October 1977
"Your Young Men Shall See Visions"
(Joel 2:28)
D-day with its mighty miracle had come and gone! After so many months of uncertainty, the campus was ours. At least, that is, we had entered into escrow.
In many ways we felt like a diver who must surface to get his bearings before striking out across the lake. Now that our first major crisis was behind, we felt we had to take stock and try to ascertain God's direction for our future. We knew that long years of financial crises lay ahead. The down payment itself was, as yet, incomplete. In spite of God's wonderful grace, we could still fail and lose everything. Not until our final balloon payment would be made, years from then, could we know that the campus was securely ours.
We couldn't forget finances, and yet there were other battles to fight and other wars to win.
It was an abrupt transition for me that day, just a week after our victory, when Ralph called all of us together and asked, "What now?"
I wanted to press on in fund-raising efforts and pay off the campus as soon as possible. But Ralph said, "No. We
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mustn't forget what the campus is for. We're not here just to buy a campus. God may very well give it to us, but I don't think He will unless we show that His concerns come first. We must do all we can to help make missions a top priority again."
For two entire days we brainstormed as a staff. "What has to happen in order for all the unreached peoples in the world to be evangelized? And what is happening now? We know that there is a big gap between these two, and our problem is to find out what we can do about it. Let's start there," Ralph suggested.
Usually, only the top staff of an institution is invited to participate in this kind of no-holds-barred brainstorming. At that time our staff was still very small. Although they were mainly still in their twenties, all had been committed to the same vision for several years.
"Who knows, perhaps our young staff will be the most important ones to include in this brainstorming," Ralph commented. "More than a thousand years ago Benedict said that God often reveals his best ideas to young people. Let's all work on this together. Now, where shall we start?"
"First of all, let's discuss what we believe needs to happen in this country in order to make the cause of missions move forward. It seems to me that before Christians worldwide can finish the job Christ gave us, there must be a massive new movement with thousands of new recruits going overseas. What could we do, for example, to help start another student missions movement like they had 80 years ago. That one brought 20,000 more missionaries from America alone. What would it take today?"
"Well, for one thing, I think we need to push the SCOWE conferences more," Becky suggested. "No one is doing a methodical job of organizing them. Someone needs to do that."
The Student Conference on World Evangelization (SCOWE) was the dream of Bill Haines, one of Becky's
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classmates at Caltech. At her urging, Bill had attended the second Summer Institute of International Studies (SIIS) at Wheaton. When he returned to Caltech, he plunged into plans for a missions conference which would draw students from all over Southern California. Ralph and I gasped when Becky told us they had rented Caltech's prestigious Beckman Auditorium at $1,000 a day, and that their conference was scheduled for the end of January, just five months away.
SCOWE from its very beginning was student sponsored, student organized, student run. It was also unusual in that it determinedly brought together students associated on their campuses with InterVarsity, Campus Crusade and Navigators as well as any others who wished to come. We were thrilled when 650 showed up that first year.
In the years to follow, Bill graduated and went on to Stanford for graduate studies. In his absence, other "Techers" picked up the baton, but if the SCOWEs were to continue and expand into other cities, these students needed help!
Then, "What about the children?" Mary Fran wanted to know. Mary Frances Redding had been a Christian Education director for years, and was more aware than most of us how little about missions there is today in the Sunday School curriculum. "You know," she reminded us, "most missionaries got their vision as children.
"Perhaps we ought to set up an office to write Sunday School materials."
"I'd like to see more than just Sunday School materials," I said. "We need to write interesting mission stories that children will want to read on their own."
"And what about the adults? What can we do to motivate them?" Ralph asked. "There are Bible study groups all over the place, some of them huge. But who goes to missionary meetings anymore? Most churches don't even have an active Women's Missionary Society."
"For one thing, we've got to set up mission prayer
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groups," David Bliss insisted. I knew he was thinking of the impact on his life of the noon prayer group at Gordon Seminary which J. Christy Wilson, recently returned from Afghanistan, had organized. Fifty students met to pray for missions every noon, we were told.
"But how can you get people to come to something like that?" another asked.
"Do you know, when I was at UCLA, I was the only one out of 90 Christians in our dorm who was the least bit interested in missions," Beth commented. "I guess I really bugged that group about missions because one day a student leader told me he was praying that I would get off this 'missions kick' and get back to what God was most interested in — discipleship and evangelism here!"
She laughed and went on. "I challenged him to read just four books and to let me have ten minutes of each of our house-meeting times to give a capsule report on some unreached people — like, where they are on the map, what the newspapers are saying about them . . . things like that."
"It was unbelievable, but in just a few months, ten of those students were so excited about missions that others started praying for them to get off the missions kick." She laughed again.
"What I'm saying is, somehow we have to get people — the churches — more personally acquainted with those who need reaching."
"And you think maps, newspaper articles, and research is the way to get started?"
"Why not?" Ralph agreed. "What we really need is a magazine of the quality of National Geographic exclusively dedicated to the evangelism of unreached peoples. It should be full of good pictures and articles and be paid for by subscription. We could send roving photojournalists around the world to write articles and take pictures for it as well as produce movies and video tapes for churches and student groups."
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"It seems like to me that we also need our university, which is run by missionaries, to help people get into 'closed' countries as Ph.D. students! They can do research papers on people groups that are unreached. And some of them can teach English to support themselves. Almost every country in the world wants English teachers." Ralph paused. "We ought to train our students in all kinds of skills that will allow them to work in 'closed' countries: agriculture, water resource development, community health, literacy . . . There's almost no end to the needs that could be met."
"And how about an office that would help ordinary American Christians live at the same consumption level as, say, a missionary on furlough? Just think of the money they could give to missions! Even if only two Christian families in a hundred did that, we'd probably have another billion dollars a year for missions!"
"Wow," I thought, "some of these ideas are really wild! But wouldn't it be great if we could do them!
"Maybe, in God's providence and time!"
