International education is a North American growth industry, the USA's 5th largest "export," valued at over 7.5 billion dollars per year! In spite of economic setbacks in East Asian countries, the Chronicle of Higher Education (Dec. 11, 1998 issue) reports that enrollments of international students from these countries continue to increase at USA campuses. Open Doors 1997-98, a report of the Institute of International Education (IIE), records a surprising increase of 5.1% in overall enrollment of international students. This represents the largest one-year gain in a decade, with the total enrollment of foreign students climbing to a record 481,280 students.

Non-student "foreign scholars" (researchers and teachers) comprise an additional 65,494, also the highest number ever. The largest gains have been at two-year colleges where the IIE reports a 20% increase in international enrollments from 1993-1997. Undergraduate internationals (46% of all internationals) will thus continue to outnumber international graduate students (43%). The remaining 11% of international enrollments are accounted for through Intensive English Language and other practical training. (More information is available at IIE's website: www.iie.org/opendoors/).

In light of this, knowledgeable people in the field of international education are making some startling predictions about the future. L. Robert Kohls, senior associate at the East-West Group and scholar-in-residence at the Institute for Inter-Cultural Leadership in San Francisco, predicts a "dramatic shift in the identity of the leading economic powers in the world by the year 2020," if current economies of the world remain stable. China, Kohls asserts, will outpace Japan as one of the world's richest countries!

An Australian study also predicts that by 2020 Asian economic progress will triple the number of university-level students in the world and a similar proportion of them will find their way to the West for the nation-building tools they can gain in studying business, engineering, technology and the sciences. This means that the million internationals we now have in North America could increase to 1.5 million in the next quarter century. Millions of international students will be coming and going from North America. Hopefully these students will all be exposed to the best cultural values and spiritual life the "West" can offer. A people-movement like this is unprecedented in world history and challenges the Church to new levels of commitment and resolve in its mission of bringing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the exploding populations of the world.

As we approach the new millennium, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship is thinking ahead in order to meet this challenge. In July 1998 and March 1999, selected InterVarsity International Student Ministry (ISM) workers met to discuss how best to "reinvent" ISM in InterVarsity so that this ministry could expand. All of us at the meetings realized that ISM needs to become more a part of InterVarsity's mainstream, more central in the minds of regular campus staff and in their programs on campus. We also agreed that the language we use in ISM should reflect InterVarsity's purpose statement, and ISM's long-term goals need to be harmonized with the ethos of IVCF. As a result, we affirmed a new paradigm of ministry in ISM which focuses on developing "witnessing communities" of international students on campus.

New ISM staff gifted in building witnessing communities and future national ISM leadership will build their priorities around this new vision. New types of staff supervision will be recommended across the country to aid in the recruitment of new types of ISM staff to build international witnessing communities. Successful paradigms of ministry we've used in the past will continue, but we now expect to see new international student groups, with international student leaders, develop alongside established ethnic minority and majority groups on campus.

These ISM staff meetings were part of an ongoing process involving ever-widening circles of IVCF staff members and staff directors. All of us came away feeling that we had made major progress in "reinventing" ISM in IVCF, and that the results will be both immediate and far-ranging. If InterVarsity is to make a significant contribution in the coming deluge of internationals in higher education, international students simply must become part of the warp and woof of our entire movement so that these visible groups can attract internationals on all the major campuses we serve.

New generations of international students are increasingly influenced by western culture and values. Modernization and global media are changing the environments in which most international students grow up. North American students are increasingly "postmodern," and so are the internationals coming to us! To help us begin to understand these changes in international students and how to minister among this generation more effectively, InterVarsity will include a special training course in its National Institute of Staff Education and Training (NISET) in July 1999, entitled: "Ministry for a New Generation of International Students."

To enhance our evangelism among international students, InterVarsity Press will publish Passport to the Bible, a cross-cultural Bible study guide written by a team of ISM staff. InterVarsity's 2100 Productions will release our new video on international friendship in 1999. During 1999, we will have pilot "reverse global projects," including a summer-long project at the University of Missouri in Columbia, in which a core of American and International students and staff will receive training in campus outreach.

Partnering with several other Christian organizations as part of our involvement with Mission America, InterVarsity plans to give a free video of the Jesus Film to every one of the over 37,000 international students in relationship with InterVarsity staff and students. Plans are also being made for a jointly sponsored website that will contain answers to all the questions newly arriving internationals ask, including questions about Jesus Christ and the Gospel! As the numbers of ISM staff members increase, so will numbers and locations of the holiday international houseparties that InterVarsity offers.

Our training of Christian international student leaders and scholars will also be improved in the coming year. In cooperation with International Students Incorporated and other church and parachurch groups working with internationals, we are planning a new CD-ROM "Toolkit" which will contain the best training and teaching content we have for Christian internationals and those who work with them. Our current IVCF-ISM website will also be expanded to include many of the best materials on ISM that we have, including some of the great HIS magazine and Student Leadership Journal articles of the past. Planning has already begun for the 2,000+ Christian internationals that will attend the next Urbana student mission convention, December 27-31, 2000, and we will offer more training for graduate students at our post-Urbana conference for internationals from January 1-4, 2001.

Regarding graduate students, the early church father, Tertullian, once asked (derisively) "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" As the church attempted to transform the Greco-Roman world, it became necessary, as the Apostle Paul said, to "bring every thought captive to Jesus Christ" as part of the church's discipling of the nations. The world needed to have its mind (Athens) convinced as well as its heart (Jerusalem) warmed and conquered by love and by the power of God. Similarly, faculty and graduate students today need to be shown that "higher learning" can, indeed must, be integrated with their Christian faith if they are to have a full impact for the Gospel on their various cultures. A high priority for the future, therefore, will be ministry with and among international graduate students. Please join us in prayer that God will strengthen us and direct our steps into this challenging new millennium!