Do Universities Really Need Missionaries?

Mis­sion­ar­ies are peo­ple who are called to pro­claim the gospel where there is no church to pro­claim it, and there ain’t no church on cam­pus!

For a while now I’ve been mean­ing to add this our site, but I’ve been a lit­tle too busy. I should have read Jon Walk­er’s arti­cle Did Jesus Rush Through His Week?!

My wife and I are con­sid­ered mis­sion­ar­ies by the Assem­blies of God. That catch­es some peo­ple off-guard. After all, aren’t mis­sion­ar­ies peo­ple who serve exclu­sive­ly in pagan lands (prefer­ably while wear­ing a pith hel­met in the jun­gle)?

Not nec­es­sar­i­ly. A mis­sion­ary is some­one who is called to pro­claim the gospel where there is no church to pro­claim it.

There are a lot of nuances and qual­i­fi­ca­tions I could add to that def­i­n­i­tion of a mis­sion­ary, but I think it will suf­fice for this dis­cus­sion. The key phrase is where there is no church to pro­claim it.

That describes the col­lege cam­pus. Col­lege cam­pus­es (exclud­ing com­muter schools) are com­mu­ni­ties unto them­selves. Stu­dents can attend class­es, sleep, eat, watch movies, play games, do laun­dry, and shop for the neces­si­ties with­out ever leav­ing their cam­pus. In fact, many cam­pus­es don’t even allow fresh­men to have vehi­cles.

What’s the ram­i­fi­ca­tion? It does­n’t mat­ter how many church­es there are in the sur­round­ing town–the col­lege cam­pus is a dif­fer­ent world. Stu­dents are in great need of the gospel, yet they are insu­lat­ed from the church­es that pro­claim it.

And so when we min­is­ter on cam­pus we’re pro­claim­ing the gospel in a place where there is no church to pro­claim it. We’re mis­sion­ar­ies.

That’s not to say there aren’t any dif­fer­ences between us and oth­er mis­sion­ar­ies. For exam­ple, the goal of most mis­sion­ar­ies is to estab­lish an indige­nous church that is self-gov­ern­ing, self-sup­port­ing, and self-prop­a­gat­ing. In oth­er words, they’re try­ing to estab­lish a church that makes the mis­sion­ary unnec­es­sary!

Our goal is dif­fer­ent. We can’t cre­ate a church at Stan­ford that meets all three cri­te­ria (being self-sup­port­ing, self-gov­ern­ing, and self-prop­a­gat­ing) because of the nature of the cam­pus and the stu­dents who inhab­it it. The chal­lenges are chiefly in the area of self-gov­er­nance (the stu­dents keep grad­u­at­ing, mak­ing total­ly stu­dent-run groups unsta­ble) and self-sup­port (col­lege stu­dents have no mon­ey to pro­vide for a full-time pas­tor). Inci­den­tal­ly, that’s why we raise mis­sion­ary sup­port.

In oth­er words, the col­lege cam­pus is a per­pet­u­al mis­sion field. We sim­ply can’t build a church that will make our min­istry unnec­es­sary or redun­dant.

And that’s why uni­ver­si­ties need missionaries–they are self-suf­fi­cient com­mu­ni­ties that are iso­lat­ed from any near­by church­es. Since the stu­dents won’t come to church, the church must go to them.

And that’s mis­sions.

Oh–I should­n’t fin­ish this with­out men­tion­ing two more details:

1) There are rough­ly 14,000,000 col­lege stu­dents in Amer­i­ca: almost half the nations in the world have low­er pop­u­la­tions!

2) The world comes to Amer­i­ca for edu­ca­tion: of those 14,000,000 stu­dents over 500,000 are from oth­er nations (over half of those are from Asia and anoth­er 7% are from the Mid­dle East). Walk­ing across vir­tu­al­ly any col­lege cam­pus you can find stu­dents from coun­tries that don’t allow mis­sion­ar­ies entry. They’ve come here and they can be reached here. That’s one of the rea­sons Chi Alpha empha­sizes Inter­na­tion­al Stu­dent Friend­ship Min­istries so strong­ly.

3 thoughts on “Do Universities Really Need Missionaries?”

  1. Glen,

    It is good for me to get a per­spec­tive on “mis­si­ol­o­gy” from a Protes­tant per­spec­tive. Par­tic­u­lar­ly it is inter­est­ing to see your cri­te­ria (and I pre­sume that it is shared by oth­er, if not all, Protes­tants) of where mis­sion­ary work is to occur: “where there is no church to pro­claim it.”

    Sean

    The Catholic Church in the past have had a sim­i­lar under­stand­ing of where mis­sion work should occur. We have called this kind of mis­sion­ary work “ad gentes” (to the nations).

    How­ev­er, Pope John Paul II has called for a “new evan­ge­liza­tion” that is to reach out to those nations, with estab­lished church­es and once tra­di­tion­al­ly Chris­t­ian, but now with a strong trend toward sec­u­lar­iza­tion.

    Includ­ed among these would be many of the coun­tries of the “First World” (includ­ing the Unit­ed States). How­ev­er, it would not have as a spe­cial focus some devel­op­ing nations, espe­cial­ly in Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca, where the Catholic Church has been present for sev­er­al cen­turies but sure­ly needs revi­tal­iza­tion (at least in some areas).

    This, then, leads me to ask you a ques­tion based upon your cri­te­ria for where mis­sion work should occur. If such work, the procla­ma­tion of the Gospel, should occur “where there is no church to pro­claim it”, would you sup­port it in coun­tries, such as those of Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca, where, arguably, there is a church to pro­claim it?

    I’d be inter­est­ed to read your views on that.

    Reply

  2. I should have seen that com­ing. 🙂

    This was­n’t a full trea­tise on mis­si­ol­o­gy. It was an attempt to explain to peope why we count as mis­sion­ar­ies even though we’re here in Amer­i­ca. As I said, “there are a lot of nuances and qual­i­fi­ca­tions I could add to that def­i­n­i­tion of a mis­sion­ary…”

    If I was writ­ing a more abstract trea­tise I would have also men­tioned that we con­sid­er state­side church planters to be mis­sion­ar­ies in the Assem­blies of God–even if they’re plant­i­ng in an area that already has one or more Assem­bly of God church­es. Their goal is enter a com­mu­ni­ty that does­n’t have enough church­es and estab­lish a new one. Once the church becomes self-sup­port­ing and self-gov­ern­ing, they aren’t con­sid­ered mis­sion­ar­ies in the same way any­more.

    No urban­ized area in Amer­i­ca has even close to enough church­es. I under­stand the sit­u­a­tion is even worse in Latin & South Amer­i­ca. http://www.providence.edu/las/Statistics.htm for cor­rob­o­ra­tion on that last claim: I note in Brazil that there are only 16,000 priests serv­ing 135,000,000 bap­tized Catholics. That’s about 1 per 8500 (and for the whole pop­u­la­tion of Brazil the num­ber is clos­er to 1 per 11,000).

    So yes, I ful­ly sup­port the send­ing of Assem­bly of God mis­sion­ar­ies to Latin and South Amer­i­ca. More­over, I’d have to say that my impres­sion of Catholi­cism in those areas is that it con­tains an even low­er per­cent­age of Chris­tians than the church­es here in the States (but that ties back in to our ongo­ing dis­cus­sion).

    Reply

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