Student Heroes: Do It Again Lord

by Gary Corwin

Much has been made through the years of the impact and power of student movements in world evangelization. And well it should, as students have again and again been on the cutting edge of the new outreach that God has initiated around the world.

Much has been made through the years of the impact and power of student movements in world evangelization. And well it should, as students have again and again been on the cutting edge of the new outreach that God has initiated around the world.

From the time of the Jewish “SIM” (Student Involuntary Movement) in the days of Daniel and his buddies at the court of Babylon, to the youthful Zinzendorf and the launch in the seventeenth century of the Moravian Missionary Movement, to the famous “Haystack Meeting” of 1806 that launched the foreign missionary movement from the United States, to the formation of the hugely significant Student Volunteer Movement (SVM) in 1888, to the long and fruitful campus fountainhead that has produced the IVCF Urbana Conferences since 1946—students have been front and center in the missions enterprise.

So what more is needed? Hasn’t the student world done more than its share already? And why isn’t the job done yet? Good questions all.

What more is needed? The answer is “plenty.” Without doubt, the Lord has done a wonderful work through the centuries to make Christianity a truly global faith. But the massive growth of populations and our greater understanding of people groups makes clear that the job is far from over. In India today there are, for example, far more unbelievers, and we are aware of far more unreached people groups, than when William Carey launched the modern missionary movement there over two hundred years ago.

Today there are roughly twelve thousand ethnolinguistic peoples in the world. Of that number, between three thousand and 3,600 are generally considered by mission researchers as being “least reached,” defined as those groups in which less than fifty percent of the population is likely to have heard the gospel. Over ninety percent of these peoples originate from the area now commonly known as the 10/40 Window and a great many are hindered from gospel access by significant spiritual barriers and others of many kinds—political, religious and social. These groups desperately need cross-cultural workers called of God to bring the gospel to them.

Hasn’t the student world done more than its share already? Certainly there is every reason to be grateful for all that has been accomplished in the work of the Kingdom at the hands of students. It is a remarkable and wonderful legacy. The problem is that neither the need, nor the resource called youth, is static. The formerly young are now older, and the currently young will soon follow. That’s not to imply that it is only the very young who have a role to play, however. It is to acknowledge, though, that each of us has but one period of youth to be catalysts for action in the unique fashion in which the young have historically led the way.

That heritage includes those like Hudson Taylor who was twenty-two when he went off to China, or Rowland Bingham who was twenty-one when he, along with two equally young colleagues, launched a new outreach into the interior of the African Sudan, or Samuel Zwemer who at twenty-three began a new mission work to the Muslims of the Middle East. Many more like them could be named, and many more like them are still needed.

Why isn’t the job done yet? The answer lies somewhere in the cross-cur-rent of God’s longsuffering love toward the lost, and his patience with the slow and disobedient means who are his followers. “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise…. He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Pet. 3:9). “And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us” (2 Cor. 5:19b-20a). While it may at times seem slow to us, the job is indeed getting done.

Conclusion: One of the great and unfortunate shifts in our day is that many students, along with many of their elders, have unwittingly accepted the idea that embracing a call to the nations is primarily an instantaneous commitment having short-term consequences, resulting in a memorable experience. The accomplishment of long-term and strategic Kingdom goals has, as a result, been too often replaced by the multiplication of “mission experiences” as the chief end of outreach from North America. Thus “been there, done that” comes to replace Isaiah’s, “Here am I, Lord, send me,” as the standard refrain in response to the needs of the world for the healing power of the gospel. The sacrifice is certainly far more manageable, but the significance of the impact doesn’t even come close.

It will be today’s students who will either reinforce and cement this trend, or harken back to a more glorious and effective heritage of student response that literally has time and again shaken the world. The question looms large: Which will it be?
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Gary Corwin is associate editor of the Evangelical Missions Quarterly and a special representative with SIM in Charlotte, N.C.

EMQ, Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 416-417. Copyright © 2003 Evangelism and Missions Information Service (EMIS). All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced or copied in any form without written permission from EMIS.

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