Listen to Dennis Gaylor’s interview with Eric Treuil from South Central Chi Alpha’s webinar.
Going to College: Stories, Strategies, & Scriptures Before You Go by Michelle Saladino is a great tool for high school juniors and seniors looking to make the transition to college. This booklet can be used by youth pastors, parents, mentors, or counselors as a seven-week study leading up to graduation. The topics covered are salvation, the gospel, spiritual warfare, community, mission, discernment, and embracing God’s will for our lives.
International students here in America and in countries around the world are the key to global mission. Here’s why:
The growth in the number of international students is explosive. There are five million international students in the world.
Two thirds of international students in the US come from the 10/40 window.
The global campus is not an American melting pot, nor a Canadian mosaic; instead, it is a global kaleidoscope, in dizzying technicolor. . . . On the global campus, International students—like their domestic peers—are marinated in a global youth culture: selfie-liked identity, app-abbreviated relationships, 15–minute YouTube heroes, tweet size thoughts. On the global campus, trends are transferred and new ones are started. The
future is being shaped here and disseminated around the world by pixel, and by hand. . . . The worldview that permeates the global campus is a kumbaya of undocumented human goodness and a trust in human ingenuity, with little memory of our histories. On the global campus, young hearts and minds are being shaped, and not in the image of God.
China has one and a half million students overseas; but it has half a million foreigners studying in China (as many as in Canada). The top two nationalities of foreign students in China are South Korean and American.
Most international students who come to faith on our global campuses will return home. Their journey mirrors the shift in the distribution of the church—West to East, North to South. International students transcend both worlds . . .
Churches in the sending countries must send some of their young Christians here as imbedded student missionaries.
Oxford University reports that, “student mobility is shifting from a largely unidirectional east–west flow to a multidirectional movement and encompassing non-traditional sending and host countries.” International education is becoming polycentric. Global campuses are becoming a worldwide phenomenon.
On the global campus, the primary focus is work. Students are to succeed when they graduate, so they often left home and crossed the world. . . .We need to teach global students about the power and virtue of the gospel to shape all aspects of their work and the societies their work will build.
The church has not been immune to building its own towers. The city of man is built from the ground up. But the city of God comes down from Him. God is re-gathering the nations, drawing their brightest hopes for the future, to a global campus near you. He wants to reveal Himself to the next generation of every nation.
An article condensed from “Ten Reasons Why the Global Campus is the Future of Mission,” by Alexander Best. Posted July 27, 2019, The Exchange.
2 Comments
This is great! Thanks for sharing Dennis.
This is a great conversation between two great men. Dennis, thank you for everything you have done for campus ministry and for writing the history of Chi Alpha!