By Janet Atkins, ISM Staff in St. Louis, MO
Most evangelistic stories focus on the receivers. Yet, sometimes it is more frightening to be the person learning to lead your friends to Christ. I believe in the power of the Word of the living God being spoken through internationals to internationals. I love watching people come to life as they learn to share the story of Christ with their friends cross-culturally. Here is the story of a friend of mine learning to step out to lead other international students into the Word of God.
Imagine a small Eastern European woman, insecure, worried, frightful of life itself, but she has chosen to follow Jesus. She couldn’t understand why I would ask her to lead a Bible study. She had never led one before. And she was struggling with so many questions about faith and life and how God has made her. She has suffered verbal abuse from her father and brother all her life. She tried to be a part of an American campus fellowship, but felt alienated and isolated. And then God brought her to our international student fellowship. And God challenged her to lead an International Group Investigating God (I-GIG) with Chinese students. “I used to not even like Chinese people,” she told me.
That Fall semester, she sat back, meekly asking questions of the women in her I-GIG. As they excitedly responded to ideas about Jesus, she sheepishly would move on to the next question. Every week in the car she would ask, “Did I do okay? I don’t think I did this right. I don’t think I talk enough. Are people getting anything out of this?” I would focus on what she did right, knowing that this woman has been hurt by those who have focused on her faults. Every week I would give her only one thing to improve, little by little.
As spring came around, I asked her to co-lead another I-GIG that was co-ed. She didn’t feel she was qualified. This time she and the other student leaders would write the materials themselves and choose the topics and the scripture. I met with her at the beginning of the semester to choose the topics. “What would you need to know about God if you had never read the Bible before?” I asked. It was like pulling teeth to help her come up with ideas. She felt she wasn’t qualified. She felt she didn’t pray enough. She left most of the work up to the veteran I-GIG leader. Week after week he led with enthusiasm as she sat through it. She would say, “I’m not really comfortable leading yet.”
Then, the challenge came. This week her co-leader assigned her a topic. The topic was sacrifice. She chose the passage she had heard preachers use over and over again: the story of Abraham and Isaac. We met the first week after she had drafted her questions. She said she didn’t really feel excited about the story and wasn’t sure how she could teach it to someone else. So I offered to train her the way that I had learned as a student through InterVarsity. Together we picked apart every detail of the passage, observing every last detail of who, what, how, where. After exhausting every possible observation, she began to ask every question she could think of.
She was a natural questioner. Why, why, why? We looked through what we had observed and tried to answer those why questions by understanding what the passage showed us. The more questions we searched through, the more interested she got. She took the passage home for another week and continued to observe, question, and think about application. By the time I met with her days before the study, she could hardly wait to begin. The passage had come to life for her. She smiled and pointed here and there showing everything she had noticed and thought about. She wanted to talk through what all of it could mean. And how could we apply it?
We had to choose a direction to lead the group, so we chose five of her questions that would lead her non-Christian friends through the passage well. Then we wrote a summary with a personal application challenge. When we finished, she said, “I am so excited about this passage! Now that I have prepared it I just want to keep exploring and understanding everything God is teaching here.”
That Friday night, she led a group of seven peers through the passage. I was so proud of her as I saw her engaging with internationals from six different cultures. She led them through the passage beautifully and ended with a summary of how the story helped us more clearly understand Jesus. She invited students to consider giving everything to Christ as Abraham had, and to consider the sacrificial Lamb of Jesus who takes our place. She boldly and excitedly challenged her friends. And she was smiling the whole time!
This story is from the Fall 2006 issue of Internationals On Campus, published by InterVarsity’s International Student Ministry.
