ministry

Dallas Willard’s ��ñ�� Ministry Roots

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Tue, 24 Sep 2019 13:45:24 +0000

Gordon Govier

Dallas Willard’s ��ñ�� Ministry Roots

��ñ��’s Graduate and Faculty Ministries marked its 30-year anniversary at the GFM annual staff conference this year but the story of Dallas Willard shows that ministry to graduate students and faculty is buried much more deeply in the DNA of ��ñ��. This was celebrated earlier in the year during a meeting of the faculty fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW). As the faculty members and administrators gathered at the University Club, they were regaled with memories of the days when Dallas was a UW graduate student.

Dallas received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the UW, living and studying in Madison from 1959 to 1965. He was hired at the University of Southern California (USC) in 1965 and taught philosophy there for the next 47 years, until just before his death in 2013. Along the way, Dallas also became a leading evangelical writer and speaker, influencing many thousands through books like The Divine Conspiracy.

Gary Moon’s biography, Becoming Dallas Willard (��ñ�� Press), describes the five years spent in Madison as a graduate student and lecturer as a critical time for Dallas. Despite having previously attended three Christian colleges, being ordained in a Baptist Church in 1956, and pastoring at two churches, Dallas still looked for a transformational faith. “I was almost terminally ignorant about God and soul,” he said later.

Discovering Spiritual Disciplines

At UW, Dallas discovered a new dimension of faith through the practice of spiritual disciplines. “What I had thought were merely the discarded practices of futile religion were actually things that, if rightly used, would help people change,” he observed.

One of the spiritual disciplines that Dallas practiced was the regular Sunday night fellowship with a handful of other graduate students in the home of UW Geography professor John Alexander, who was the ��ñ�� undergraduate chapter faculty sponsor, and soon to become ��ñ�� president.

"He (Alexander) felt that there was a need for something for the grads; he opened his home on Prospect Drive for us,” recalled Mary Daniel, emeritus professor in the UW Department of Spanish and Portuguese. “At Dr. A’s house nothing was off limits. You could ask anything.”

In the foreword to the study guide for The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas attributed many of the basic teachings from the book to this formative period. “Part of the first chapter comes from graduate school days when I was active in ��ñ�� Christian Fellowship,” he wrote.

What Dallas appreciated about ��ñ��, he said at another time, “was that capacity to be biblically serious, to hold to the central teachings of what Lewis called ‘Mere Christianity,’ and yet to be open enough to be willing to discuss anything.”

The Dilemma

Dallas faced a hard choice as his time at UW came to a close. He received his Ph.D. in 1965, and during the previous year he had not only been a UW lecturer, but he also pastored the Arena Congregational Church in a small town outside of Madison. Would he return to the pulpit as a full-time pastor or follow philosophy into the academy? What would it be, the pulpit or the classroom?

Finally, the answer came. “The Lord said to me, ‘If you stay in the churches the university will be closed to you. But, if you stay in the university, the churches will be open to you.’ I knew the Lord said it to me because I sure didn't have enough sense to understand what it meant at the time,” he concluded.

So Dallas accepted the invitation from USC to move to California. He became a fixture in the philosophy department, chairman from 1982-1985, and recipient of the USC Associates Award for Excellence in Teaching in 1977.

Joe Thackwell, ��ñ��’s Director of University Partnerships, got to know Dallas and his wife Jane as he planted a graduate student and faculty chapter at USC. He learned that Dallas would write his phone number on the board and tell students they could call anytime, “although if it was dinner time he may not answer.” Joe noted, “The call to pastor through his professorship was a family call that implicated his whole life in the way that missionary and pastor’s families often experience.”

Dallas spent hours and hours listening to students in his office and made a habit of long lunches with students and faculty, engaging them deeply. “He also made himself available to the whole Christian community at USC,” Joe said. “When he taught at the Trojan Christian Faculty and Staff Fellowship the numbers swelled.”

Working with former students and current USC staff, Joe established a memorial plaque that now hangs in Mudd Hall, the home of the USC Philosophy Department. The plaque lists four worldview questions that Dallas used in his lectures and listed in his book, Knowing Christ Today. Joe believes that it is the only such memorial to a professor on the USC campus.

Dallas almost never said no to an invitation to speak. Through his counseling, books, and lectures about Christian living he was able to disciple as many people as a professor as he could have as a pastor, maybe more. And the formative fellowship he attended during his UW days illustrates the importance of graduate student ministry.

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International Student Ministry Grows as the Globe Shrinks

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Mon, 05 Nov 2018 17:06:07 +0000

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Gordon Govier

International Student Ministry Grows as the Globe Shrinks

Tomsk is known as the Athens of Siberia. Home to six Russian state universities, one-fifth of its half million population are students. Tens of thousands of those students are from outside of Russia, many from sub-Saharan Africa.

“It’s a growing worldwide phenomenon,” said Richard*, one of ��ñ��'s senior ministry specialists. “That’s why they’ve invited me to come and help them.”

For the last three-and-a-half years Richard has been traveling back and forth to sites like Tomsk in Europe and Eurasia to train staff of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) in international student ministry (ISM). He is one of ��ñ��’s longest tenured ISM specialists, and has been involved with ISM for more than 30 years in the western U.S.

“The number of international students keeps growing like crazy,” said Daniel Bourdanné, IFES General Secretary. “What an amazing ministry opportunity.” International students in the U.S. doubled in the last decade, now numbering one million. Globally, there is similar growth, from 2.8 million in 2005 to 4.8 million in 2016 (Migration Data Portal).

“There’s a groundswell of interest in working with internationals,” said Kurt Thiel, who directs ��ñ��’s Link program. Link sends ��ñ�� volunteers, like Richard, to assist IFES partners in other countries. More and more requests are coming in for specialists in ISM.

Joseph*, a Link staff worker with ISM experience in the U.S., arrived in Israel about four years ago. Rasha Saba, General Secretary of the Fellowship of Christian Students in Israel (FCSI), invited him to focus on ISM. They discovered groups of Christian international students were already meeting. Having someone to connect them, train leaders, and encourage them was greatly beneficial. Currently there are four ISM groups in Israel and more are forming.

FCSI has separate groups of Arab Christians and Messianic Jews that meet together on occasion for Bible study and discipleship conferences. Rasha said having a third group of people who are “outside of the complexity” of Arab/Jewish relations helps the other two groups feel more comfortable with each other when they are together. “It’s sort of a bridge, I guess,” she said.

All three groups have been knit closer together by the FCSI emphasis on inductive Bible study but it seems to have a special benefit for the international students. “It’s unique that students are able to come to study the Bible in Israel together with locals,” she reported. “Students are saying this is something they will take back home.”

Lindsay Brown, longtime IFES staff member and former General Secretary, observes that many of the current leaders of the Christian church in certain Asian countries came to faith while they were international students in the U.S. “In the book of Acts few people were converted in their home,” he said. “Nearly everybody in Acts was converted away from home.”

The growing global middle class is helping boost the number of international students. Schools like international students because they increase diversity and prestige, and they are a financial boon. Some schools in certain Eurasian countries offer specialized instruction in fields like medicine and engineering, in English, to attract students who can’t quite afford or weren’t quite eligible to enroll in elite universities. Thus, proficiency in English can be a door-opener to ISM ministry in many countries abroad.

Some who are joining ISM ministry are international students themselves. On his next trip to Siberia, Richard plans to meet with a student from Ghana, an alumnus of the IFES affiliate in that country, so that he can train him to do ISM with his fellow students.

As ISM continues to grow and expand within IFES, leaders are studying the theological dimensions of ISM. Daniel Bourdanné says ISM goes beyond hospitality, welcoming the stranger, serving their needs, and sharing the gospel. IFES will also benefit from international students. “They are not coming like empty vessels; we can learn from them,” he said.

Indeed, ministry partnerships are growing through ISM. Kurt Thiel has been in touch with a student in Sri Lanka who plans to study law in the United States. His grades are good enough to get into any elite U.S. law school. His question for Kurt: “Where does ��ñ�� need the most help?”

International students are not only coming to the U.S. to study, they are also coming to do ministry. “What a great gift to ��ñ�� in the U.S. to have these students with a strong faith and a love for IFES come to us and work with us,” he said.

As the globe shrinks, the body of Christ grows, as each part learns to work more effectively with the others.

^{*not his real name}

^{Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash}

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Transforming Virtual Conversations

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Tue, 12 Dec 2017 14:42:48 +0000

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Gordon Govier

Transforming Virtual Conversations

Angelo Blancaflor became a missional gamer during his third year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) when he realized something about his fellow gamers. He had been meeting with them online for years but knew little about their offline lives.

In high school Angelo and three online friends shifted their sleep schedules for almost a year, in order to be awake from 1:00a.m. to 4:00a.m. Pacific time so they could watch a game being streamed. “We bonded deeply because we were all a little bit crazy at those hours of the night, watching games and talking about whatever else, waiting for the games to start,” he said.

Five years later, they were still gaming friends, but not much more than that. So Angelo began to ask them about their families and what they did when they weren’t gaming. Eventually he asked if they could meet in person. As they established a new level of trust with each other, and developed curiosity about each other’s lives, sharing about his Christian faith began to naturally become part of the conversation.

But even though Angelo had been able to build community with these gamers, he began to ponder the unique challenges to really getting to know others in the online gaming world.

Angelo joined the ��ñ�� community at UIUC shortly after he arrived from his home in Orange County, California quite naturally. New friends in his dorm invited him to an ��ñ�� social activity where he found more new friends. He kept attending, his faith grew, and he eventually became a student leader.

Mid-way through college, Angelo attended the ��ñ�� Leadership Institute, a month-long summer training course at Cedar Campus in Michigan. There he committed himself to follow God’s leading in his life and in his relationships. And he felt that God was calling him to go to graduate school for biology research.

Toward that call, Angelo began working in a research laboratory as a UIUC student, and just before attending Urbana 15 he lined up a research position at the University of California–Irvine where he could work after graduation. He wasn’t planning on doing vocational ministry.

But, as he put it, “God rocked my world and said, ‘Hey, grad school is nice and all, but what about missions?’”

Angelo had already been planning to connect with ��ñ��’s Ministry in Digital Spaces (MDS) team at Urbana to talk with them about his experiences in missional gaming. And he found people who shared his passion and vision for gamers. “They said, ‘Yeah, this is exactly what we want to do too,’” Angelo recalled—to which he replied, ‘Well, I’m already doing this, I need to get on board with you guys.”

Once on the MDS team Angelo began to delve further into the dynamics of developing online communities, specifically online small groups that would be similar to the typical ��ñ�� campus small group Bible study. “It’s not terribly different than getting an offline small group started,” he said. “But getting into conversations with people is very different because you can’t just encounter them like you would on campus.”

Angelo became the evangelism champion for the MDS team and began coordinating his research with ��ñ��’s Evangelism Department. Then, when an unexpected leadership departure brought about the closing of the MDS team, Angelo was able to transition into a new role as the Evangelism Communications Manager. He’s continuing to engage with the online communities that he’s connected with and is now working on the second phase of his project; to test calls to faith in online small groups.

“I think that some of the things that we have learned over the past year-and-a-half are going to be really crucial for the next generation of college students that grew up in a really similar context, the online context, but didn’t stop to think critically about it because it’s so normal for them,” Angelo said. “I think it’s natural for the next generation to need people to guide them through and disciple them through some of these things.”

But facilitating the work of the Holy Spirit online also resonates in communities beyond college students. All ages are engaging with Facebook and other online social media. “There’s a ministry need here of people to bring life to all of these conversations,” he said. It’s the perfect challenge for a missional gamer like Angelo.

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University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Grief, Hope, and Our Mission

gordon.govier@intervarsity.org — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 20:58:43 +0000

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Grief, Hope, and Our Mission

��ñ�� president Tom Lin sent this post-election reflection to all ��ñ�� staff and volunteers on Thursday, November 10, 2016.

Friends, it’s been a long couple of days. I’ve been on the road this week. I’m physically and emotionally spent, but I wanted to share a bit of my thinking.

As a Taiwanese American raising two half-Taiwanese/half-Korean daughters, I spent yesterday processing and grieving the divide in the society where my girls are being raised. I remember growing up in a society where others made it clear that I didn’t “belong” and that I should “go back to where I came from,” and then committing myself to changing this for the next generation. The U.S. presidential election leaves many of us—particularly women, people of color, LGBTQI staff, and immigrants—feeling vulnerable, devalued, and without hope.

I am troubled by the fact that evangelical voters split between the candidates along racial lines. The racial divide within the church seems as clear and as stark as ever before. This leaves me grieving, weary, and sobered.

Many of us are genuinely struggling, wondering where God is in all of this. What should we do?

As followers of Christ, I hope we will attempt to heed Scripture’s command to pray for the leaders of our country. Some of us will do so with hope. Some of us will do so only by faith. All of us will need to pray how Jesus taught us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done.”

As members of the global Church, I hope we heed voices from the majority world who stand in solidarity with our challenges and have experiences to share. Church leader Duncan Olumbe from Kenya wrote yesterday:

May God walk with citizens of the USA and especially those who are Christians during this interesting phase of your history. Whether celebrating or dumbfounded, do not box God into your interpretive grid, theological or otherwise…. I sense the Golden Rule – love your enemy – will be severely tested over the coming days. Speak and post less, be more reflective, and pray even more.

As ��ñ��, we must resolutely affirm the good news we bring to campus, to every corner of the campus, including the most marginalized corners. I believe the church and our country need us to live out our commitment to multiethnicity and ethnic reconciliation now more than ever. Let us grow in entering into the discouragement and despair of our students of color. Let us continue challenging White students to renounce cultural idolatries and racism, while also trying to better understand White anger and alienation more deeply and empathetically, coming out of this election. Let us continue challenging all students to embrace God’s invitation to be ambassadors of reconciliation.

Furthermore, I believe we need to live out our commitment to women in ��ñ�� leadership. When we do so, we model what it means to treat women with the dignity and respect they are owed as people created in God’s image. We demonstrate what it means for men and women to work as partners together.

I believe we need to learn advocacy for the religious freedom of others, particularly Muslims. Thanks to our campus access initiatives, we have a good relationship with the Muslim Students’ Association. We are talking with their national executive director next week.

This election reaffirms the strategic importance of our mission. It reaffirms that we must work together to make ��ñ�� a place where women, as well as staff, students, and faculty of color, thrive, where our multiethnic communities are salt and light in the midst of darkness and hopelessness. We yearn to see this, but we cannot carry out God’s mission in our own power or own strength. This is something we can only pull off with the power of the gospel.

Brothers and sisters, we have good news to bring to the campus in this fractured and polarized time. We are people of hope! And the thirst for hope is at an all-time high. Amazingly, the early church grew and matured under leadership whose debauchery, sin, and ethnic divisions outstrip our own. So we will continue to engage the campus with the gospel, even with hope.

With gratefulness for you and our partnership in the gospel,

Tom

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