Alec Hill - Summer Sojourn to East Asia
InterVarsity president Alec Hill led a group of staff and friends of InterVarsity on a two week East Asia sojourn that connected with several global projects.
What value do you see in taking the group on this tour?
The group that went with us to East Asia included senior staff, retired staff, and several friends of InterVarsity. The tour gave them hands on experience with what InterVarsity does. They were welcomed by the staff and included in the program. The visitors also toured a Buddhist temple and visited a local church. All of this gave them an appreciation for the quality of the InterVarsity’s staff, students, and mission. We have seen a greater willingness to support the ministry as a result of past groups visiting InterVarsity summer projects.
Did you observe ways in which this summer’s project will help staff to be more effective on campus?
The staff consider it a privilege to have time to interact with students 24/7. The staff and students are energized with a vision of the breadth of the gospel. The project we visited worked closely with Steve, one of the Link staff in the country. Steve has done a great job of developing a ministry on campus, a ministry that includes students, faculty, and administration, in addition to a relationship with the local church. The US field staff who took students to East Asia for the summer were excited to see how InterVarsity’s campus work models contribute to developing an indigenous Christian student movement in another nation.
How did you see the project affecting the student participants, both those from the United States and from the local community?
The students often go on these summer projects with the idea that they will be sharing God’s love. Over the course of the summer many of them realize that they are also being challenged in their Christian walk. One of the significant challenges of this summer was the lack of privacy. The dorm set up on the campus was quite different from most in the United States. I was encouraged to see students willing to give up something they thought they had a right to, to give up that right for the sake of the gospel.
I was also encouraged by the story of a young woman who became a Christian as a result of her father having been a student in the United States. While he was in the US, he attended Sunday evening international dinners hosted by an InterVarsity faculty advisor and his wife. The young man enjoyed the fellowship of the dinners, but was not receptive to the message of the gospel. He did accept a farewell gift of an English Bible. When his daughter was older and wanted to learn English, he gave her the Bible, telling her to learn the language but not the message. She, however, was captivated by the message and became a Christian. Two years ago, she was a student in our summer project at her school. This year she worked as a local staff person for the project. She also leads Bible studies on campus during the year.
Do you have any other comments on your time in East Asia?
While I was there, Steve arranged for me to give a couple of seminars about character training in business education. I gave a talk based on an article I had written several years ago. I was the first Westerner to speak to these faculty members about such a topic. They were very receptive. I would like to arrange further faculty exchanges with them.