Mark's Blog

Three hundred current world leaders, including several heads of state, studied at American universities.  Over 300,000 Chinese students, many pursuing Masters and Doctors degrees are in the dorms and apartments in your neighborhood.  Sixty thousand Saudi students are living among us for up to five years.  The world is here!

We Christians can choose to be afraid and to suspect all of them of being potential terrorists—or we can choose to believe that God has brought the nations to our universities for His purposes.  Let me help you with that choice.

In his speech to the Athenians, the Apostle Paul said about God:

 God began by making one person, and from him came all the different people who live everywhere in the world. God decided exactly when and where they must live. God wanted them to look for him and perhaps search all around for him and find him, though he is not far from any of us. . . . (Acts 17:26-27 NCV)

Paul says they are here because God wants them here. He wants to give them a chance to look for him and perhaps find him!

And why are you here? Why are you living on this date in the place where you live, surrounded by people from all over the world?  Could it be that this same verse describes you as well?  Could God have put you here in order to be the one who helps one of these international students to find Him!

Let me tell you the story of Wendy:  She was born into a family of atheists in China. Her mother even joined the Communist Party, so she grew up with no exposure whatever to faith in God.  When it became possible for her to go to the US to study, she applied to the first university listed alphabetically—Abilene Christian University—and was accepted.

At ACU, many people talked to her about Jesus, even took her to church, so many people in fact, that she felt like it was taking away from her studies, so she decided to leave ACU and go to another school.  She enrolled at UT Dallas and that was that for her and God.

Except that one day one of her friends told her that there was a local church offering the FriendSpeak program, which was the opportunity to improve her English through one-to-one conversations.  She was eager to improve her English, so she signed up, even though it was being conducted at a church building.

For weeks and weeks, she consistently practiced her English with an American FriendSpeak worker, reading texts from the Book of Luke. One day, however, the story they read about a great banquet where so many people made weak excuses about why they could not attend the great feast. Suddenly—unexpectedly—Wendy thought, Is that me?  Is this story about me and am I making excuses for not believing in God or Jesus?

That day, she began a process of re-looking at all those stories in Luke that had been only conversation texts before, but now they started speaking to her personally.  Two months later, she became a Christian. Since then, she also led her mother to faith. In addition, she has helped with FriendSpeak ministries in two congregations where many other Chinese people have become followers of Jesus.

What if Wendy had been at the university near you?  Would she have found God?

A good friend of mine Greg Swinney works with an organization called Crossroards International Student Ministries. He travels the country, encouraging campus ministries to raise their eyes from just providing protection for Christians to being the first contact with international students who don’t know Jesus, of being the first to tell the Story, of being their first friends, showing them the love of God.

Today we were teaching a class together at the Pepperdine Bible Lectures and he told the story of an elderly man who spends his days working as a greeter at Wal-Mart.  To the world, he is simple and almost unnoticeable, but he and his wife have made it their ministry to make friends with international students at their local university.  They have a map in their home with pins in it. Those pins represent all the countries where all the students are from whom they have made friends for God by simply inviting them to their humble home.  Forty pins in forty countries touched by this remarkable Christian couple.

One million international students in our neighborhoods! Just start with one of them. Let’s all start with just one and see what God does.  I’m quite sure He will do more than we can imagine!