by Trevor Joy
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Every year 2,650 students representing over 30 countries attend Fresno Pacific University for its Intensive English language program. Most often they embark on this journey all alone, leaving friends, family and everything familiar back home. When these students arrive in Fresno, the university seeks to provide a number of ways they can connect with Americans and feel welcomed into the community.
Though we’ve been aware for some time of the large international student population through missionary friends doing this work, it was just about two years ago that God began putting it on our hearts to get involved. As we pursued involvement, we starting meeting others who invited us to join them. One specific encounter led us to our friend and fellow leader Jenny, who invited us to get involved with a group she led called, Discovery Bible Study (DBS). We joined Jenny’s group to see for ourselves what this was all about. DBS is designed for people of all faiths to read scripture and discuss it’s meaning through answering three questions: What does this say about God/Jesus? What does this say about People? Do I want to do anything different this week after reading this passage? After spending time as participants we were excited to join Jenny and other leaders to help host this group and have been doing so for the past two years.
We get asked some
times, “What does a typical DBS night look like?” The answer is that it looks different every week. We never really know who will come, or how the discussion will go. Though that is a bit of a challenge for my wife’s love for planning, we have had some wonderful experiences that compel us to show up every week and see what God will do. At one DBS, a Saudi student made a comment which no one in the group understood. He tried to explain further but we were all still lost. At that point, another Saudi student asked the first one, in Arabic, some clarifying questions and then relayed the conversation to the rest of us, helping to clarify. After the clarification, a Japanese and a Russian student contributed their thoughts as well. Now usually if I were to say that a Russian, a Saudi Arabian, and a Japanese student were sitting in my living room talking about the Bible, you would be preparing yourself for a really good joke! But the reality is these 3 students, none of which are Christians, engaged in conversation about Christianity and discussed their answer to the question, what does this passage say about Jesus?
Though their primary purpose is learning
English, students also hope to make American friends, and experience American families and culture. One of the first students we got to know was a young man from Jordan. He was outgoing, kind and curious. We love the outdoors and love to hike and backpack so we invited him to join us on a short trip through the Giant Sequoia Trees. He gladly accepted and as we walked took tons of pictures and expressed his appreciation for the experience. We continued to hang out with him at various points after the trip enjoying great discussion about our different cultures, religions, and world perspective. The three of us at one point joyfully noted things that we have in common despite our differences. I was truly sad to be hugging him goodbye as I dropped him off at the train station on the way back to Jordan. Will he be gone for a semester, or two, or for good? Time will tell. Oh the seeds! (Mark 4:1-9) We keep tossing out those crazy seeds and wondering what will come up.
“Listen! A farmer went out to sow his seed..... other seed fell on good soil. It came up, grew and produced a crop, some multiplying thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times.” Mark 4:3,8