… in international student ministry
If you are interested in ministry to international students enrolled at universities in the United States, you may be interested in my recent post at International Bible Fellowship. It is entitled IBF: Reloaded.
In this post I write about the reactivation of our old student ministry, International Bible Fellowship (IBF), as a recognized student organization at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas.
Back in May we had a special dumpling and video night at our house with Chinese students enrolled at Texas A&M University. I wrote and posted on that evening on May 25. This afternoon I discovered that the post (along with a couple of other May posts) was missing from my blog. Fortunately, I had the post saved at another location and wanted to put it back onto tangiblethoughts.
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We had a great small group meeting this past Saturday. We were joined by ten new Chinese PhD and post-doctoral students for an evening of making home-made dumplings, getting to meet and know new friends, and viewing a video about Chinese history, culture, and Christianity.
Several of the new folks asked to be added to our group’s email list for notices about future activities and meeting times.
We pray that many of these new friends will come to know Christ as their personal Savior and Lord.
Here are some pictures from that night.
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Making dumplings is a group event.
We’re excited and getting hungry.
Dumplings are served!
One of our new friends.
Old and new friends.
~ reach students … disciple the “nations” ~
My wife and I visited a young Chinese couple last night. They live in the Texas A&M apartment housing complex known as University Housing. They were very gracious hosts, preparing and serving us a delicious snack of steamed rolls and fried dumplings. “Hao chi!”
These friends, “Kelly” and Lynn”, are both Christ-followers, passionate about prayer and evangelism, and are very active in the local Mandarin congregation that we are associated with. They are also involved in the Bible study fellowship small group that meets at our home most Saturday nights. In fact, many of the people who have participated in the Saturday evening meal and Bible study group have been invited and brought by this couple.
It was a blessing to spend time with “Kelly” and “Lynn” last night … to see pictures of their family, friends, and homes in China, but most of all, to hear them talk about Christ and reaching their fellow Chinese with the Gospel.
The Saturday evening pot-luck meal and Bible study schedule for this spring semester mentioned in my last post is going to begin tonight. We are looking forward to having friends and new friends into our home for a time of relationship building, good food, Bible study, and discussion of the Word.
We are praying that these Saturday evenings together will be used of the Lord to draw people to faith in Christ and into Christian community.
It is also my prayer that as we see people accept Christ as Savior and Lord we will be able to start smaller, more intimate groups that will focus on more in-depth discipleship, equipping, leadership development, and the casting of vision for evangelism and the starting of organic, simple churches that will penetrate and saturate family and relationship networks, student and academic cluster groups, and career work places for Christ.
I have just obtained the Fall 2009 international student enrollment figures for Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. My family and I are involved in a home-based ministry to students from the “nations” who are pursing their academic careers in our community and these numbers are always very interesting to us.
The report shows that the international student population at A&M (Main Campus) has increased since the 2008-2009 school year.
The Fall 2008 international student enrollment was 4,484. This year’s total (Fall 2009) international student enrollment is 4,560.
The top five nations represented in this year’s international student enrollment (including financially “sponsored” students), and their numbers are:
Of these students, 3,646 are enrolled in graduate degree programs, while 824 are enrolled in undergraduates studies. The remaining numbers are enrolled in other studies and programs.
We are always mindful that the community’s international population is much greater than the university enrollment numbers would suggest. Many of the University’s students are married with children and are visited, often for extended periods of time, by parents and siblings. There is no way that we can accurately place a figure on the total number of internationals living in our community, but it is huge.
As I have written in earlier posts on this blog, we believe that the Lord of the Harvest, in His sovereignty, has brought the “nations” to our campus so that they might hear the saving message of Jesus Christ and come to know Him as their personal Savior and Lord. These new believers will then be discipled in the faith, as we are commanded to do by Christ in Matthew 28:18-20, and equipped for ministry and service (Ephesians 4:11-14). We will also seek to start organic, simple churches that will reach into the respective nationality groups and networks of the new believers and model a simple form of church that can be replicated and reproduced in any culture, setting, or nation.
These new believers will be used of the Lord, in their respective professional and academic fields as church planters, Bible teachers, pastors, and evangelists to reach their networks, people groups, and nations for the Lord Jesus Christ.
Please pray for the many to be led to faith in Christ and for us as we commit ourselves to reach and disciple the “nations” who are studying at Texas A&M University.
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This article was originally posted on November 17, 2009, on taethnenetwork, another blog I have written.
As I re-read The Tangible Kingdom by Halter and Smay, I am discovering that the message of the book rings as encouraging and inspirational to me today as when I first read it about a year ago. The passages that are highlighted in yellow and/or emphasized by red arrows still speak to my heart and passions. And, I am finding new statements and points that are striking chords with me this time around.
One such fresh passage is found in the chapter entitled “Posture.” Under the heading “Where Missionaries Begin” (p.38), Halter and Smay write that when we, Christ-followers and churches, engage people with something of an understanding of their assumptions, experiences, worldviews, and emotions,
everything changes: our posture with people, our livlihood, what we do with our spare time, who we spend our time with, how we structure the fabric of our lives. Yes, church is what we’re concerned about because we’re deeply entrenched in its minutia, but we can’t make transformative adjustments if we start there and work outward. We must go out and then let church reemerge as a reflection and the natural outgrowth of our missional way of life.”
Sounds a little like “becoming all things to all men so that some might get saved.”
Missional, being sent into the world as God’s representatives, has an “inseperable twin.” The “twin” is called “incarnational.” The authors quote the meaning of incarnation as “any person or thing serving as the type or embodiment of a quality or concept.”
The section continues with a statement that caught my attention. The authors write that
missional sentness is focused on leaving and everything related to going, but incarnational represents how we go and what we do as we go.”
I think of this as the Missional-Incarnational Factor (MI Factor).
As God the Father sent the Son to walk among men in order to reveal Himself and His love for humanity, so He sends us into the world to do the same. God’s love was supremely manifested on the Cross of Calvary, but it is true that it was also revealed in and through relationships and community. So, it is true for us, that the message of His love and grace that we have been commissioned to share will be most effectively revealed in and through our relationships and the communities in which we live and move.
Who or what is it that the Lord may be wanting me/us to leave (comfort zones, relationships, church as we have always done it), to whom or where is He directing us to go, and how is it that He would have us live in order for His Kingdom to become more real and tangible in the lives of people who are in need of Christ?
That is the MI Factor question.
Missional and being on mission are major subjects of discussion among Christ-followers and 
churches today. Many books on the subject … many definitions of what “missional” and “missional living” are.
I was going through some articles in my files the other day and came across two definitions of “missional living” that I liked.
The first is from Floyd McClung. McClung served with Youth With a Mission for many years and is currently with a ministry in South Africa called All Nations. In an article entitled “Missional Living”, McClung describes “missional living” simply as:
investing in the lives of other people. It is not a program. It is certainly more that organized outreach activities. Being a missional person means intentionally building bridges to other people – for the sake of them knowing Jesus and discovering what it means to be a fully alive, free human being. It is an attitude that says, ‘I will invest my life in others for the sake of Christ and His purposes on earth.’ It means I will live that way in every sphere of life and every day of the week.”
The second definition is taken from an article written by Ashley Wolpert and posted on Ed Stetzer’s blog. The title, like McClung’s, is also “Missional Living”. In the article Wolpert is interviewing Ed Stezer and she asks him to define missional living.
Stetzer defines it this way:
Missional living is essentially living with our primary perspective as that of an ambassador for the Kingdom of God. It means making our lives not about us, but about Jesus and His Kingdom.
In an alliterated sense, missional living is an incarnational (being the presence of Christ in community), indigenous (of a people and culture) and intentional (planning our lives around God’s agenda) focus on the power of the Gospel to bring the reign of God into people’s lives.”
From both definitions we can draw the conclusion that missional living is:
We have all read about being on mission, or being sent: God sent His Son; the Father and the Son sent the Spirit; and the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit send us into the world with the Gospel message of His love and grace.
Into what context of life has the Lord sent or placed you, and how are you intentionally and purposively engaging it for the Kingdom and glory of God?
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There are many definitions of missional living or what it means to be on mission. You’ve probably read a good one or two that you feel best expresses missional living to you. Why not leave a comment and share it?
Read Floyd’s article here and Ashley’s interview of Stetzer here.
Church Planting Movements – How God Is Redeeming a Lost World by David Garrison was such an informative and inspirational book the first time I read it several years ago that I thought I would read it again.
The book has been as informative and encouraging the second read through as it was the first time.
In the book, Garrison reports on what the Lord is doing to bring a lost world to Himself through church planting movements that are occurring around the world.
Garrison defines a CPM as “a rapid multiplication of indigenous churches planting churches that sweeps through a people group or population segment.”
He “unpacks” the definition of a CPM in Chapter 2 by saying that they …
This is exciting because we know that new churches and the starting of new churches is the most effective means of evangelism that we can be involved in and committed to.
After clarifying the difference between CPMs and mass evangelism and the Church Growth Movement, Garrison says that it is important for us to understand this activity of God because:
Church Planting Movements in different parts of the world are described and discussed in Part 2 of the book. I was particularly interested in the description of what the Lord is doing in China (“Wo Ai Zhong Guo”).
With respect to CPMs in China, Garrison describes a model for house churches that combines multiple lay leadership development, mutual accountability, biblical authority and rapid reproducibility. He refers to this model as the P.O.U.C.H. church.
P.O.U.C.H. churches are characterized by:
As P.O.U.C.H. churches are started and developed, two very important ingredients are built into their DNA. The first is multiplication. When the churches grow to about thirty members, they multiply (not divide) and start another church. Through the multiplication of churches, communities and networks are penetrated and saturated with believers and authentic faith communities. The second ingredient built into the DNA of P.O.U.C.H. churches is leadership development. The equipping and releasing of believers for ministry is critical for the multiplication of disciples, leadership, and churches to continue.
My heart is thrilled by the rapid multiplication of churches and the development of leadership that is released to do ministry and start new churches that we see in China.
If the church in the West is going to see the communities where we live and minister won to Christ, it would behoove us to seriously pray about, consider, and embrace a P.O.U.C.H. church-type approach to ministry. We do this recognizing this model’s potential for reaching people for Christ and its practical value when considering the cost of land, property, and buildings in most of our metro and urban areas.
This approach to ministry, though it would be more properly referred to as house church network ministry, is being done in the Dallas-Ft. Worth (TX) metroplex and Denver, Colorado areas. Check out the Ethne Network (Denver) and the Church of a Hill Connection (DFW) links under the “Church” heading on the right sidebar.
I believe this model for ministry would be very effective in reaching students enrolled at our local universities and colleges. In other words, start simple churches that reach and disciple students and meet on campus or in its surrounding areas.
Over the course of the next few posts I want to share some of the information about church planting movements that David Garrison has discovered and reports on in his book. I believe that much, if not most, of this information has real potential for application in our local ministries if we are committed to doing whatever it takes to reach our communities for Christ.
~ Blessings ~
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Please visit Monergism Books and WTS Books and help me earn free reading material.
Last summer I wrote two posts on the book, The Tangible Kingdom, by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay. Hugh and Matt are the co-pastors of Adullam, a missional congregation in Denver.
Today, I received a comment on one of the posts from Missio, Hugh and Matt’s missions organization that is a part of their Church Resource Ministries (CRM Leaders) ministry. I was offered a copy of the book that they have written as a follow-up to The Tangible Kingdom.
The book is entitled, The Tangible Kingdom Primer. It is an eight-week study that helps individuals and congregations move into a more missional way of thinking and conducting themselves as Christ-followers. It is described as “an eight-week guide to Incarnational community.”
I am looking forward to receiving, working through, and posting on the Primer.
That you, Missio, for the comment and the book.
~ Blessings ~
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Read my previous posts referenced above, The Tangible Kingdom and Living the Life.
I would like to share a prayer request with those of you who visit my blog on a regular basis, as well as you who may have just dropped by for the first time.
My wife and I are prayerfully seeking the Lord’s will and leadership regarding a return to full-time vocational ministry. I believe the Lord would have me serve as a minister of missions on the staff of a local church.
The Lord has given me a passion for and a desire to return to a ministry that focuses on and is engaged in the strategizing and start of new churches, cross-cultural ministry, outreach and small groups.
May I ask you to please pray with and for us as we ask the Lord to very clearly reveal His perfect will and leadership as we desire and seek to serve and glorify Him in missions ministry.
tangible thoughts ... 
