A New View of God’s Worldby President Greg Christy

DAN ROSS

Many institutions of higher education are committed to sending students abroad to study for a few weeks, a semester or even a year. With the global marketplace graduates are entering today, learning in another country has perhaps never been more important.

However, at Northwestern we view global education through the lens of our Vision for Learning, which makes our approach distinctive. 

Northwestern doesn’t send students abroad just to study and experience another culture, as important as that may be. Similar to all students’ learning at NWC, we want their experience abroad to better prepare them to trust, love and worship God; engage ideas; connect knowledge and experience; and respond to God’s call.

Before sending students abroad, our faculty and staff work diligently to ensure they are strongly rooted academically and spiritually—ready to experience other cultures and learn more of what it means to pursue God’s redeeming work.

This summer Northwestern sent 52 students on study trips to the Czech Republic, Germany, Israel, Japan and Turkey. During the last four years, we have developed and launched our own study abroad semesters in Romania and Oman. Reflecting our mission and Vision for Learning, these programs are rich experiences for growth that integrate faith, learning and living in community.

In the summer of 1990 I had the opportunity to experience something like this myself. I spent five weeks traveling with Athletes in Action, a ministry of Campus Crusade for Christ, to what was then Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Holland and Spain.

Our ministry team conducted baseball clinics, played games against national teams, and shared our faith in Christ publicly and personally. What impacted me most was staying with host families in two of the countries and learning how much we had in common even though it seemed we were so different.

Up to that point in my life, I saw the world from a very limited perspective. This trip gave me a new vision of God’s world and my place in it. In a similar way, our students are experiencing this with the added benefit of an academic component.

As our students travel, study, learn and live in community with those who are different from themselves, they experience growth as never before. The world becomes smaller and their vision of who God is becomes larger.

Northwestern’s study abroad experiences engage students in courageous and faithful learning and living that empowers them to follow Christ and pursue God’s redeeming work in the world—a big, diverse world. This is yet another way we live out our mission as a Christian academic community.