Safety and our Global Projects

In Light of Recent World Events

While we encourage students to make lifetime commitments to serving Christ, even in dangerous places, short-term missions is generally not the place for us to put students in life-threatening situations. Therefore, we will continue to equip our staff to lead responsibly and re-direct global projects proposed for locations that are not safe for Americans.

The dangers that exist in overseas travel are different than the dangers at home; however, going overseas does not automatically imply danger any more that staying home automatically implies safety. Beyond the issue of safety, we are compelled to help our students love God's people from every ethnicity and culture in tangible ways and to explore his global purposes for them as individuals and for the Church. This is often best done by taking them overseas.

We estimate the relative safety of a location with the help of a few information sources. The US State Department provides warnings for those locations that they deem unsafe for Americans traveling abroad. Along with the State Department travel warnings, we will listen to the advice of our hosts on-site in the foreign location. In addition, we remain plugged into news reports from a variety of sources. At appropriate times in the year the Director of Global Projects will call together the President of InterVarsity, our legal counsel and other leaders to review the programs planned for locations that are deemed unsafe. On several occasions we have helped project leaders to re-direct their teams because of concerns for safety. On other occasions, we have gathered sufficient evidence that the locations in question are, in fact, not as dangerous as reported or that our project is located in an area far from the area of concern.

We sincerely hope that with clear-headedness and purpose, InterVarsity staff will continue to call our students to be responsible global citizens and serve the spiritual and material needs of people at home and abroad. In serving overseas, students often discover more of whom God wants them to be as they see Christ in one another, in national believers overseas, and in those they serve. For these reasons we still feel short-term overseas projects are a great way to accomplish our mission on campus and in the world.

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