By Mitch Holt, Copy Editor
During the summer, 57 ACU students engaged in World Wide Witness internships, short-term missions programs in 23 different locations across the world, ranging from 6 to 10 weeks in length.
Dr. Gary Green, missions coordinator in the Halbert Institute for Missions at ACU, said WWW provides participants with an extremely experimental form of learning.
“It helps students learn about themselves and other cultures,” Green said. “They can see God active in ways they never would have dreamed of. It’s truly a stretching spiritual experience.”
World Wide Witness works in partnership with the Let’s Start Talking program to recruit and train teams for mission sites across the world. Participants spend months in preparation, and most of them take a missions course during Maymester for further preparation.
According to the WWW’s mission statement, the organization’s goal is to provide opportunities for spiritual development, give participants a chance to hear God’s call to long-term missionary service, help increase ministry skills, increase the missions vision of American churches by multiplying the number of church members who have had first-hand experience, and give missionaries on the field short-term help with specific tasks.
Four ACU WWW interns traveled to New York to work with house churches in the area and team up with the Bronx Fellowship of Christ in community outreach. The four students worshipped and ate meals with house church members each week, and they reached out to the community through teaching English to immigrants, teaching children in the projects and landscaping for members of the community.
Kevin Porter, senior youth and family ministry major from Dallas and one of the New York team members, said the experience exposed the team to a new form of “church” emerging among unconventional Christians in the U.S. He said the internship gave them experience in full-time ministry during the 10 weeks they were there.
“[House churches] are not perfect,” Porter said. “But they reach a group of people that traditional church, as we know it, does not reach.”
