ASI Scandinavia 2018: IT IS TIME – To Be About Our Fathers Business!

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ASI Scandinavia

Chantal Tomlinson

How to be a Missionary on my Campus?

Dearly Father, I just want to thank you so much for this time that we have to share on how we can be more effective missionaries for you on campus or to our neighbouring campuses and wherever we study or wherever there are students that we can support.

And Lord I pray that your Holy Spirit may be with us, that you may speak to our hearts, and that you may show us how we can be a light for you, wherever we are.

So for this workshop, I split it into 2 sections.

So we have the first part and the second part.

The first part will really be looking at kind of the vision, the mission, the inspiration behind being a missionary on campus.

Then the second part we look at some practical ways in which you can share the gospel with those around you.

So The aim of this first part is to highlight the great opportunity that you have as students on your campus or nearby a campus and to equip you with some skills, some ideas.

Now, this is a very short time period that there's so much more that I could share, but I really just want to kind of get you thinking, because a lot of it is things that I've learned kind of as I've been going along.

So it's the same for you as well, that as you go along, God will teach you and show you, but it's to really give you kind of an overview as to how you can do this.

So just to give you some background for myself, so I'm not currently a student, I just finished up a master's in research, but prior to that, when I first got involved in Campus Ministries, I was studying dietetics at Coventry University in England.

And in the next slide, I'll go to share more about how God led me to really be passionate about sharing the gospel on campus.

But after I got involved in campus ministries, I really got involved and I was like, man, I just want to keep being a student so I can minister to other students.

Because the idea of going into work and not having that opportunity to mingle with students and to share the gospel really didn't seem attractive.

So I thought, OK, if I can just keep being a student and keep supporting the group, then I would love doing that.

So that led me to continue studying for the next few years.

And it so happened as well that around that time, this ministry was really growing to the point where our conference really took hold of it.

And so I then was able to help with the conference to help other students on other campuses to grow their ministries.

And in the past year, I've been at Wildwood Lifestyle Center in the school there, and I've been learning about how to start ministries and how to manage them sustainably.

So business management, basically, from a Godly perspective.

And how did I get involved in campus ministry?

So in my first year of university, when I first went to university, I had the idea that when I went or whatever I was doing, I wanted to use whatever I had for God.

So I already had that seed in my mind, but I didn't know how that was quite going to happen.

So I'd gone to university, the first week from before I went to university, I made sure I looked up the local church.

I had the addresses of 2 churches in the city.

I chose the 1 closest and the first Sabbath I went.

The first lunchtime I went to someone's house, which I never thought I would do.

I was very shy at that time and they had youth Bible studies every Friday, so I started to join those Bible studies and the youth group there at my church was very active.

And now this is something that is very important for those that maybe are supporting students or in a church.

Having a vibrant youth department is really helpful for students because even if you don't have an official club on campus, this is a way in which students can grow, they can be inspired and they can be nurtured to actually be effective missionaries.

So that's where I believe God was starting to grow me and inspire me and prepare me for this ministry.

So I got really involved in the youth Bible study groups.

And so in the second year of my time at university, we actually went away to an event run by the conference, and it was a student's day.

And in this day, it was really a way to inspire students to be missionaries on campus, and to be bold about their faith.

And so at this student's day, and there's a speaker called Justin Kim, who shared the story of Nicodemus and how Nicodemus went to Jesus in the night.

And he was highlighting the fact that sometimes as students, we go to university and we kind of shy away from sharing the gospel.

We may go to church and they know we go to church on the Sabbath, or they may know we do certain things or don't do certain things, but we don't really overtly say, this is why and it's because I'm a Seventh-day Adventist.

And so that started the thought process in my mind to say, okay, what am I really doing?

And then the afternoon, there were some students sharing how they were sharing the gospel officially as a club on campus.

And the light just went off in my head and I said, wow, like, I think my university could do with a group like this.

I tried to get, when I went back to university, I tried to get someone from a local university to start a group on our campus because I didn't feel equipped, even though I had the inspiration.

That didn't work out because you need to be a student on the campus to be able to start an official group.

And so the vision died down, lay dormant, until the following year I was inspired to go to a mission school in England, an evangelistic school for 4 months.

And so God led and I was able to go during the summer break.

But while we were there, we were encouraged to use what we were learning practically.

I happened to have a list of students on my phone.

And I brought them together and said, OK, guys, I have this idea that we can have a group on campus, have Bible studies, different activities, to share the gospel.

Everyone was on board and basically that's how we started.

So in the first couple of pictures you see there were 2 groups from a couple of the first years that we were running.

So we started the name Christian Adventist Society.

We were just brainstorming and thinking of what was the image that we wanted to portray to students on campus.

We had a small group of us, but we had amazing experiences where there was even 1 student that started coming to church independent of the campus group.

And when we started the campus group, he started coming along, but he was still quite new in the faith, and he was really into basketball.

And around that time, he was then having to choose between coming to the Bible study groups or going to his basketball lessons and classes, sessions.

And he really enjoyed how he was learning and growing and how we'd have fun together, we'd pray together.

And so he found that the campus group was really a good opportunity for him to grow in the Lord.

And so he continued coming and over the next couple of years he eventually got baptized and he attributes that spiritual growth that helped him to make that decision to coming to the campus group.

And so after those couple of first 2 years, our conference then made an initiative called ASC, which is a logo you can see on my hoodie there in the third picture.

And that was a way to kind of unify all the groups that were starting up around that time under the conference name so that there was some accountability as to who we belonged to and who was checking on the doctrines that we were teaching and that kind of thing as we were representing the church.

So that's just an introduction as to how I got involved.

And as this workshop is called, How can I be a missionary on campus?

I just wanted us to look at the question of who is a missionary?

Everyone that is a believer is a missionary.

So I looked at the dictionary definition, and it said that a missionary is someone sent on a religious mission, especially 1 sent to promote Christianity in a foreign country.

So the question from that, it says, especially 1 sent, but initially it says a person sent on a religious mission.

So we're just going to look at a biblical example here.

If we turn to John chapter 4, we see the story of the woman at the well, and We see some insights here of her experience and how she was a missionary and in the same way we are also to be missionaries.

So I won't read the full story, I believe it may be familiar to us, but just to highlight some key points.

So for the woman at the well, she was a woman that basically was in need of Christ.

But we see that Christ in this sense was the missionary to her, in that God led him to the place in which he could meet her.

And we see a parallel here with us on our campuses or in connection with students.

It may be that God leads us to a certain university, to a certain course, to a certain social group, for us to be a missionary to someone specific there.

Because Jesus didn't need to go through Samaria and in fact culturally it wasn't something that he should even be doing as a Jew but God led him to Samaria to meet this woman and in the same way we should be led by God, daily led by God, so that in our various communications with students, in our interactions with them, God can lead us to the people in which he wants us to reach.

And so when he went there, we find that it was a very practical situation that opened up the opportunity for him to actually share the gospel, because he sat there and he just said, the woman came and he asked her to draw him some water.

And it's in the same way, we'll go on to look in the second session, how meeting the needs and mingling with students is a way in which we can then share the gospel with them.

And then as we continue on, we see that Jesus was able to use the physical example of physical water to draw the lady's attention to himself as the living water of life.

The same thing with us, we can use very practical situations on campus to draw our fellow students, professors, those around us at university to Christ.

But the part that I want to highlight the most is the fact that later on in chapter 4, we see that in later on in verse 29 of chapter 4, she dropped her water pot, she forgot about why she was even there, and she ran into her village, and she told everyone, come and see a man who told me all things that I ever did.

Then they went out of the city and came to him.

And so Ellen White actually talks a lot about how this was, she was an example of a missionary.

She'd come to Christ, she'd met him, she'd been filled with the water of life, and the experience was just bubbling up in her that she had to go and share with the city and then others came to him also.

And it's the same with us as students that while we are having that connection with God and we're filled with his spirit, the natural impulse should be that we run and share this with others and so others can come to him.

So I'm just going to read this quote in The Desire of Ages, page 195.

It says that, every true disciple is born into the kingdom of God as a missionary.

He who drinks of the living water becomes a fountain of life.

And so the process of being a missionary on campus should be a cycle in which you receive from Christ, and then whatever you've received from Christ, you then go out and share with others.

How to be a Missionary on my Campus?

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