Urbana 2000 is now months past, but the call of God to love our world is as fresh as ever. Your chapter life can communicate that calling if you start to build your activities around themes that reflect God’s heart.

Chapter life is composed of many facets. These can become windows and doors that expose chapter members on many levels to the possibilities of world missions. Below are several facets of chapter life, each with seven ideas to get your creative thinking started. This fall, consider building into your chapter at least one idea from each category. In addition to all these, check out www.urbana.org regularly for more mentoring resources.

Prayer meetings

1. Pray regularly for area(s) of the world where your group has ongoing relationships or programs.

2. During normal chapter prayer meetings, pray periodically about whom the Lord would send out from your chapter into cross-cultural mission.

3. Invite international students to come and talk about their countries and cultures. Then pray for them and their countries.

4. Pray through InterVarsity’s purpose statement.

5. Pray for chapter members involved in cross-cultural ministry before they go and after they return. Create a chapter listserve to distribute e-mail prayer requests for them while they are on the project.

6. Periodically pray through the world news section of a good newspaper.

7. During a prayer meeting, pray for the country listed on the label of an article of your clothing.

Small Group Bible Studies

1. Form the habit of adding one question to your Bible study each week such as, “Does this passage have anything to say about God’s heart for the world?” or “What does this passage say about God’s heart for those of differing ethnicities or cultures?” You’ll be amazed once the wheels start to turn.

2. Get your small group members involved with international students as conversation partners or within a GIG (Group Investigating God). Invite them to your group to talk about life in their country).

3. Get the group involved with people who are ethnically, culturally or economically different from the members (for example, serve at a homeless shelter, tutor at a nearby school, visit a variety of churches or choose campus housing that will stretch your cross-cultural experience).

4. Encourage members to get cross-cultural ministry training such as Student Training In Missions (STIM) or through a Perspectives missions course.

5. Be active in supporting those from your group who are going on or returning from cross-cultural ministry experiences.

6. Check out the follow-up options on www.urbana.org together and help each other figure out appropriate next steps for moving cross-culturally.

7. Go on a cross-cultural project as a small group.

Large Group Meetings

1. Work to integrate God’s heart for the world into one aspect of the large-group meeting each week.

2. Focus on countries to which students from the chapter have gone and are going. Invite international students from those countries to speak about their homeland and culture, or have chapter members research various aspects of these countries and give reports during large-group meetings.

3. Regularly invite missions-minded speakers to large-group meetings. Have at least one talk per year where the idea of mission as an aspect of discipleship is presented. Invite testimonies from Christian international students. Bring in missionaries to speak—possibly on “non-missions” topics such as prayer, dependence on God, or the power of the Holy Spirit.

4. Reflect the broader world in musical worship by incorporating songs from different languages and styles into the normal repertoire of the chapter.

5. Think of creative ways to involve members who have been and will be involved in cross-cultural ministry.

6. Discover and try some creative icebreakers from another culture (maybe even talking about why some work and some don’t in our culture).

7. Do announcements in another language and see who can figure them out. (Eventually give them in English!)

Retreats and Conferences

1. Does your area or region have a “twinning” relationship with an IFES movement? Pray for your twin and take an offering for your partners in the gospel.

2. Arrange for students or staff from your overseas partnership to be at the event.

3. Periodically get missionaries or international believers to be speakers at retreats and conferences.

4. Incorporate worship songs from several different languages and cultural styles.

5. Have one meal be an unusual international meal.

6. Provide a time and place for interested students to talk with staff or students who have been involved with cross-cultural ministry.

7. Play games from another culture.

Fun Stuff

1. Have a “dress foreign” party or dance and play international music.

2. Participate in some of the events sponsored by your campus’s International Student Office or other ethnic and cultural organizations on campus or in the community.

3. Have a scavenger hunt, gathering objects (or people!) from different countries.

4. Form an “international restaurant of the month” club and explore other foods.

5. Have a “proverbs” party with international students, sharing common proverbs from different cultures.

6. During a social gathering, stop and give a “prize” to the person who is wearing clothing made in the greatest number of different countries. (If appropriate to the context, talk about it: is the purchase of third-world manufactured clothing a good thing or a problem, or both?)

7. Celebrate a few international holidays throughout the year.

Leadership

1. Study Scripture that will help your team grow in understanding of the centrality of God’s heart for the nations.

2. Implement a “2-2-2” strategy—getting chapter members on a trajectory of two-week, then two-month and finally two-year cross-cultural involvement while they’re in school and just beyond.

3. Talk specifically about how missions ties in with your chapter goals for the semester.

4. Work with missions leadership in the chapter to brainstorm ways to “integrate” mission rather than “isolate” it within chapter structures.

5. Be active in sending, caring for and receiving those in the chapter who are involved in cross-cultural ministry.

6. Look at how you spend a typical week, thinking through how missions could be integrated in simple ways into the things you already do (for example, use cross-cultural illustrations in your teaching, expose people you disciple to other cultures [in Scripture, local restaurants, etc.], or have one of your regular appointments be with someone ethnically and culturally different from you).

7. Consider going on a cross-cultural ministry project together as a leadership team or with those you disciple.

—Rich Henderson is the director of InterVarsity’s national missions team.