Center for Global Missions interns to serve in Austria

Submitted Photo

 

Two Oklahoma Christian University students will travel to Graz, Vienna this summer to make an impact and blaze new paths.

“The Center for Global Missions has two goals,” Ben Langford, director of the Center for Global Missions, said. “One, to help students consider full-time mission work a real possible vocation for their life. And second, realizing that a majority of students on OC’s campus won’t, we want to help every student create a culture where every student can think about their vocation within the mission of God.”

According to Langford, the Center for Global Missions is sending 20 interns to nine different countries this summer: Peru, Brazil, Ireland, Russia, Australia, Bulgaria, Zimbabwe, Vanuatu and Austria.

“Typically, mission trips change people,” Langford said. “It broadens your understanding of church and what God’s doing in the world. When you’re out of your own context, there’s opportunity for growth, for questions, and you come back understand things and the life of missionaries differently.

For the first time, two of the interns – senior Payton Minzenmayer and sophomore Darian Russell – will extend their stay to three months instead of the usual six-to-eight-week time period.

“I don’t believe that you truly know something until you’ve experienced it,” Minzenmayer said. “I can do all the studying of what it’s like to be a missionary and what it’s like to be engulfed in a culture, but until I’m actually engulfed in it for three months – in the language, in the culture and in how they live in that lifestyle – I won’t understand what it means.”

Minzenmayer and Russell will intern at a church south of Vienna.

“I went on the study abroad this past summer, and I went into it with the mentality of thinking it would be cool to be a missionary in Scotland and go to school at the same time,” Minzenmayer said. “I told that plan to a missionary in Vienna and he basically said he didn’t know what I would do for school, but he knew a church down in Graz, Austria and a guy named Thomas who had been looking for help.”

According to Minzenmayer, he contacted Thomas and on his last free travel weekend of the trip visited the church in Graz, Austria.

“I didn’t know if I needed to work there or raise awareness for somebody to work there, but I knew that I was going to play an instrumental part with that church,” Minzenmayer said. “I came back and told Ben Langford my passion and how this church needed help, and he told me to do it. I asked Darian what she thought about it and she was gung-ho for it, so we just went from there.”

According to Minzenmayer, the church is held in an apartment complex. One of the interns will be living in the apartment adjoined to the room they hold services in, and the other will be staying with a family on another floor in the apartment complex.

“The church they’re going to is very unique: half of it’s Austrian and half of the congregation are African immigrants from Ghana,” Langford said. “Darian did an internship with us last summer to Rwanda. So it’s this perfect combination, I think, that Payton has experienced doing missions in Austria and knows that church and Darian has done mission work in Africa, so she knows … about African culture.”

As the team works alongside the church in Graz, they will learn to speak German.

“Your window into people’s lives is being able to communicate with them,” Minzenmayer said. “And we’re not going to be able to make an impact until we can communicate in some way, and language plays a huge part in that.”

Learning a foreign language can expand possibilities for outreach in their three-month mission field.

“Payton and I, as a couple, have always acknowledged that we have different strengths and weaknesses and we kind of compensate for each other pretty well, which makes us a pretty good team,” Russell said. “And I’m excited to look at this as a potential life-long mission project for Payton and me.”

The Center for Global Missions prepares their student-interns through fundraising, language and culture classes and hands-on mission work before sending them to their respective countries.

“We are fundraising right now through the Center for Global Missions,” Russell said. “Anybody can donate, we send out sponsorship letters and people have responded with money or best wishes for us. … Last year I only had to raise $4,000; this year we have to raise five thousand, so it’s hard, but just knowing that people are praying for us is a big contribution.”

As Minzenmayer and Russell prepare for their three-month mission internship, fundraising and lines of communication are being established.

“We have a blog and we’re kind of posting on it now saying what’s going on: how we’re doing, fundraising, what we’re excited for, what we’re nervous for,” Russell said. “We’ve had a lot of people ask us questions, so the purpose of the blog is to answer those questions and keep them up to date.”

This blog will allow people back home to keep up with the lives of Minzenmayer and Russell, allowing a glimpse into a personal view of what it is to be a missionary.

“I would really encourage people who are even a little bit interested in missions to do an internship through the Center for Global Missions,” Russell said. “Even if you don’t end up being a missionary, it really makes you aware of the work that goes into it and why they need funding.”

For more information on Minzenmayer and Russel’s trip, you can follow their blog at http://panddgraz.blogspot.com.

Anyone interested in helping fundraise can make checks out to Oklahoma Christian University with “CGM Darian and/or Payton” included on the “for” line.