International Student Ministry (ISM) remains one of the most strategic but consistently underappreciated facets in world missions today. To date, there are over 6.9 million international students worldwide—that is, students who attend institutions of higher learning in countries other than their places of origin and nationality. North America (primarily the United States and Canada but also including Mexico) remains a highly popular destination for international students, hosting approximately 2.1 million international students and scholars.
Students from around the globe have historically flocked to North America’s colleges and universities because they are among the best the world has to offer. A key consequence is that many of the world’s political leaders both past and present spent their formative years as international students in Canada and/or the U.S. The implication of this for ISM is obvious: Christian outreach to international students has the potential to impact, powerfully so, the global political sphere spiritually.
Granted, Christ’s Great Commission as given in Acts 1:8 has been understood by some as about the progressive witness for Christ, beginning in Jerusalem to all Judea and Samaria and on to the ends of the earth. Yet the fact that international students are coming to our shores effectively telescopes and conflates all that by bringing the uttermost parts of the world to “our Jerusalem”—our cities and neighborhoods. Just think about it: The international student whom we befriend today could well be the president of his or her country or perhaps the future secretary general of the United Nations tomorrow!
Kofi Annan of Ghana was a graduate of MIT’s Sloan School of Management in 1974, among other international degrees. He served as the 7th General Secretary of the United Nations from 1997-2006 and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001. Other world leaders who were international students include King Abdulah II of Jordan, Empress Masako of Japan, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, President Bola Tinubu of Nigeria, and many more.
God Loves Internationals!
The Scriptures provide multiple accounts of God’s heart for the nations and “internationals” touched and transformed by the ministry of his people. Deuteronomy 10:19 exhorts God’s people to love the stranger in their midst. The second recorded miraculous feeding of the thousands by Jesus, which took place in the region of the Gerasenes, likely involved a Gentile-majority crowd (Mark 8:1-9).
In the opening chapters of the Book of Acts, Peter addresses three thousand who responded in faith and were baptized, the vast majority of which were internationals—Jews from the world over who had gathered in Jerusalem for the Feast (or Festival) of Weeks (Acts 2:5; Leviticus 23:15-22). Although Peter himself would not fully appreciate that God intended to extend His salvation to the Gentiles until his (Peter’s) vision of the unclean animals and subsequent encounter with the Roman centurion Cornelius (Acts 10), it may not be an exaggeration to suggest that Peter’s sermon was in fact a form of international ministry, likely including “international students”—think of folks like Saul of Tarsus, who had come from Cilicia (in modern-day Turkey) to Jerusalem to study with the eminent scholar of the Torah, Rabban Gamaliel I—added to the mix. There is little question that the God of the Bible is not only missionary but wholeheartedly global in focus and zeal (Genesis 12:3)!
ISM’s Potential Worldwide Impact
The impact that ISM can have—and indeed has had—on the world, let alone the global political sphere, is immense. The list of former and present international leaders who, in their formative years, spent time overseas as students is as long as it is remarkable. At the height of its empire, Great Britain hosted countless students from its colonial outposts who later became political visionaries and founding fathers in their homelands: Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru in India, Mohammed Ali Jinnah in Pakistan, and Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore, to name a few. Other former imperial powers like France and the Netherlands have also had their fair share of students turned great leaders; in fact, eminent founding members of the Chinese Communist Party such as Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and Chen Yi, among others, spent time as students in France. These places continue to host international students from around the world.
Likewise, over the years Canada and the U.S. have hosted hundreds if not thousands of international students who became prominent political and corporate world leaders like Ghanaian statesman and UN general secretary Kofi Annan, and Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk who studied in both Canada and the US. Other leaders like Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, the former president of Latvia, and Noor Hassanali, the second president of Trinidad and Tobago, were students in Canada.
On a more controversial note, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the former Al Qaeda leader and principal architect behind the 9/11 attacks, once studied in universities in North Carolina. The current Chinese president Xi Jinping spent extended time in Muscatine, a farming community in Iowa, as part of an agricultural delegation in 1985. Or consider Svetlana Nicolaescu who earned her medical degrees in Moldova and a Master of Public Health from Kansas State University. Nicolaescu served her country in high-capacity health roles, including leading Moldova’s Ministry of Health, Labour and Social Protection as State Secretary.