Biblical Basis of International Student Ministry (ISM),

I’m fully aware of the pitfalls of trying to teach, especially a group like you international student workers on a subject like this. James (3:1-3 The Message) puts it well when he says: "Don’t be in any rush to become a teacher, my friends. Teaching is highly responsible work. Teachers are held to the strictest standards. And none of us are perfectly qualified. We get it wrong nearly every time we open our mouths."

I once heard Festo Kivengere (Anglican Church leader from Uganda)

say that when God looks down on his feeble efforts to communicate it must look like the scrawlings of an infant trying to draw something…and then like a loving Father God says: "Well done!" What the Holy Spirit chooses to communicate, of course, is of most importance, so I hope some of what I say here will be used by the Spirit to strengthen and encourage you.

My thesis tonight is that since our human beginnings, God has unceasingly been seeking and calling humanity to a relationship of love with Himself. Both Old and New Testaments are united in portraying God’s love through the people of God, (the patriarchs, then Israel and finally the church). Like God, God’s people go-out and call-in representatives of the nations to this same relationship of love with God. God’s relationship to His people includes His intent that the surrounding world honor Him as God. International students in our time have become a key to the glory and honor of God being perceived throughout the nations in a time of unprecedented expansion of the human race.

Let me start off with a significant quotation from Dr. Carl Henry:

This statement highlights how important international students are for the mission of the church and health of society today. They are strategic for missionaries like you and me for other reasons as well:

1. They are important to their nations. The so-called "developing nations" look to these students as the future under-girding of their nation-building efforts. They are key to the economic development of these nations, which long to achieve the status and standards of modern states. This is one reason for large numbers taking the sciences, engineering and management. Also many of the world’s political leaders have been educated here. So they are important to their nations.
2. They are important to their families as well as, of course, to themselves in terms of their own personal advancement. For many coming from relatively impoverished backgrounds, a good paying job and a competitive edge at home or abroad in the job market depends on their academic achievement. Their families often make great sacrifices to help them get this education, and then look to them for substantial support financially later on.
3. They are important to the Christian Church in their nations. Many internationals are Christians and studying not only in Seminaries with a view to Christian ministry, but also studying in our universities. These will have an obvious impact on the churches they return to, as well as on the missionary enterprise of those churches.

A surprising new fact of recent decades is that the number of missionaries being sent out from non-western churches has grown from 13,000 in 1980 to over 50,000 at the turn of the century (with some estimates much higher). With the western Protestant missionary force slowed somewhat as colonialism has waned, new missionary forces have emerged from developing-world nations, especially nations where the church is strong such as Korea, the Philippines, South India, and east and west Africa. The burden of the mission of the church and of world evangelization is being shared increasingly with these churches. Who are the leaders of these churches going to be? Many will be the international students currently on our campuses!

Less obvious, but equally important perhaps, is the impact of changed attitudes on the part of many non-Christian world-leaders educated in the so-called "Christian West." These may never become Christians in their personal faith, but they can wield immense power politically and socially in their countries where they have leadership roles in the society.

Some years back my wife and I spent a year in Benares, now called Varanasi, in India. I was a graduate student for a year at Benares Hindu University. (By the way, I recommend a year abroad like this to any student or recent graduate if possible…it’s very-eye opening to experience being a foreign student while trying to learn how to effectively minister among internationals).

We lived in a faculty hostel on campus and a faculty man was one of the first to call on us for afternoon tea. Yadav was the head of the Education Department in this Hindu university. As we got acquainted one of the first questions he asked was, "What are the spiritual foundations of western culture?" As I started to look for ways to share how the gospel influenced our western cultural roots, he anticipated me saying, "Jesus Christ is central to this gospel isn’t he?" With some astonishment I began to explain who Jesus is. Before I got very far along he said," The resurrection is foundational to belief in Jesus isn’t it?"

I asked him where he’d learned all this! He said that he’d been a student in London before teaching in Kenya and then India, and as he described his experiences in England I discovered he’d met Christians and been to a retreat strikingly similar to one of our Inter Varsity International Conferences or "Houseparties!" Later I was talking with other Hindu faculty in our hostel about the fact that this man was from Haryana Pradesh, one of the most staunch Hindu parts of north India. "Oh that makes no difference," one of them said off-handedly. "He thinks like a Christian, talks like a Christian and acts like a Christian…he might just as well be one!" Yadav is the man who has taught many generations of school teachers in this strongly Hindu area of eastern Uttar Pradesh. His attitudes and even his life style was radically affected for a lifetime by his experiences with God’s people in England.

The fourth reason for the strategic importance of internationals for the church’s ministry in western nations is the "Biblical Mandate." It’s here I want to spend the major portion of our time together.

You are all fully aware of most of the salient arguments for a Biblical Basis of our ministry to internationals, and many of you could do as good or better a job of standing up here and talking about it. So why talk about it? Like you, I believe that the Bible is our bedrock of motivation and encouragement in this ministry, especially when we get discouraged from what some might think of as a lack of "results," or discouraged by the indifference of fellow Christians we wish dearly to partner with in this ministry. We need to continually exhort each other to love and good works and remind ourselves of the encouragements of scripture.

If all we do is point to these more explicit texts, such as those on the "aliens" in Israel, the overall significance of the alien may seem meager, even anemic, compared to the huge body of the rest of scripture where aliens are not explicitly mentioned. It will be a little like focusing on the few but specific prophecies about the death of Christ, (the looking-on-him-whom-they-have-pierced, or the no-bone-shall-be-broken passages), as if these are enough to convince a skeptical audience or carry enough weight to serve as the primary foundations for the Messiah’s purpose in coming into the world as a man to die for sin).

It’s important we also grasp and teach the larger themes of what God has been doing in and through Israel, and then His Church, if we are to make a powerful presentation of International Student Ministry. We need to focus attention on the larger themes of scripture such as God revealing Himself to all humanity, first in the Patriarchs, then in a chosen people Israel and finally in the fullness of time in the person of Christ as the Incarnation of God to be a sacrifice for the sin of not just a few of us but of the whole world.

We need to keep in mind in all our Biblical studies that this book is about an almost unimaginatively Holy Creator-God, and about a human family totally alienated from Him with universally disobedient hearts and deeply imbedded sin. The moral chasm separating us from God is as wide and deep as the metaphysical or spacial one. Keeping this in mind will help explain the severity of temporal judgments (not to mention eternal judgment), and will make us periodically ask not why so much judgment, but why such mercy and restraint?

We see this moral chasm in the Old Testament after Genesis 2 where even the most committed follower of God will confess: "I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips" (Isaiah 6:5). It explains why the Hebrew community, increasingly blinded by self-centeredness over time, viewed the very revelations and blessings of God as a reason to become self-absorbed and to feel superior to others. We see this moral chasm again in the New Testament where even the Apostles of God, unaided by the Holy Spirit, would have kept their new faith confined to the Hebrew community. In this sense, our calling to reach out to cultures and peoples other than our own goes against every natural self-centered instinct unaided by the Spirit of God. Reminders of this should drive us continually to dependence on God both for ourselves and for others.

I’d like to take you through a number of selected passages of scripture focusing on a few of the grand themes as well as specifics. I can touch only lightly on the riches in each of them but will try to apply them as we go along to our current ministry situation. We’ll get an overview of the whole of the Bible this way as well as some practical ways in which it strengthens and elucidates some of the issues we struggle with in cross-cultural relationships.

How does this apply to international students? The most obvious is that internationals need to be respected as equals. But even more than equals, they are part of that dispersed humanity God has given a special role to in "having dominion over" His Created order. The specialness of their calling, Christian or non-Christian, is that within this "Creation Mandate" given to all human beings, these students are for the most part the next generation of leadership in whatever dimension of cultural, social, political, economic or religious life they may end up.

What does this mean for us as ISM workers? Clearly it means that minimally we need to respect them, "Male and female," as equally God’s image-bearers. Some positive and negative examples:

1. Philip Prasad is a member of the Dalit or "untouchable" community of India which is largely illiterate and oppressed. He is one of the few Christian Dalits to have gotten a PhD, which he got studying in the "West" some years back against incredible odds both psychologically and economically. From a Hindu standpoint he’s from the lowest of the low castes in India because of "sins in previous lives," and therefore at best only barely human in Hindu eyes. Yet God is currently using this man to orchestrate an almost unbelievable mass movement of tens of thousands of untouchables into the Kingdom of God. If missionaries in India, and believers in the West had not respected, welcomed and loved this man years ago as a student, he likely would not be what he is today.
2. The image is "male and female"…think of the women students from religious cultures, repelled by the loose sexual standards of Western men but for whom respect by men of spiritual stature is one of the few ways they will discern the difference a Christian makes… or the female spouses of Muslim students, protected from social contact with Christian churches and groups here, and therefore requiring a special creative effort by Christian women for them to find respect, acceptance and love while living in our Western