Summer program has local, global impact

By Jeremy Watson

BR Intern

Mary Sumner has no regrets over her investment. "The institute is worth every penny," said the Carolina alumna bound for graduate study at N.C. State.

Instead of saving money over the summer for tuition, books, a car or an MP3 player, Sumner and 14 Duke, N.C. State and UNC-Chapel Hill students each paid $3,000, from donations and their own bank accounts, to enroll in a new program sponsored by Summit Baptist Church in Durham.

Through the institute, students learned missionary skills in theory from the discourses of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS) professors, and in practice from trips to Southeast Asia's tsunami-ravaged zone, inner-city Durham and a once-vibrant steel mill town in the Buckeye state.

In Youngstown, Ohio, their first destination, students gave out 3,500 leaflets to inform city residents about Youngstown Metro Church, a Summit and North American Mission Board plant that reaches 18-35 year olds "abandoned by the church."

Some students noticed a spiritual void in these young adults. "There is barely any hope to be found," UNC junior Emily Mann said.

Learning how to fill the religious needs of people like those Youngstowners and deepening their own faith were goals on the students' agenda when they returned to Durham.

For six weeks, from 9 a.m. to noon Tuesday through Friday, Institute participants gathered in a Duke University classroom to hear lectures different from those typically found in Triangle schools.

In Bruce Little's apologetics course, students were taught logic and trained to rationally defend their faith in discussions with non-Christians. In one activity, Little had them construct their own proofs for biblical beliefs, then he demolished their arguments by exposing the logical fallacies they committed.

In a course on Genesis, Summit pastor J.D. Greear surveyed the Bible's opening chapters and showed how themes in the Old Testament's earliest book recur throughout Scripture and continue to have theological relevance.

Other Institute courses students would be hard-pressed to find in their undergraduate catalogues SEBTS President Daniel Akin's ecclesiology course; SEBTS Great Commission Center director Bruce Ashford's Christianity and Culture; and SEBTS professor Peter Schemm's course on "Biblical Manhood and Womanhood."

After being dismissed from class, students interned in various ministry positions at Summit. "It was a great chance to become more involved in what I consider my home church," Mann said.

Each night, Summit members opened their homes to give students free meals and a place to sleep. Members also cut the Institute's price by a fourth, supplying $1,000 of each participant's $4,000 cost.

Once their courses and internships ended, students served Summit's hometown for a week by hosting a community picnic and volunteering at a Boys & Girls Club. "We wanted to connect Summit to our Durham community and build future relationships," Greear said.

That week, mission slogans like "make Durham a great place to raise a family" and "make it hard to go to hell from Durham" motivated students. Seeing children desperate for food and attention made them grateful for their amenities and eager to do more work. "Just one week of mission focus will not do. We must labor every day for our city," Mann said.

Students who felt too far from their comfort zone in Durham's low-rent housing projects were woefully unprepared for their next mission site.

In a Southeast Asian city, which Summit chose not to identify, students saw up close the destruction caused by last year's tsunami that killed at least 240,000 people. "All the photographs and satellite images I had seen prior to my visit were misleading," said Sumner. "Beyond the scope of the lens are kilometers and kilometers of debris where a dense city used to be."

Duke Divinity School student Sharon Hodde realized the tsunami's magnitude when she saw that a wave had dismantled the light of a lighthouse. "The amazing thing about this lighthouse is that it stood at least 60 feet high," Hodde said.

Although showering meant pouring a bucket of cold water on their heads and breezes provided the only air conditioning, these inconveniences were trivial in light of what students accomplished there.

By building community shelters for families made homeless by the tsunami, toiling at free health clinics and fogging mosquitoes, a technique used to exterminate the often disease-carrying insects, students aided the city's slow return to normalcy.

They also taught English at a madrassa, an Islamic religious school, and answered curious pupils' questions about Christian beliefs. "It was my sense that the children were very well equipped to defend Islam, but it was still very valuable for them to hear first hand our view of the cross," Sumner said.

Mann thinks the tragedy could be a catalyst for saving as many souls as the tsunami claimed. "For the first time in hundreds of years, Christians have been able to set foot in this Islamic stronghold," she said. "The door has been opened for people to hear the truth that will bring God on a personal level for them."

Hodde's experience convinced her that all Christians, particularly American Christians, should make short-term mission trips to foreign countries.

"God's vision was for all the nations, but most Americans are plagued by an incapacitating narcissism," said Hodde. "Leaving the U.S. to serve others on the mission field is a great way to discern the difference between the gospel of America and the gospel of Christ."

Sumner wants to preserve her compassion for the tsunami victims she helped and may revisit them. "I hope that I don't ever get over this feeling I have for the people I met," she said.