March 4, 2015

Jiwan Moon Has a Plan to Retain Adventist Youth

Jiwan Moon is hoping to tweak the Seventh-day Adventist Church Manual — and in the process stem an outflow of young people from the church.

Moon will tell a major conference that opens Wednesday about his proposal to add the position of “public campus ministries coordinator” to the
Church Manual’s lineup of elders, deacons, and other elected officers at local churches.

Moon, just nine months at the helm of the newly created office of public campus ministries for the Adventist world church, said the coordinators could play a crucial role in encouraging Adventist students on public campuses to remain committed to God.

The coordinators, he said, could engage the students in mission-minded activities that taught self-sacrifice and endowed them with the missionary spirit that Adventist Church cofounder Ellen G. White has described as akin to the spirit of Jesus.
Jiwan Moon, pictured at Annual Council in October 2014, had a 95 percent youth retention rate at his former church in Canada. Photo: ANN

“Adventist students usually have an identity crisis when they go to public campuses,” Moon said in an interview. “There is a saying, ‘They leave as an Adventist and come back as a non-Adventist.’

“In order for young people to make their Christianity relevant,” he said, “they have to learn to appreciate living the life of self-sacrifice.”

Adventist leaders have good reason to worry. The church is losing more than half of its young people before they reach adulthood, and in some developed countries the figure is closer to 70 percent, according to statistics presented at the church’s Annual Council business meeting last October.

Efforts to reach out to public campuses started about 40 years ago within the North American Division, but the world church only decided to create a full-time position to address the issue last year.

Transforming Students Into Missionaries

In the meantime, several grassroots programs that encourage Adventist students to share Jesus on public campuses are flourishing at churches such as the University Adventist Church in East Lansing, Michigan.

“The impact of campus ministry cannot be underestimated,” said David Shin, who spoke of miracles in his seven years as pastor of the University Adventist Church in East Lansing, Michigan (see sidebar below).

“There is nothing more life-changing in a secular student’s life than the everlasting gospel,” Shin said. “The impact of the countless lives that will be touched as a result of these conversions cannot be quantified — it’s like a wave in the ocean of humanity.”The proposed
Church Manual amendment has to be approved by the General Conference session next July. Regardless of the outcome, Moon is laying the groundwork to fulfill his department’s motto to “transform Adventist students into campus missionaries” with the Adventist Church’s first major conference on the issue.

“We are hoping to build a consensus about not only retaining Adventist young people but also causing them to live a proactive Christian life,” Moon said. “We need to empower them and give them the opportunity to serve.”

The five-day conference, which opened at the world church’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, will draft recommendations to the world church on nurturing students from the ages of 16 to about 30. Among the proposals is the creation of public campus ministries positions at all levels of the denomination: divisions, unions, conferences, and local churches. Coordinators at local churches would be able to contact their counterparts at the conference level for resources and other assistance.

A third of the conference’s 50 invited delegates are actively involved in public campus ministries and will share their experiences with the others, a mix of youth ministries leaders and church administrators from the church’s 13 world divisions.

Moon said he hopes that the new public campus ministries leaders will in place throughout the church by the end of the year.

Teaching Vacation Bible School in Canada

Moon is well familiar with the challenges that the Adventist Church faces in retaining young people. Before joining the General Conference last year, he established an innovative program called the Reach Out & Care Missionary Movement at the church that he pastored in Canada.

“We had a 95 percent youth retention rate,” he said. “It was a most rewarding experience to see the fruits of my labor.”

Under the ongoing initiative, young people at the Kitchener-Waterloo Adventist Church, located an hour’s drive from Toronto, are expected from the age of 13 to help a struggling church every summer. The students lead a Vacation Bible School at their church, take a few days of missionary training, and then go to a nearby church to teach Vacation Bible School in the mornings, engage in community outreach in the afternoons, and conduct an evangelistic series in the evenings.

“The youth are strongly encouraged to turn off their cell phones and other electronic devices,” said Dimitar Kolev, youth leader at the Kitchener-Waterloo church (see sidebar below). “We do not listen to secular music and generally attempt to minimize secular influences and spend the week in devoting ourselves to God and availing ourselves for His use.”

He said the program, which started in 2006, changed his own life.

“I myself am a product of this program, and I can attest to the profound impact it has had on my walk with God,” he said.

Targeting 2 Universities and a College in Canada

Dimitar Kolev, youth leader of the Reach Out & Care Missionary Movement program at the Kitchener-Waterloo Adventist Church in Kitchener, Ontario, tells why his church has a 95 percent retention rate for young people.

Q: How exactly do you reach out to the students?

We are blessed to live in a town with two universities and one college, which means we get a new batch of students every year. Usually the first step is theirs — coming to our church. At that point I or another youth leader will act much in the way that an interest coordinator would: we welcome the students, gather contact information, try to establish a connection, and make them feel like this is a church they can belong to. We have biweekly or monthly social events and work very hard to make sure everyone participates and is integrated well into the group. Social events produce bonding, and we have found having an abundance of them helps keep our group tightly knit. It's a very important component.

Q: How many students do you work with at any given time? What is the budget, and how is it financed?

A: Last year we had 30 people who joined us on our mission trip to Haileybury, Ontario, and of those 30 at least five to seven were university students. We anticipate having more joining us this summer.

The budget ranges depending on location. This was our farthest mission trip yet, and we spent $6,000 in total, about $2,500 of which was spent to cover transportation costs alone. Thus far we have always financed the project ourselves through fundraising in our own and other churches. Every year we come up with a different fundraising program that is rehearsed and then presented during the divine hour in the churches we visit. The program typically consists of several related readings interrupted by special music. So far we have never had to charge the missionaries themselves. Yt has always been a free trip. and we hope that, God willing, it will remain this way.

Q: What are the results of the outreach?

A: We are a movement that aims to assist small, struggling churches in the area. We identify locations based on membership and community statistics such as the ratio of Adventists to non-Adventists, the unemployment rate, and the number of citizens living below the poverty line. Our outreach program consists of Vacation Bible School in the morning, community service in the afternoon, and evangelistic series at night. In essence we amplify the most important functions of the church for a week.

In our community service component, we have typically partnered with the local church or the municipality. Last year, the town of Cobalt developed applications for its citizens to fill out if they were in need of our help, and the response was impressive.

We have tried to spend more than just one year at a location in order to be able to build a relationship with the community and bridge the gap between them and the local church. It is the local church members who are expected to pick up the work where we leave off and care for the people in their community as a continuation of the program.

Of course, there is definitely an in-reach component to the program because this is meant to also be an intensely spiritual experience for the youth and young adults involved. There is very little free time, and most time not spent in work is spent in devotional and prayer. Learning to show God's love to others and put their needs above your own can be a powerful experience in today's self-centered society.

During the week each young person has a one-on-one conversation with me and another youth leader. We pray together and discuss their experience and their relationship with God. After the mission trip, the university-age students remain in close touch with the younger youth, mentoring and encouraging them to follow Christ.

Q: How did your program start?

A: The program started in 2006 when Pastor Jiwan Moon had the idea that for the price of sending one or two missionaries abroad, the church could send five or 10 locally to help struggling churches, of which there were and still are many.

We plan to expand the program to include other churches so we can go to more than one place at a time or stay more than one week at a time. Ultimately, we'd like for the movement to grow so that we can develop something along the lines of groupmissiontrips.com, where people can go online to sign up for mission trips locally and abroad.

— Andrew McChesney

Two Adventist students supervising a University Church booth at Michigan State University. The students run the booth every Friday during the school year, giving invitations for free personal Bible studies. Photo: David Shin

Targeting Michigan State University

David Shin, senior pastor of the University Adventist Church in East Lansing, Michigan, tells how his church reaches out to students at nearby Michigan State University.

Q: How do you reach out to students?

A: Our philosophy is the best way to win secular students to Christ is to have Adventist students reach out to their fellow students.

Outreach is overseen by a student organization that is considered a department of our local church. Adventist students elect their own president and officers to the student organization, with input from our pastoral leadership. Every student considers him- or herself an integral part of the University Church. The student organization’s outreach is integrated into our church’s overall master plan of evangelism.

Our church acts as a support base for student activities, and our staff is involved in the intentional mentoring of student leaders. We also sponsor key students to training intensives at Emmanuel Institute, an evangelism training school in Michigan. We encourage our students to go canvassing during the summertime.

We host a Friday night vespers at the church preceded by food cooked by our members. On Monday evenings, one of our staff members hosts a small group Bible study. We also sponsor a weekly booth on the Michigan State University campus where our Adventist students do surveys to gather interested people for Bible studies.

Our church implements an annual cycle of campus evangelism that includes sowing activities in the fall and reaping meetings in the spring.

Q: How many students do you work with at any given time? What is the budget, and how is it financed?

A: We work with anywhere from 15 to 25 Adventist students a year, not counting visitors and friends who come through the church.

Regarding financing, the students have their own bank account and treasurer. However, our church has in its budget an allotment of $1,000 a year that we give to the students for their projects. This is not counting the weekly food that is provided by our members, the sponsoring of key students to evangelism training intensives, and the sponsoring of evangelism on campus. These are all supported by the local church.

Q: What are the results of the outreach?

A: The results have been incredible. One of our male Adventist students was at bus stop and began a conversation with a female Chinese student who was an agnostic. He gave her a card offering free Bible studies. They studied together. Our associate pastor Daniel Jean Francois then studied with her. Seven months later, on February 2014, she was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Now is she back in China attending the Adventist church there and is switching majors to do medical missionary work in China. She came to this country as an atheist and went back to China as an Adventist.

In 2013, we baptized Anthony, the son of a Baptist preacher, who was in the jazz program at Michigan State University. Anthony felt the call to ministry and now is studying to be a pastor at Southern Adventist University.

We are just now seeing one our student converts, Christian Bull, beginning full-time ministry. Four years ago, one of our students began giving Bible studies to Christian. Christian was baptized and went on to Southern Adventist University to study to become a pastor. Christian graduated last year and now he is a pastor in the Greater New York Conference.

These stories are just the highlights of some of the many stories of Adventist students reaching students on this secular campus for Christ. We find that the best way to keep our students in the church is by encouraging them to share their faith.

Our current student association president is a convert who was baptized two years ago. The president before her was also a new convert who was baptized three years earlier. We find that every student who actively shares their love for Jesus on campus remains in the church.

Q: Could you share a little background on how your program started?

A: The program really started more than 50 years ago when a group of church members had a burden for Michigan State University and bought a church two blocks from the university. Since then, the church has felt that its mission is to reach the university campus.

A quote that I have written in my Bible encompasses why I believe that campus ministries is a worthy endeavor: “Change the university and you change the world.” — Dr. Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations General Assembly and Security Council.