By Jaci Schneider, Copy Editor
During Melissa Landry’s internship last summer, she traveled 7,458 miles and learned how to drive on the wrong side of the road.
Landry’s internship not only helped her learn how to work with community leaders, children and teenagers; it also taught her how to deal with culture shock, overcome homesickness and live like a missionary.
Landry traveled overseas for the first time last year for a World Wide Witness internship in Auckland, New Zealand. Although Landry is from Plano and her major is accounting and finance, her internship focused on missions.
“I didn’t have much experience in extended missions,” Landry said. “I was getting out of my comfort zone, especially when it came to children and teens.
“But I learned that when you truly do become vulnerable to God and ask him to use you, he really does.”
Landry is one of 170 students who have participated in World Wide Witness, the university’s missionary summer internship program. This summer, the organization will send 65 more students out across the globe-the most sent in its five-year history.
Landry learned about World Wide Witness from Dr. Gary Green, one of the organization’s founders and a missions coordinator for Latin America. Although Landry wasn’t planning on becoming a long-term missionary, one of her friends told her about her own experience overseas and intrigued Landry.
After Landry spent eight weeks helping the Northshore Church of Christ reach out to the community, she’d consider living overseas for a longer period of time to do vocational missions.
“I really do want to move out there at some point,” she said.
That’s one of the goals of Green and co-director Dr. Wimon Walker, instructor of Bible, missions and ministry.
“We know that most of our interns will not become missionaries.” Green said. “But we know that they will also be much more supportive of international missions; they’ll have a comprehension and compassion for what goes on worldwide that they never had before.”
Dr. Gary Green came to the university in 2001 from working as a missionary in Venezuela. His goal coming to ACU was to begin a short-term missions program for Latin America.
Dr. Wimon Walker had begun working at the university just one semester earlier, and his goal was to begin a missionary apprenticeship program.
When the two realized they could combine their goals, they formed World Wide Witness.
“Since then, it has been a great partnership, and things have really taken off,” Green said.
Before Green and Walker arrived, ACU had missions internship opportunities in Thailand and Africa, but no easy way to get involved.
“There was no front door for those internships; you basically had to know the right person to get involved,” Green said. “My goal was to make it more of a front-door approach and make it more high profile.”
Now Green and Walker make promotional videos, visit Bible classes and recruit students for the internships, which allow interns to work with a missionary from four to eight weeks during the summer.
The internships go beyond mission trips, both Green and Walker said. They are like a “try-out” for students interested in missions. The students must raise anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 in support, and they work with the missionary in the field.
The two men assist students in raising funds for their trips by helping them write letters. Green said he signs up to 4,000 letters a year to be sent to churches, friends and family.
Students can work in places near and far such as Thailand, Australia, Brazil, France, Mexico, Costa Rica and the United States.
In turn, the missionaries mentor them and help them build relationships and experience cross-cultural life.
“They’re not really trips,” Walker said. “They’re really going in and living in that place … they’re going to serve and learn.”
As a result, Walker said, they come back with an increased vision of what God is doing in the world.
In the Swiss Alps
Mitch Ebie, masters of Christian ministry graduate student from Orrville, Ohio, lived for six weeks last summer with a Let’s Start Talking group in Schauffhausen, Switzerland, where he said he learned a lot about teaching the Gospel.
Let’s Start Talking is a national program that sends students to teach English in foreign countries. At ACU, the program comes together with World Wide Witness in training and recruiting.
Ebie said working in Switzerland stretched his beliefs and the way he tells people about Christ.
“Over there it’s more complicated,” Ebie said. “They’re very skeptical, and they think that [Church of Christ] is a cult.”
Every day, Ebie would read with students of different ages using a workbook and the Bible to help them practice their English. He also had time to hang out in the town, explore its surrounding scenery, including the Swiss Alps, and get to know some residents.
Although Ebie participated in Let’s Start Talking trips before, this particular trip presented different issues to him when trying to teach other’s about Christ.
“They’re not just going to pick it up,” he said. “It’s interesting to see the perspectives of other people and what they’ve been through and their culture and society.
“They don’t need God like people in Africa … maybe they have too much.”
Ebie said learning to reach the people in Switzerland proved to be a challenge
“It’s challenging to think of ways to get through to them,” he said. “You have to build a relationship, and they have to trust you, and see it in you.”
Ebie came home with a different perspective, which Green and Walker hope every student comes home with.
Although Ebie plans to stay in the United States this summer, he said he would like to spend time overseas in his future.
Changing lives
Ebie and Landry are not the only students to participate in World Wide Witness or Let’s Start Talking and decide to spend more time overseas.
Walker and Green can both list names of students and scenarios where the internship changed the student’s life.
One student left for her internship and decided to take the next semester off so she could stay where she was, Green said.
One intern went to Mexico and, by the time he returned at the end of the summer, he had already arranged with his sponsoring church to return after graduation.
However, Green and Walker know not all interns will come back ready to be cross-cultural missionaries.
“We hope that some of our interns will hear God’s calling and say, ‘I want to spend the rest of my life there,'” Walker said. “But it’s not for everyone. Some will come back and say, ‘You know, I need to go back to Wichita Falls and spend the rest of my life there.’
“But no matter what, they will have a different perspective.”
Although World Wide Witness is only in its fifth year, Walker and Green are beginning to see some of their interns make long-term decisions.
“We’ve had several interns whose lives have been seriously changed,” Walker said.
Green said many students have begun masters degrees in missions with the desire to be church planters.
“We are just now getting to the point of seeing interns become part of long-term teams,” Green said.
The long-term results do not come from luck or chance; Green and Walker work diligently to provide students with a realistic experience of missionary life by making sure the missionaries the students work with will serve as mentors and help them build relationships.
“We don’t want to run a temp agency,” Walker said. “While they’re there, they ought to be of service, but we also want them to be mentored.”
Walker and Green work year-round on the internship program. The missionaries who participate are found through relationships within the Halbert Institute of Missions.
“We don’t work with just anyone,” Green said. “Someone in the Halbert Institute knows them personally or has references for them.
“It becomes a network of relationships.”
Although Walker and Green arrange the sites before students even apply, every once in a while something falls through.
One year, a site in Papua, Indonesia, fell through 10 days prior to departure because the government rejected the students’ visas. However, Green was able to turn to relationships he had with people in Singapore and Malaysia, and the students traveled there instead.
“We had to scramble quite a bit, but we work with a lot of wonderful people,” he said. “Those students had a very positive experience.”
Future decisions
For Landry and Ebie, their internship became even more than a positive experience. It changed their ideas about the world and their futures.
Ebie said the church he worked with in Switzerland asked him to return to work with the youth group, and he also considered traveling to New Zealand this summer to work with a church there.
“I would love to go overseas,” Ebie said.
Landry came back from New Zealand not only missing Cadbury chocolate and the beach; she misses the people she formed relationships with the most.
“It was awesome being able to see that we really did have an affect on the people,” Landry said. “When I first got back, I was like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to go back next semester.’ But I’ve experienced it, and I think someone else deserves that chance, too.”
