Integrating Your Short Term Trip
Back on Campusby Rich Henderson
Share your summer experience through slides, photos, and presentations
• Set up presentations at church, in your chapter, or invite your support team to a dessert.
• Write out your story first. You may want to have a long and short version to use in various contexts.
• Organize your slide/photo sequence to illustrate your story so that you won't be explaining each slide, rather each slide will be highlighting your story.
• If you like, select some background music. It may be music traditional to the area you visited or simply mood setting.
• Be sure to conclude with two or three specific results. How has your life been changed?
Begin a Friendship with an International Student
• Read Paul Little's Guide to International Friendship.1
• Attend an International Student House party.
• Pray and ask God to lead you to the right international friend.
• Observe in your classes who may be an international. Introduce yourself. Ask to meet for lunch, coffee/tea, a coke, etc.
• Seek support from your prayer partner or small group.
• What to discuss with your new friend: your major, information about each other's home town, customs, points of interest in one another's country, family, hobbies, etc. Invite your friend to campus or church socials, worship services, picnics, or home for a weekend.
• Don't avoid talking about religion or your faith, but don't push it either. The more you get to know your friend the more naturally this will come.
• Be prepared with a clear, concise outline of the Gospel for when your friend asks.
• Trust the Holy Spirit to be working in the life of your friend as you meet with them week after week, but don't feel pressured to bring that person to Christ by the end of the year. That is God's business. Simply be ready to serve as His instrument.
Form a Prayer/Discipleship Relationship with One Other Student with a Focus on World Evangelization
• Ask God to send you a friend who has the same vision as you; to be a learner from Christ.
• Share your desire with chapter leaders, staff, roommate, or pastor.
• Join a missions group on campus.
• Be open to others who might suggest a partner for you.
• Once you've found a partner, your meetings might begin by:
- getting to know each other
- praying together
- discussing and deciding upon goals
- deciding on meeting content and format
- deciding on when to meet, how often and where
Recruit Others to go on Future Missions Trips
• Ask God to show you who might be a good candidate. Remember, there are other missions trips than the one you went on which may suit this person better.
• Challenge that person with cross-cultural involvement.
• Help them work through their fears and concerns.
• Obtain needed materials from an IV staff or the GP office.
Help Lead a Mission Bible Study
• Promote the idea two to three weeks in advance of start-up, getting help and counsel from chapter leaders and staff.
• Prepare yourself to teach or help others to teach by obtaining a good outline of the Biblical Basis of mission from your staff worker or pastor.
• Plan how many sessions will be needed to cover the material figuring on 1 hour meetings (45min. study, 15min. worship/prayer).
• Schedule according to the best time for all involved.
Help Lead a Mission Prayer Group
• Recruit and promote the idea, giving two to three weeks lead time before your first meeting.
• Plan the format; i.e. will you use Concerts of Prayer outline? Use of worship, confession, prayers for revival and world evangelization, prayers for international students, missionaries, a specific people group.
• Invite two to three missionaries or tentmakers per semester to your group with whom your group can build a relationship and carry on a continuing partnership.
• Share leadership of the prayer times.
• Record answers to prayers giving thanks to God.
In InterVarsity Chapters, Help Your Chapter Develop a "Twinning" Relationship with a Student Movement in Another Country
• Discuss this idea first with your InterVarsity Exec and staff worker. In what ways could a relationship with Christian students in another country benefit the chapter? How might the chapter benefit this other movement?
• Give them a profile of the student movement in the country you were in. What needs exist amongst students there?
• Draft a letter to the IFES Regional Secretary for that area of the world proposing the relationship and getting guidance as to how to begin working with that student movement. Contact the InterVarsity Missions Department at gp@intervarsity.org.
1 See also Crossing Cultures Here and Now by Lisa Chin.
Adapted from InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Global Project Handbook, 1999
Unless otherwise noted, all materials on the urbana.org web site are Copyright InterVarsity Christian Fellowship / USA. All rights reserved.
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