Post Cairo report
What a great time I had in a city that I dearly love. I arrived with a group of us Americans and we all huddled into a mini bus packed to the gills with everyone and all of our luggage strapped to the top. We took about 90 minutes to go about 15 miles as we hit peak Cairo traffic. Amidst impromptu business meetings, the occasional, “Hey Rich what is that building?”, catching up with some old friends, and the onslaught of incessant honking from Cairo’s cars I was back. It was great to be back. Many of my teammates were worried that I wouldn’t get on the plane to come back to Orlando!
Our conference was a gathering of campus leaders from around the world. We had folks from Africa, Eastern Europe, East Asia, Australia, New Zealand, India, South America, Western Europe, Canada and of course the US. I was even joined by a couple of Egyptian friends of mine. Truly an international group. We gathered to seek the Lord for the students of the world, to share new ideas of what is working, to encourage one another, pray for one another and truly seek to work together as one global group of campus ministry experts. My specific role was to address the issue of how to we reach the 110 million students of the world where they live and breathe…on the internet.
I came expecting a lot of resistance to building student movements on the internet. Most people my age (and even younger) don’t see the internet as something “real”. That is, it is not a viable form of doing ministry. Ministry can only be done on a one to one basis. (e.g. a staff member or student sharing the Gospel in the student union with another non-Believing student). This kind of thinking goes even further when it comes to any kind of discipleship ministry. That certainly must be done face to face in a staff members’ home or student dorm room.
I think that was totally true for the times that I was on campus as a staff member and as a student, but times have changed. When I was a student, I didn’t have cable tv in my dorm room or a high speed internet connection or a cell phone. I used the pay phone down the hall, used the tv lounge downstairs (shared with 700 other students in my dorm) and had no idea what the internet or a cell phone was!
Luckily, I really didn’t have a problem with convincing my peers that we need to begin to reach students on the internet, the question really becomes how. I was able to give a presentation on how to lead something that we really don’t understand. Most of us know how to do email and look up things on the internet, but how does that translate into reaching students? I can’t just spam every student in the world with the Gospel? How do I use the power of the internet, but not lose that personal one on one touch? After all, computers can’t be evangelists and missionaries! I don’t have all the answers yet, but I do have a new group of recent internet converts!