Author: Glen

Beloit College has released its 2006 college mindset list.

From the intro: This year’s entering students have grown up in a country where the Presidents have all been Southerners, and in a world with AIDS and without apartheid. Saturns have always been on the street, the Fox Network has always been on television, and prom dresses have always come in basic black. The evil empire is not earth-bound, the drug “ecstacy” has always been available, and with the breakup of AT & T, nobody has been able to comprehend a phone bill.

Some of the more humorous items:
11. Barbie has always had a job.
14. A “Hair Band” is some sort of fashion accessory.
15. George Foreman has always been a barbecue grill salesman.
21. The United States has always been trying to put nuclear waste in Nevada.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you my mission field!

Paula and I have been out of town the last three days, and it was great!

The Nor Cal / Nevada District hosted a golf tournament.

No–we didn’t play. We did something much, much better.

We drove around in a golf cart all day both days and handed out free ice-cold drinks to parched pastors! The temperature on the first day was around 102 F and set a new record for the area, which meant that the golfers were VERY happy to see us. There were around 80 golfers, and we gave away around 400 drinks over the two days of the tournament.

It was a great way to bless the pastors, and it was also a great way to build some name recognition for Stanford Chi Alpha among this key constituency. It was also a great way to become the most loved people on the golf course!

Yet another way Stanford is changing the world: here’s a list of companies founded by members of the Stanford community. Among them:

Hewlett-Packard
Cisco Systems
Silicon Graphics
Sun Microsystems
Electronic Arts
Yahoo!
EBay
Nvidia

Turns out that 40% of the revenue in Silicon Valley is generated by companies that emerged from Stanford, and the employees earned around 6.5 billion dollars in 1999. Wow!

By the way, that 6.5 billion dollars would work out to $650 million dollars in tithes. For comparison’s sake, the Assemblies of God gave $350 million in 2001.

In a recent article about the arrival of the freshmen at Stanford was this little tidbit:

For the first time in the university’s history, the majority of the members of the Class of 2006 are persons of color. According to statistics from Office of Admission, 40.6 percent of the new class are white, 23.4 percent of the class are Asian American; 11.6 percent are African American; 10.3 percent are Mexican-American; 5.5 percent are international students; 3 percent are other Latino and 1.9 percent are Native American/Native Hawaiian. In addition to being the most ethnically diverse, the class is the one of them most geographically diverse ever admitted.

Here’s another reason the American university is such a strategic mission field–there are about 14,000,000 university students attending college in America and almost 4% of them are from other nations.

The most recent statistics I could find show that over half of them are from Asia and 7% are from the Middle East. Many of these nations forbid any sort of missionary work–but they send their future leaders here to be trained! In fact, the Navigators claim that 7 of the top 10 countries that send students to the U.S. are closed to typical misssionary efforts.

That’s impressive enough, but I’ll up the ante even further. I’ve heard that every major world leader except Saddam Hussein has studied in America, but I wasn’t able to verify that claim. What I can do is list of some of the world leaders trained on United States campuses. Imagine the potential world impact of reaching the future leaders of the world today (incidentally, I have a related essay focused on America)! The political scene is so tumultuous that I won’t bother pretending this is current. Assume that they’re possibly out of power unless you hear their names on the news.

Ehud Barak, Former Israeli Prime Minister, Stanford
Alejandro Toledo, president of Peru, Stanford
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli Prime Minister, MIT
Benizar Bhutto, first female Prime Minister of Pakistan, Harvard U
Carlos Salinas, president of Mexico, Harvard U
Lien Chan, Premier of Taiwan, University of Chicago
Lee Teng Hui, President of Taiwan, Iowa State and Cornell
Saud Al-Fasial, Foreign Minister of Saudia Arabia, Princeton
Adul Al-Awadi, Kuwaiti Minister of State, Harvard
Kai-Wen Mao, Chinese Minister of Education, UC Berkeley and Carnegie-Mellon
Dhoukan Al-Hindawi, Deputy Prime Minister of Jordan, University of Maryland
Osama al-Baz, Chief Advisor to President Mubarak in Egypt, Harvard
Bir Birkram Sha Dev Birenda, King of Nepal, Harvard
Tahir al-Masri, Prime Minister of Jordan, University of North Texas
Yosuko Matsuoka, Foreign Minister of Japan, University of Oregon

You don’t have to imagine the potential impact, ministry to international students has already had worldwide ramifications. Consider this telling example:

A number of years ago, Hal Guffey (former president of International Students, Inc.) was speaking to a group of Christians about the opportunity to befriend international students. At the end of his talk a young lady from another country approached him. She told him that though her father had not become a Christian as a result of his student days in the U.S., nonetheless he had returned home with a favorable impression of Christians. Many years later he found himself in a position to decide whether Christian missionaries should be allowed to remain in his country. He decided they should be allowed to stay. (source)

If you know of any others world leaders who should be on the list, let me know via the comment box!