24 UCCF short-term mission teams, comprising around 150 students, Staff and Relay Workers, will be involved in summer mission teams this year.
16 of the 24 teams of up to 15 students will be going abroad to Europe, Asia and Africa, representing an increase from the ten teams that were sent last year.
Led by UCCF staff, summer teams partner with mission agencies who operate in the destination country (usually IFES). A typical team may hold an openly evangelistic English Bible camp, where non-Christian students can learn the English language, have fun, and discover Jesus. Mike Chalmers, a Christian Union Staff Worker in North Wales, has led a team to Lithuania for the last five years and says: ‘It meets a cultural and spiritual need. Practising English with British students is a luxury, especially in Eastern European countries. Meeting Jesus in the pages of Scripture is a rarity in countries that have no idea he even exists’.
Easter
Most teams are sent in the summer months. However, a team of students from Oxford took advantage of the Easter break to go to Siena, Italy, and partnered with the local IFES group there (GBU). Running their second ever mission week, the team of ten Brits effectively doubled the numbers of the GBU group.
Encouraged
Free English lessons were offered using Uncover (UCCF’s evangelistic resource) as the reading material. Numbers at evening events consistently outperformed the students’ expectations. ‘The guys were astonished’, remarked Pete, a Relay Worker on the team. ‘They had never seen so many turn up to an event they put on. We left behind a group of Christian students really encouraged in mission and reaching out to their friends. There are now more Christians attending the GBU group, and 15 people have been coming along to the follow-up course.’
As well as sending mission teams abroad, UCCF also have short-term mission teams operating in Britain. Five teams will be partnering with Friends International to reach out to the thousands of overseas students who come to Britain’s towns and cities to study English and experience the culture. They will be making the most of the exciting opportunity of being able to share Christ freely with students from cultures where the gospel is not well known, or has its freedoms restricted. A further three teams will spend time in urban areas, partnering with local churches to meet the particular needs in the area.
|Uncover| going international
Uncover — UCCF’s latest gospel campaign — is also due to go international, with 10,000 copies of Rebecca Manley Pippert’s Seeker Bible Study resource to be translated into Norwegian. Having seen how well the resource was received by British students, Tor Erling, General Secretary of NKSS, the IFES movement in Norway, was determined to see the project launched in Norway. He comments: ‘Many times we have asked our students to evangelise but have failed to present tools to make the gospel accessible. With Uncover, we can give them a tool that makes things a whole lot easier. If you ever wanted to invite your friends to read the Bible with you, this is your chance’.
Other IFES movements that have expressed an interest in seeing the material translated into their own languages include Spain, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia and Israel.
Find out more about Uncover at http://www.uccf.org.uk/uncover Alternatively, follow us on Twitter, find us on Facebook or watch us on Youtube.
Robin Peak is UCCF Communications Assistant.
