Staff: Bill Nelson (staff) and Peter & Mimi Hinterkopf (volunteer staff)
Reaching:: Mostly PhD students, Public Health Master’s students, visiting scholars, and post-docs
Key Activities: Our weekly Friday evening meetings are specifically designed to engage those who have interest in exploring Christianity. Each September we begin by tracing God’s rescue plan for humanity beginning with the early foundational stories in Genesis. Later in the academic year we introduce Christ’s life and ministry. A large percentage of the students we work with are new to Bible study. We often meet these students first through various ethnic holiday celebrations and day trips.
Ministry Success Factors: The one-on-one personal time that we as staff and volunteers invest helps them to make a decision to embrace Christ and follow his call as disciples. Those who serve as leaders find a supportive environment within our leadership community where they can be challenged, encouraged and supported to faithfully follow Christ.
Leadership: At present our leadership team includes Bill (staff), 1 volunteer (from Japan), 4 visiting scholars (from Singapore, India, and Hong Kong), and 5 grad students (from Iran, Malaysia, South Korea, India, and Peru). Each lead small group Bible discussions on Friday evenings and pray for the students in their small group. Most students and scholars in the fellowship stay at Hopkins for less than one year, so we must move very quickly to replenish our leadership team.
Growing Leaders:
The heart of our ministry comes through discipling Christian scholars within the context of active engagement in ministry. We meet as a leadership team each Monday evening to share life together over a meal or snack, to read Scripture together from the same portion of the Bible that the students and scholars will be leading Bible discussion groups for the following Friday, and to pray for each other and for the students we are engaging with the gospel. Our semi-annual leadership mini-retreats provide us extended opportunities for sharing life together in community, for intercessory prayer, and for seeking God’s leading with our ministry vision. We work towards preparing internationals to return to their home country as Christ’s ambassadors.
Student Leader Testimonies
Yeni from Peru
A few months after arriving in Baltimore in 2006 to begin studies at the School of Public Health, God led me to the Hopkins International Fellowship. Soon afterwards, Pastor Bill invited me to join the leadership team.
I then had to review my purpose for leaving Peru to come to Hopkins. For sure God brought me here to study and grow intellectually. At the same time, God challenged me to believe that He could indeed reach students that I had previously doubted would embrace the gospel through me. I have heard about people in countries that know nothing about Jesus Christ, but I have never been in front of one of them. Seeing this makes me really cry out to God, “What are we doing? What are we waiting for? Who is going to go to them?” Maybe I will never go to China to share the word of God, but I can share it with my Chinese classmate, and he/she can then go back to China to do the same. In the same way, I felt the need to gain further training so that I could be more effective in ministering to the needs of the people in my country.
I have the extraordinary opportunity to meet people in academia here that love God with all their heart, mind, and soul and live for Him. It is, for me, such a privilege to learn from them. I could not have had this experience in my own country. Another challenge awaits me when I return to Peru: tons of university students and people in academia think that it is not worthwhile to love and serve God. Now I can say to them, “It is possible.”
