young people's weekend conference because of lack of support. But we could draw over-hasty negative conclusions from this. Many have other priorities at New Year, and conferences have multiplied. Just the previous month, 200 students gathered to consider a career in Bible ministry here or overseas, and many there sought help from one of my colleagues. Where mission personnel go to the students, win their confidence and help them with their own present, urgent ministry, I find in my regular experience that students seek them out when they consider what to do with the rest of their lives. The missionary society that is not interested in serving the student generation where they are, will not find them anxious to apply for service. Jesus was not joking when he taught that the measure we gave would be the measure we would get!
Missionary training
Many planning to work overseas benefit hugely from Bible college. But students in a Christian Union can have many 'good missionary training' experiences. They learn to take responsibility for Christian work and evangelistic initiative, often by being thrown in at the deep end at an age when in many churches everything is done for them. Where training is given, it is generally on the job, and used at once. They have to work out how to be relevantly biblical and maintain their integrity when surrounded by contemporary pagan culture. Of course there are casualties, but even that can be good preparation. They live and work among those of other faiths and nationalities, learning to be friends, sharing life together. A surprising number have attempted cross-cultural witness, and some have seen friends converted as a result.
For some, planting Christian Unions abroad with IFES is the extent of their vision. And from the earliest days of UCCF (then IVF), staff workers and young graduates have travelled widely to inspire student witness around the world. The significance of this ministry should not be under-rated. In many countries, graduates from the CUs have brought in-depth Biblical ministry into the churches. But generally the vision is wider than just the student world. Scores of those I worked with in the CUs of the 1960s are scattered around the world in an amazing range of ministries. And the same is true of those going from the present generation. For all the problems of today's Christian Unions, the vision to make disciples of all people groups is being passed on, and is bearing fruit.
Dick Dowsett,
OMF International (UK)
