THINKING STRATEGICALLY
We’ve thought about exposing God’s life within us by individual friendships; and exposing God’s life within our collective fellowship by evangelistic meals, etc. But there’s a third aspect of exposure, and it’s this: it’s important to make the student community aware that our group exists at all!
Visibility: we want the university to know that there are a number of people here who are staking their lives on the belief that biblical Christianity make sense. When I was a student, we had a number of political groups in our university. One of them was a Trotskyite group with just two members (and one of those two was reputed to be fairly unintelligent). But they knew about visibility. They held regular booktables in the students’ union building (next to ours, to their annoyance, because we liked talking to them); their posters were all over the building. So, when you were thinking about the political options in the student community ‑ during elections, for example ‑ you couldn’t help thinking of them. The existence of a group that believed what they did was forced on your attention.
And that’s one reason why booktables are worth doing; even if you never sell a book, you are challenging the student community to consider Christ by simply demonstrating that there are ordinary students who believe in Him. That visibility also opens up the possibility of contacting interested students in whose lives God is working but who may be remote from any of our normal friendship networks. There are many ways of increasing our contacts and visibility besides booktables. We can go door‑to‑door in the student residences; we can sing and preach somewhere where many students walk by (perhaps interrupting our programme every few minutes to allow members of our group who are scattered around to get into conversation with bystanders ‑ and certainly aiming to invite people to an evangelistic Bible study). We can do street theatre. In a student residence we can hold a ‘dialogue evangelism’ or ‘Grill‑a‑Christian’ event ‑ giving an open invitation to students to come and meet a Christian and ask all the difficult questions they have about his faith. We can put up posters ‑ particularly during a major outreach, when it may be worth getting enough cheap posters to have one in every possible window in the city. We can publish a one‑sheet, thought‑provoking evangelistic broadsheet, and distribute it round the places where people sit or eat (particularly those that are irregularly cleaned!) We can do a questionnaire in the buildings and student bars. Some of these methods may be ideal for a small group that is not really able to mount a major preaching outreach. Questionnaires proved enormously effective in Portugal, for example. And John Kynaston wrote in Christian Arena how some of the small groups he worked with contacted far more non‑believers through questionnaires or through street drama combined with a short talk than they would ever be able to draw in to a meeting.
One student group threw out a challenge to the university: Explain the resurrection! They raised a large sum of money, and offered it to anyone in the university who could present an alternative explanation of the facts of the resurrection to a panel of lawyers! ‘By all means save some’, said Paul (1 Corinthians 9:22). The point is to experiment: if one approach doesn’t work, try another, keep experimenting! In my own university, the team that planned the group’s organized evangelism felt our booktables were failing to sell books. So we raised some money, bought a stock of books and set up an evangelistic library. (People signed their name and address when they borrowed a book: if the book wasn’t returned, we knew that might be a good place for some visitation evangelism!) Be adventurous! It makes the whole thing more stimulating!
The point is to think strategically. Sometimes some Christians talk as if God made the human being with a blissfully empty skull, and then the devil came along and put a brain inside! No: God expects us to love Him with all our heart and all our mind. Yes, strategic planning must be done in a context of prayer, and of worship, so that our thinking is shaped by our sense of God and so that He can speak to us (see, for example, the way the new step forward in mission is taken in Acts 13:1‑3). Hard thinking: what kind of events will people come to? when and where is the best place to hold them? How should we plan the academic year ‑ when should our main outreach thrusts take place? what can we do with Christmas and Easter? how can we best take advantage of the huge opportunity at the start of the academic year, when (in many places) new students come up to university away from home for the first time, ready to explore yet lonely and looking for friends ‑ open to Christ’s love and truth as they may never be again?
Developing a clear strategy is essential, so that our group members know where we’re going, what the vision is, what they’re called to be committed to. Then they can see their personal friendship evangelism as being brought to a focus in regular outreach events every few weeks, so that they’re always thinking towards the next such event, and getting into the habit of praying towards it and working out who they could bring. We make friends, then there’s an outreach to bring them to; hopefully, through that outreach, we make some more contacts - people to talk with, get to know, eat with, play squash with, study the Bible with; and then there’s another event a few weeks later to bring them to; and so the process goes on. The sense of being an army on the march for God; of being a group who are actually going somewhere.
In numerous parts of the world, Europe included, ‘university missions’ ‑ weeks of outreach, with perhaps preaching events each evening backed up by smaller, more local or more specialized apologetics talks, supper parties, etc ‑ see many students turning to Christ in a week. One of the most exciting things in Europe in recent years has been the way students in city after city are venturing out in such actions where they’ve hardly ever been attempted before. But these things don’t happen on their own. They represent the harvesting of a long process of sowing, in friendships and faithful witness.
So perhaps we can list five ingredients of a strategy that will make an impact on the student community around us:
Friendship with non‑Christians
Evangelistic Bible studies
Activities to make us visible
Regular events of relevant, biblically‑based preaching of the message
‑and one more, without which the rest will crumble:
The spiritual warfare of determined prayer.
To this we must now turn.
SPIRITUAL WRESTLING
It is striking to see how the largest IFES groups in the world tend to be marked by a strong commitment to prayer. In Africa, several countries have had 10% or more of the student population actively involved in their groups, and university missions have produced an enormous harvest of converts. It is significant, then, to see the central place that regular prayer and fasting holds in the life of these groups. Days of prayer, nights or whole weekends of prayer: in Nigeria, former NIFES general secretary Femi Adeleye told me some years ago, many campuses would hold all‑night prayer meetings once a week. This was the case even in strongly Muslim parts of the country where Christian students’ lives are occasionally in real jeopardy. (Femi himself received death threats three times when he was president of the group in Kano, a city where hundreds have died over the years in religious rioting. One such message threatened to eliminate all the Christians on campus.) ‘Students know they are in a real battle which only prayer can deal with’, he said; and after appointing their executive committee, groups might choose a prayer team whose responsibility within the fellowship was simply to give themselves to intercession. Again, when I visited South Africa, it had the largest secondary‑level student movement in IFES; and in that country too the same deep commitment to prayer was visible. The largest IFES-linked university group there, at Turfloop, was gathering the majority of its members each night for a time of prayer characterised by enthusiastic worship; but that was not all ‑ at 5am, 1 pm, and 11pm, every day but Sunday, 30‑40 ‘prayer warriors’ came together for an hour.
Of course the African groups had their problems too. Yet when we consider the way their numerical growth has vastly outstripped what we see in Europe, it is worth pondering on this area of prayer. After all, commitment to prayer was a key factor in the rise of the groups that came to make up IFES. Back in the 1890s, a key leader in Cambridge University’s Christian Union was Douglas Thornton; a keen evangelist, organizing genius, and missionary enthusiast, he distinguished himself by inventing a machine to help his prayer life, which combined an alarm clock and a fishing rod. (At 6am the alarm clock went off; it was connected to the fishing rod, which then whisked his bedclothes away to force him to rise for his ‘quiet time’.) The same commitment to the centrality of prayer is visible in Howard Guinness, pioneer of the work in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. As a student he found he could win children to Christ, but not his contemporaries ‑ until he resolved that ‘From today the central thing in my life shall be prayer’, and rearranged his schedule accordingly. Then his fellow‑students began to turn to Christ.
The same picture emerges when we think of the 1936 survey of the student groups then in existence, which revealed that most saw the daily prayer meeting as their most important activity; or the early pioneers in Germany, with their motto ‘We can only advance on our knees’; or the 1947 Nanking national conference of the China Inter Varsity Fellowship, at that time possibly IFES’ largest movement, where the local group hosting the conference prepared for it in two parties: half would be arranging the physical preparations while the other half prayed, then they would swap over! All this is likewise what we should expect from Scripture. ‘Our struggle is not against flesh and blood’, says Paul, ‘but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms’ (Ephesians 6:12), and unless we take the weapon of prayer (v18) for committed spiritual warfare against the ‘god of this age’ who has actually ‘blinded the minds of unbelievers’ (2 Corinthians 4:4), our efforts and arguments will be ineffective. Time and again we see this in major outreaches: there are major spiritual strongholds to be broken in prayer, so that the Word can go forward. Spiritual warfare is an indispensable part of the struggle.
Exodus 17 gives us the clearest biblical picture of all this. Here the Lord tells us of the first battle the Israelites fought after crossing the Red Sea: ‘Moses said to Joshua, “Choose some of our men and go out to fight the Amalekites. Tomorrow I will stand on top of the hill with the staff of God in my hands.”‘ (When we look back in Exodus to find the significance of this staff, we discover it was the proof God had given him that he was God’s man wielding God’s authority (cf 4:1‑5). So his holding it up over the battlefield was a public declaration of God’s authority with him in that situation ‑ just as when we pray in Jesus’ name today.) ‘So Joshua fought the Amalekites as Moses had ordered, and Moses, Aaron and Hur went to the top of the hill. As long as Moses held up his hands, the Israelites were winning, but whenever he lowered his hands, the Amalekites were winning. When Moses’ hands grew tired, they took a stone and put it under him and he sat on it. Aaron and Hur held his hands up ‑ one on one side and one on the other ‑ so that his hands remained steady till sunset. So Joshua overcame the Amalekite army'(17:8‑13) (NIV).
A strange story. Why has God given it to us? Surely the point is clear: as long as Moses prayed, the people of God prevailed; but when the praying stopped, there were real, serious, consequences. People started to die when the praying stopped ‑ there were heads cut off, spears plunging into intestines, Israelite gore splashed across the rocks ‑ even though Moses had stopped praying for the very legitimate reason of tiredness. (Perhaps times when we feel like giving up praying out of weariness can sometimes be the very occasions when the prayer‑battle is most crucial, and when the enemy is therefore doing his best to stop us. The fact that we don’t feel we’re accomplishing anything is no guide as to what’s really going on.) God is sovereign; but He has given us real spiritual weapons, and He expects us to use them. It’s part of the dignity of being human: our actions have real consequences. He has chosen so to arrange things that if we pray, there is blessing; if we don’t, there won’t be ‑ ‘You do not have, because you do not ask God’ (James 4:2).
‘I want you to know’, says Paul, ‘how much I am struggling for you and for those at Laodicea, and’ ‑ good missionary prayer, this ‑ ‘for all who have not met me personally’ (Colossians 2:1). His teammate Epaphras, he adds, is ‘always wrestling in prayer for you… working hard for you'(4:12‑13). Some of us tend to give up when prayer begins to feel like ‘wrestling’: but again, those tough times may be when we’re really engaging the enemy! This is a habit that it’s essential to acquire in our student days; it’s hard just to maintain it after graduation, among the pressures of career and family ‑ learning the habit after graduation could be a desperate task. I remember talking with two close Asian friends a year or two after graduation, and the question arose of whether the spirituality of our student days had been ‘too idealistic’. It was only when we realised how basic were the things we were in danger of surrendering ‑ the brief daily time of prayer and Bible study, the expectant intent of being used by God in witness from time to time, the practice of His presence throughout the day – that we realised the deception the enemy was trying to foist on us!
Our student days, then, are when we must learn the habit of disciplining ourselves to ensure the priority of our time with God ‑ of discerning when idolatry is evident in the priorities of our timetable. (If you want to know what is really most important to you ‑ what you really worship, if you like – check what it is that you find time for in your life whatever else happens.) We know that a marriage relationship where the couple talked to each other for just five minutes a day would soon be heading for breakup!‑ yet we often give little more to our relationship with God, and then complain that He seems far away. I remember being greatly helped by hearing a leader of a particular multinational Christian organization that is normally quite image‑aware, confessing, at a conference, his own total failure in this area. (I started listening carefully when he shared this, because I was doing pretty badly myself.) He told how he was helped by covenanting with God that each day, no matter what, there should be 20 minutes for prayer. To African students that may seem pathetically, even sinfully, limited; or again, we may feel we should not need such disciplines. But when many of us are sick ‑ so sick and disordered that we do not find time to talk with our Father ‑ the discipline of such a diet may be medically essential! No, faithfulness in prayer is not easy (for this writer it has been the number one area of long‑term struggle, and frequent defeat). But we can set out to put God first; and when we fail, pick ourselves up, claim forgiveness in Jesus’ blood, reexamine our time‑commitments, and start again.
Once again, it is in our determined struggle, our ‘hunger and thirst for righteousness’ rather than in our successes, that we can be a model to one another. Maybe we can’t all be examples of a successful prayer life ‑ but we can all be examples of people who are trying to make prayer central. So that when we have decisions to make, we pray; when we begin a journey, we pray; when we end an enjoyable evening relaxing together, we pray; after a meal with friends, we pray. Anyone can take the initiative. Anyone likewise can refuse the ‘super‑spiritual’ tag and invite others to join in fasting; anyone can request the setting aside of a half‑night for prayer during a camp or conference. (Interspersed with breaks for praise, with a balance of local and global concerns, and with varied approaches, it will pass by in no time.) Anyone, too, can be used by God to bring in the note of claiming the biblical promises and of victorious praise as we come before God in spiritual warfare, confident that He hears even our prayers and is utterly sovereign.
In many countries we have learned the importance of praying for friends specifically, by name, in our evangelism. Ireland and Australia are just two countries where evangelism has gone forward as specialised prayer cells have been set up for this task. Churches in my own country have seen the same through ‘prayer triplets’, where believers meet in threes and each brings the names of three friends for targeted prayer. In university missions, it often becomes clear as the week progresses who are the people in whose lives God is specifically working, and it can be striking to see the consequences as prayer is focused on these individuals. But this should also be a part of our ongoing friendship evangelism. ‘Pray every day for your non‑Christian friends’, said Norwegian Ole Hallesby, one of the key leaders in the early IFES. ‘Surround them with your prayer. Each time you pray you plunge a holy explosive into their soul, and one day it will scatter the ice from around their hearts.’ Our task is faithfully to pack in the hidden dynamite, day after day; one day the sovereign Spirit of God will come and put a light to the explosive. It may be years afterwards; it may in our evangelistic Bible study or in a preaching event we’ve arranged a month from now.
DOING THINGS THAT LAST
This post has been concerned with how we can make a real impact on the campus around us. But adventurous evangelism cannot be separated from thorough teaching, training and discipling ‑ unless we wish to fall into the pitfalls of shallowness and superficiality, or of burnout.
Evangelism is a beginning, never an end. In physical birth, we do not leave the new‑born baby on the hospital floor; and the same is true in the spiritual realm. Every new Christian needs follow‑up from one or more close Christian friends who will look after them during the crucial opening months and stand by them when the enemy counter‑attacks, as he probably will. They need someone to make sure they have really grasped the gospel, grasped the meaning of repentance and of faith; careful clarity at this point can make all the difference in the years that follow. They need someone to help them establish the vital habit of daily Bible study and prayer (maybe meeting with them regularly for a while); they may well need help as they learn how to study the Bible, and how to develop the habit of applying what is learned to their own life, to set about growing in holiness. They will need help in finding a biblically‑based local church to belong to, where they can be fed and cared for. The question of baptism will arise too. They may need help as they learn to live an evangelistic lifestyle themselves: a new Christian who has so recently crossed over from the non‑Christian side, and who has already a whole network of friends and contacts who aren’t yet Christians, can be the ideal witness for Cllrist ‑ but that’s not the way it may feel from their end! Finally, the ongoing friendship should be the context in which the new Christian learns to see every aspect of their entire life in terms of God’s calling, and develops a deepening concern for His mission into the entire world.
Follow‑up should rapidly become a two‑way process: older Christians have often an enormous amount to relearn, and a great deal of refreshment to receive, from the fresh realism of faith of a new believer. And as a new believer is encouraged to be a source of blessing to their brothers and sisters, they learn something fundamental about the nature of the Body of Christ and their place in it as participant rather than spectator: ‘The whole Body… grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work'(Eph 4:16). The small group Bible study is the natural place for this kind of interaction to take place, and where these groups are strong they can give real robustness to the life of the fellowship as a whole. A classic example of this was the group at Singapore’s main university some years ago, which plateaued at a size of 130 and was finding things becoming somewhat impersonal, with too many members who were ‘passengers’. They organized the entire fellowship into ‘contact groups’, groups of four or five students who met each week for Bible study, prayer, sharing and outreach (the latter being perhaps the unusual ingredient for cell groups); with the aim to grow, redivide, and so multiply. Six years later, 700 students from a university population of 6000 were involved in CGs (when I visited another seven years later that number had risen to 1500!) Small groups do not guarantee success: in my own university they were perhaps the weakest aspect of our ministry, because we had seen the need neither for careful training of small group leaders nor for good Bible study outlines. But worldwide, the significance of what they can contribute seems undeniable.
The missiologists of the ‘church growth’ school tell us that every Christian needs fellowship at three levels; the small cell; the larger congregation, a group in which a wide range of gifts can be drawn upon; and the big celebration, where we are encouraged by being with a really large group of brothers and sisters. Perhaps national conferences supply the place of the celebration events to our student movements; but the combination of small group and large group, cell and congregation, is very important. The small groups are essential for real fellowship and pastoral care, in‑depth prayer, and in‑depth application of Scripture; without them, the group becomes impersonal and lacks grassroots involvement. But the large‑group meeting is also essential for thorough teaching, for collective vision and strategy, and for becoming a real unit that can impact the university as a whole; without this the group can become introverted or lacking in robustness and direction.
The fellowship’s leaders have to work out prayerfully how to use the large‑group meetings for real impact. New students are coming to university and joining in the group: can we really assume they already have a good grounding in basic discipleship? If not, what are the topics in which they need to be trained so as to live out a discipleship that will really make an impact around them? How to have a ‘quiet time’ of daily Bible study and prayer, perhaps? How to witness? Why the Bible is reliable? How God guides? Why believe in Christianity at all? What is discipleship? Sex? The family? We have to choose priorities as to what issues most need tackling in the year to come ‑ and to choose the context, and the outside resource people, with whom we will aim to tackle these issues.
The role of leaders as catalysts in the development of a group that can make a real impact does not stop there, of course. Much of the key work in caring for and encouraging group members happens informally over meals, on walks, during evenings over mugs of coffee. Here again we may have a profound sense of our own inadequacy ‑ and here again that quite accurate perception can either paralyse us or throw us back in faith on the living God. It’s true, of course, that from time to time pastoral issues will arise that have to be passed on to someone more experienced, a staffworker or pastor or graduate who is concerned for the work. But in general, Christ has challenged us all to ‘carry each’s other’s burdens’, to ‘love our neighbour as ourselves’, and the love, gentleness and sensitivity that we need to do so are the fruit of the Spirit whom He has given to every one of us. It is with confidence, therefore, that group leaders can each set out to get to know and be known to a good number of their group, so as to be of support to them; developing friendships that are always open‑ended to newcomers, rather than fossilised into a clique.
Indeed, all of us will find opportunity to care and encourage others from time to time, just as from time to time each of us will stand in need of such ministry. Admittedly such concerns can and sometimes do become a path to introversion. The devil is always out to lure us into spiritual selfishness, focusing on our own needs, our fellowship, our relationships, in an unChristlike manner, when outside it is growing dark and the wind is howling. Certainly our fellowship cannot grow like Christ if we lose the centrality of the outward dimension of witness, because then we are disobeying His commands, and growing unlike our Lord who was always ‘the man for others’. In fact it is noticeable that as we venture forth in evangelism in obedience to Christ, that in itself serves, very often, to deepen our commitment to each other: we learn that we need each other! But the reverse isn’t true; in my own experience, at least, groups that stress their own relationships and communicating with each other don’t end up making an impact on the world, but spiral inwards instead. If, however, we see our caring always as pointed towards the task of mission and spiritual warfare that God has given us to accomplish together, then we can advance in all directions at once.
We can be confident that ‘He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion’ (Phil 1:6). We have simply no idea what great plans God has for the lifetimes of each and every member of our group. But it is because we believe in our group members and the gifts and talents that God has given to each one that, as leaders, we set out to stretch them and mobilise their abilities: delegating out our own responsibilities as far as we can, cajoling and chivvying younger Christians to do more than they think they can, helping them begin to cope, and just when they’ve managed it, thinking of something that will stretch them even more… and so helping them to grow in exactly the same way God is helping us to grow! (I wish I had known more about this side of leadership during my own student years: I would have been doing a lot less myself and ended up a lot less tired!) Paul’s challenge to the young leader Timothy was to pass on all he had learned from Paul to faithful people, who would themselves pass it on to yet others (2 Timothy 2:2). Christian leadership is about making ourselves redundant; passing on all the vision and knowhow we have to others, so that they can take over our job and we can go and do something else. And when there are no ‘something elses’ left to do, the gospel of the kingdom will have been taken to all nations and the End will come (Matthew 24:14)!
And that is the context in which all our work takes place. We want to make an impact on our college, but that is because we want to make an impact on the world. We know that at the university we can find the people who will shape our society in the years to come; and we seek to let loose God’s Word and God’s Spirit in this context so that our whole society may be affected. The local churches of our country should be able to look to the graduates we produce as people who really are of help, who really contribute. Not only as pastors (though indeed we wish to see many pastors emerging from among us; in particular we should dream of producing ‑ or, yes, becoming ‑ the relevant, street‑aware, realistic Bible expositors for the next generation). The local churches should know that from our groups come people who are in secular jobs or are homemakers or housewives but who nonetheless can be depended on to play a valuable role in their fellowship using some of the skills they learned in their student group: leading and helping others to lead good Bible study groups, perhaps; helping develop an effective youth ministry; helping plan relevant programmes, maybe; or helping mobilise effective evangelism. Many things we learn in our student group can be especially applicable to church‑planting situations in new housing estates or inner‑city areas where the churches have fallen on hard times. The local churches should find that students emerging from our group have learnt about servanthood, about becoming ‘incarnate’ in the concerns of others like Jesus did (or like Paul, becoming a Jew to the Jews and a Greek to the Greeks (1 Cor 9:19‑23)), so that we can handle the (sometimes difficult) process of digging into the less hospitable environment of a local church; where not everyone functions according to the cultural norms of our generation, or sings our favourite songs, or recognises the importance of our most cherished insights!
But our longterm goal is to make an impact, not just on the churches, but on our whole society. Student work has been compared to ‘making sandcastles on a conveyor‑belt’: as soon as you get together a really good team of folk in your group, half of them leave and you must start building all over again! But the other side is the exciting vision of thousands of graduates going into every level of society with God’s Word and God’s Spirit, all over Europe, every year: going into every level and every area of our world to preach the gospel. Here is where movements of Christian graduates are important. Graduates who don’t just selfishly forget the student movement that has nourished them are, of course, essential to its ongoing prayer and financial support. But there is huge potential when graduates also have a vision for networking together in workplace evangelism (again, using skills learned in the student groups, such as evangelistic Bible study), and in taking a stance together for righteousness and justice and Christian standards and insights in the issues arising in their profession. One thinks, for example, of the broad range of specialist groups among doctors, teachers, psychologists, lawyers, scientists, economists etc that have been part of the student movement in Germany.
We are out to impact the world. In our world, many children will become permanently blind this year for want of a daily vitamin A capsule or a daily handful of green vegetables. Many more children will be rendered permanently lame through polio, for lack of the cheap vaccine that has virtually eliminated polio in Europe. Yet more will die of common illnesses or malnutrition, most of whom could easily be saved by low‑cost methods ‑ like all those who will die of diarrhoea and could be saved by a simple solution of sugar and salt. Far too many young women each day will die in childbirth in the two-thirds world, from poor nutrition, overwork, lack of trained medical personnel. Thousands of people a day will die of starvation‑related causes. And many who do not die will live only in dehumanising poverty; the widows who turn to prostitution to maintain their families; the parents who sell some of their children into slave labour or child prostitution to feed the rest.
Clearly, if anyone can tackle these issues, it is the graduates of the world. From our groups is emerging a steady flow of people who can confront in their own families and lifestyles the issues of over‑affluence and materialism, and who can determine to use their skills and careers for the service of the poor, motivated by the love of Christ and by the Word of God that presents our Lord telling the damned, ‘I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink… Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me'(Matthew 25:42‑45). From our groups emerge both the people who can take practical skills to the front lines in the neediest parts of the world (or who can choose low‑paid jobs in needy inner‑city areas in our own country), and those who can pray that God will keep them faithful to the vision as they work for real changes while in ‘ordinary’ professions at home. We can picture a ‘river of living water’ of such people emerging, year after year, from our movement, making their lives count. We are inviting our fellow‑students to join us in a movement of transformation by the power of the Spirit.
It is to such large visions that Christ wished to draw our attention when He promised us His Spirit. The Spirit was not given us for our own gratification; rather, He said, the prime consequence when the Spirit’s power came upon His people was that we should ‘be My witnesses in Jerusalem’ (our own immediate situation), ‘and in all Judaea’ (our surrounding country), ‘and Samaria’ (looking across the cultural and ethnic barriers), ‘and to the ends of the earth’ (Acts 1:8). A key purpose of local evangelism is to glorify Christ in world evangelism. Half the world still has not heard or read the gospel; and in our group this dimension of reality cannot be left as the concern only of a lonesome and discouraged student missionary secretary (even assuming our group has designated such a person!) Rather, it is the context into which everything else is fitted. It is true that many of our members may have very little awareness of global mission; and the pressures of our egocentric, affluence‑drunk culture combine to keep us focused on a very narrow and self‑obsessed set of concerns, even in our spirituality. But these pressures can be challenged. As group leaders, we can determine that the underlying missionary objective of our group is expressed in significant spaces in our programme and teaching; we can think carefully how world mission can be expressed in each of our group’s activities (rather than confined to specialist events attended only by those who already have a world vision ‑ so training our group to see them as a hobby for specialists). We can plan how to present mission concerns in ways that are colourful (international food, songs, dances?), creative, and relevant. (I remember one national conference where we took hot news items from the newspapers, related them to the situation of the church and student movement in those countries, and prayed about them: and one student commented, ‘I never thought prayer could be so practical!’) We can think how to show our love to the missionaries we support as real human beings. Be creative… why not send them a luxury food they may be missing from home (Dutch or Norwegian cheese? British marmite?); or a music CD, a humorous book, or a magazine to do with their hobbies? We can pray too for the exposure of individual members of our group; asking God who we should lend a particular book or magazine to, who we should invite to a meal with a visiting speaker, or who we should take with us on a conference or summer team…
Here again, as in every area of our work, enthusiasm motivates much better than despair! God’s words ‘will not return to him empty’; and we can be prayerfully confident that He has plans to do ‘more than we ask or imagine’ in the lives of the most ordinary‑seeming Christian friend we have. I think of the friends I studied with at university, twelve years ago. I enjoyed the university I went to, but in all honesty it isn’t one of Britain’s top campuses; and, as a group, we weren’t as evangelistically effective as some other campuses in the country. Some years later, however, I tried to find out what had happened to the students on the committee of which I was president. One had gone to east Asia and one to India to do student work; another was a schoolteacher in a rural area in east Asia. One was the highschools staff in Wales. I was working with IFES. Two more were in significant secular roles; the latest whereabouts I could establish for the remaining two were that they were respectively in Saudi Arabia and bound for missionary service in Africa. I think too of the students I shared a house with in my last two years. From their number came a Baptist minister, an Anglican minister, a staffworker in the Malaysian student movement, and a drug rehab worker in India, besides those living for God in ‘more normal’ secular professions. We should dream big dreams in our student groups; ten years from now we may be almost anywhere!
And that is why it is worth giving ourselves to God’s work among students. We have no idea what God can do, right where we are. There is nothing more exhilarating than being in the centre of His purposes when His kingdom is really moving forward. We are, as we say, the ‘missionary arm of the church’ within the university; and it is Christ, not us, who says ‘I will build my church’ (Matthew 16:18). As God tells us in Psalm 126, ‘He who goes out weeping’ (like Jesus wept over His city (Luke 19:41)), ‘carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with him.’ It’s His promise! The good seed undoubtedly produces a crop, says Jesus ‑ thirty, sixty or a hundredfold what was sown (Matthew 13:23). A thirtyfold return is not a bad minimum! Perhaps we should see ourselves as spiritual guerrillas planting loving timebombs: if we’ve really enabled someone to see the challenge of Christ’s gospel, then that is enough to bring them into the kingdom many years hence; and we can think of the timebombs of our evangelism going off all over Europe (and beyond) throughout the years to come!
Someone once asked Martina Navratilova why she was so good at tennis. She replied, ‘I’m not just involved in tennis, I am committed to it. Do you know the difference? Think of ham and eggs… The chicken is involved; the pig is committed!’ That’s a very biblical picture of commitment! Paul says in Galatians 2:20, ‘I have been crucified with Christ; and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me.’ In a crucial sense, his life was over. He wasn’t like the chicken that just comes along, sings, lays an egg and goes away again. Rather, his life was finished, except insofar as it was Christ’s.
God is calling us to ‘dream big dreams’ of what He can do through us if we are truly willing to be committed. It’s what we’ve seen throughout the history of the student movements worldwide: God forever bringing something out of nothing, doing ‘more than all we ask or imagine’ (Ephesians 3:20). He calls us in our turn to live lives in which we really do things that will last…
‘I want to serve the purpose of God in my generation.
I want to serve the purpose of God while I am alive.
I want to give my life for something that lasts forever…’
…so that by His grace, by His power, we shall look back from eternity and know that we did not waste our lives on trivial things, but on building the kingdom that will still be there to His glory a million years from now. As Paul puts it at the end of 1 Corinthians…
‘Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labour in the Lord is not in vain!’
