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Integrating Missions into Campus Witness and Fellowship

Ideas for Cultivating Love for God's Purposes in the World
by Fred Everson

Prayer Meetings

1. Praise God for his love for the peoples and nations of the world! Joyfully ask him to give you his love and his "heart!"
2. Organize some of your daily/regular prayer meetings around unreached people groups. Use tools such as Global Prayer Digest; Operation World ; or IFES Prayer and Praise.
3. Regularly pray for the area(s) of the world where you have ongoing relationships/programs.
4. Regularly pray about whom the Lord would send out from your fellowship into cross-cultural mission.
5. Have international students come talk about their countries and cultures. Then pray for them and their countries.
6. Integrate prayer for members involved in cross-cultural ministry into the regular prayer meetings - before, during and after their experience. Create a list-serve to distribute prayer requests for those participating in cross-cultural ministry.
7. Periodically pray through the world section of the newspaper.
8. Pray for the country on a label of an article of your clothing.
9. Have an around-the-world prayer night. Make sure you have a world map, specific information, guidelines, and variety.
10. Have a prayer breakfast with a featured missionary or international student. Have prayer requests ready for that country or people groups. Pray!

Small Group Bible Studies

1. Add one question to the Bible study each week such as, "Does this passage say something say about God's heart for the world?" or "Does this passage say something about God's heart for those of differing ethnicities or cultures?"
2. Get your small group members involved with international students (i.e. as conversation partners, by leading a GIG (Group Investigating God), inviting international students to your group to talk about life in their country).
3. Find a creative way for your members to get involved with people who are ethnically, culturally, or economically different than themselves (i.e. serving with a community development organization, living on a different part of campus or in specific dorms, etc).
4. Encourage members to get cross-cultural ministry training such as Student Training In Missions (STIM, through InterVarsity) or a Perspectives missions course.
5. Be active in supporting those from your group/chapter who are going on and returning from cross-cultural ministry experiences (this includes financial, logistical and prayer commitment to help send them).
6. Go on a cross-cultural project as a group.
7. Plan or attend a meal featuring food, décor and eating arrangements/customs of another culture.
8. Make a missions presentation, as a small group, at a local church (including organizing and hosting prayer meetings).
9. Make Bible covers that represent each member's commitment to God's heart for the world.
10. Assign each small group in the fellowship to come to large group prepared to share news, prayer items, and missionary names to pray for. Ask each group to prepare and share this creatively.
11. Have each small group adopt a people group or country of the world and gather information, pray and give to a missionary/national worker in that place. Exchange letters with that national/missionary.
12. Encourage each small group leader to intentionally point out each time God's love for the nations/world/other people comes up in their Bible study.

Large Group Meetings

1. Work to integrate God's heart for the world into one aspect of the large group meeting each week.
2. Specifically focus on countries to which students from the group have gone and are going (i.e. have international students from those countries speak about their homeland and culture, have group members research various aspects of these countries and give reports).
3. Use cross-cultural studies, simulations or games for discussion on missions issues.
4. Regularly have missions-minded speakers (i.e. have at least one talk per year where mission as a part of discipleship is presented, have testimonies from Christian international students, have missionaries speak - possibly on "non-missions" topics such as prayer, dependence on God, or the power of the Holy Spirit).
5. Reflect the world in musical worship by incorporating songs from different languages/styles into the normal repertoire.
6. Always display a world map (or "map" of international faces/places) in your meeting area.
7. Do icebreakers from another culture.
8. Do announcements in another language and see who can figure them out. Eventually give them in English.

Retreats and Conferences

1. Pray and take an offering for your overseas partners.
2. Arrange for students/staff from your overseas partnership to be at the event.
3. Periodically get missionaries or international believers to be speakers.
4. Incorporate worship songs from several different languages/styles.
5. Have one meal feature food, décor and eating arrangements/customs of another culture.
6. Have a time and place for interested students to talk with staff or students who have been involved with cross-cultural ministry.
7. Play games from another culture.

Leadership

1. Participate in a cross-cultural opportunity (e.g. "summer mission trip") together as a leadership team and/or with those you disciple.
2. Read Scripture and pray together regularly to grow in commitment to God's heart for the nations.
3. Implement a "2-2-2" strategy - getting group/chapter members on a trajectory of 2 week, 2 month, and 2 year cross-cultural involvement.
4. Read, discuss and prayerfully respond to the biographies of missionaries and mission leaders.
5. Talk specifically about how missions ties in with your chapter/group goals for the semester/year.
6. "Adopt" a Christian student movement in another country and commit to a 3-4 year support relationship with them, pray for them, take offerings at large group, share updates with what God is doing in/through them. In InterVarsity, this means "twinning" with IFES movements (talk to your IVCF staff worker or contact the IVCF's mission department).
7. Recruit for, attend, and respond to Urbana 06 and other mission conferences.
8. Work with missions leaders in your group to brainstorm ways to "integrate" mission rather than "isolate" it.
9. Be active in sending, caring for, and receiving those in the group who are involved in cross-cultural ministry.
10. Look at how you spend a typical week thinking through how missions could be integrated in simple ways into the things you already do (i.e. use cross-cultural illustrations in your teaching, expose people you disciple to other cultures [in Scripture, local restaurants, …], have one of your regular appointments be with someone ethnically/culturally different than yourself, attend the events/meetings of campus groups culturally different than your own).

Fun Stuff

1. Have a respectfully-done "dress foreign" party/dance, playing international music.
2. Participate in some of the events sponsored by the International Student Office or other ethnic/cultural organizations on campus or in the community.
3. Have a scavenger hunt - gathering objects (and/or people) from different countries.
4. Form an "international restaurant of the month" club.
5. Have a "proverbs" party with international students - sharing common proverbs from different cultures.
6. During a social gathering, stop and give a prize to the person who is wearing clothing made in the greatest number of different countries.
7. Celebrate a few international holidays throughout the year.

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December 27-31, 2009