Harding University hosts missions experience event

Oklahoma Christian University students visited Harding University during the weekend for the 2015 Global Missions Experience, a missions conference themed on the idea of “Relentless.”

The Sept. 17-20 Global Missions Experience was this year’s version of the World Mission Workshop, an event held by Church of Christ affiliated universities with the purpose of talking and learning about missions. Oklahoma Christian University last hosted the event in 2013.

“Whether the event is called the World Mission Workshop or the Global Missions Experience, the underlying purpose is the same: to bring students together from different Christian colleges and universities to learn about missions and, hopefully, to inspire many to become involved in missions themselves, either now or in the future,” Professor of Missions Bob Carpenter said.

Harding hosted the workshop at its missions training facility at Camp Takodah – the university’s 1,350-acre summer camp. About 1,000 people attended the event with nearly 30 people from Oklahoma Christian.

Camp Tahkoda has several simulation stations that allow students to experience different cultures worldwide. People were given a story to act out as they went into a busy marketplace. Vice President of Outreach Madeline Decker was one of the Oklahoma Christian students who participated.

“We went into the marketplace to buy food for our family,” Decker said. “It was crazy. There were people shouting out in different languages and homeless people hanging on to you and begging for money. You had to try and bargain with the vendors who spoke different languages so you could buy enough food to feed your family.”

Another aspect of the simulation was a banquet that helped the participants conceptualize how many people go hungry in the world.

“What they did was hand out tickets randomly,” Decker said. “There were 12 blue tickets and the rest were white. The 12 people who received blue tickets got special treatment. They were sat at a fancy table and fed steak and corn and other luxurious things. The rest of us with the white tickets sat on the ground and were given a small bowl of rice and beans.”

Some of the speakers during the weekend included Greg McKinzie, Adrian Teo, Alan Howell and Bob Lawrence. On the first day, the group ate dinner and two other keynote speakers addressed the group: Scott Karnes from Ireland and Kent Brantly.

Brantly worked in West Africa as a medical missionary with the Samaritan’s Purse. On July 26, 2014, he was diagnosed with Ebola virus, which he caught while treating patients during the crisis. The events that occurred thereafter received international media attention.

Brantly was featured on the cover of Time in 2014 and has spoken at many conferences. He also recently released a book titled “Called for Life.” He spoke to the group about relentlessly serving God.

Brantly said while he feels called to go to places like Africa and minister to people, it might not be everyone’s calling.

“I don’t think that everyone has to go to the foreign mission field to be a disciple of Jesus, but He does call all of us to pick up our cross and follow him daily,” Brantly said. “And that’s not easy, no matter what your role in life, no matter what your occupation or your geographical location. He doesn’t call us to an easy, laid-back comfortable life.”

Brantly said one of his goals in traveling to all the conferences is to both encourage people to hold on to the faith in the midst of suffering, but also wrestle with some of the questions that are brought up in instances like his.

“Our circumstances have raised a lot of challenging questions for us and for people who analyze our experience … issues that sometimes we tend to sweep under the rug with trite, pat answers,” Brantly said. “I survived –11,300 other people died. And people say, ‘Well we know why you survived, because so many people were praying for you.’ But I don’t think that is a satisfactory answer. Of those 11,300 who died a lot of them were faithful, god-fearing Christian people who had lots of other people praying for them. They were mothers, fathers, and children. My life is no more valuable than theirs.”

The missionaries had another opportunity to connect with the participants during evening campfire sessions. It was a time for them to teach about the different cultural contexts they lived in and how to minister to people within these contexts. Each campfire tried to represent a different continent.

President of Outreach Savanna Harris said reuniting and talking to the missionaries she met in Germany ignited her desire to return and do mission work there.

“I went to the Europe campfire,” Harris said. “I got to meet with the missionaries that I got to meet in Germany. I didn’t know that they were going to be there so that was really neat hearing from them. … They were just so real about what was going on,” Harris said. “They didn’t hide anything; they shared the hardships, they shared the good parts of it.”

Decker said that although she enjoyed the whole conference, worship was her favorite.

“I loved the singing and the people,” Decker said. “Here we have chapel and no one really wants to be at big chapel so they just sit and play on their phones and talk the whole time. That gets really discouraging, but at the conference everyone who was there were Christians who wanted to be there and that was really uplifting.”

The event also had specific classes geared for students based on certain fields of study that encouraged them to use talents for mission work. In the art class, they painted a mural with figures symbolizing each continent.

“On Saturday night, those who were committed to go out and do mission work got their foot painted and they got to put it onto the mural … that included mine and a lot of other people from OC,” Harris said.