{"id":76,"date":"2002-09-04T10:58:58","date_gmt":"2002-09-04T18:58:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/archives\/2002\/09\/04\/do-universities-really-need-missionaries\/"},"modified":"2002-09-04T10:58:58","modified_gmt":"2002-09-04T18:58:58","slug":"do-universities-really-need-missionaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2002\/09\/04\/do-universities-really-need-missionaries","title":{"rendered":"Do Universities Really Need Missionaries?"},"content":{"rendered":"

For a while now I\u2019ve been meaning to add this our site, but I\u2019ve been a little too busy. I should have read Jon Walker\u2019s article Did Jesus Rush Through His Week?<\/a>!<\/p>\n

My wife and I are considered missionaries by the Assemblies of God<\/a>. That catches some people off-guard. After all, aren\u2019t missionaries people who serve exclusively in pagan lands (preferably while wearing a pith helmet in the jungle)?<\/p>\n

Not necessarily. A missionary is someone who is called to proclaim the gospel where there is no church to proclaim it.<\/b> <\/p>\n

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<\/b>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t even allow freshmen to have vehicles.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s the ramification? It doesn\u2019t matter how many churches there are in the surrounding town\u2013the college campus is a different world. Students are in great need of the gospel, yet they are insulated from the churches that proclaim it.<\/p>\n

And so when we minister on campus we\u2019re proclaiming the gospel in a place where there is no church to proclaim it. We\u2019re missionaries.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not to say there aren\u2019t 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\u2019re trying to establish a church that makes the missionary unnecessary!<\/p>\n

Our goal is different. We can\u2019t 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\u2019s why we raise missionary support<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In other words, the college campus is a perpetual mission field. We simply can\u2019t build a church that will make our ministry unnecessary or redundant. <\/p>\n

And that\u2019s why universities need missionaries\u2013they are self-sufficient communities that are isolated from any nearby churches. Since the students won\u2019t come to church, the church must go to them.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s missions.<\/p>\n

Oh\u2013I shouldn\u2019t finish this without mentioning two more details:<\/p>\n

1) There are roughly 14,000,000 college students in America: almost half the nations in the world have lower populations!<\/p>\n

2) The world comes to America for education: of those 14,000,000 students over 500,000 are from other nations<\/a> (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\u2019t allow missionaries entry. They\u2019ve come here and they can be reached here. That\u2019s one of the reasons Chi Alpha emphasizes International Student Friendship Ministries<\/a> so strongly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Missionaries are people who are called to proclaim the gospel where there is no church to proclaim it, and there ain\u2019t no church on campus!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wp_typography_post_enhancements_disabled":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-76","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-stanfordministry-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Ded-1e","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/glenandpaula.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}