Students learn global needs during Missions Emphasis Week

View all Missions Emphasis Week convocations on Liberty’s YouTube channel:
Monday, Feb. 13
Wednesday, Feb. 15
Friday, Feb. 17

Liberty University’s largest Missions Emphasis Week wrapped-up in Friday’s convocation as campus pastor Johnnie Moore spoke to students “from the inside,” challenging them to love their neighbor as they love themselves and to be proactive in missions work.

Held each semester, the week is devoted to global missions, giving students a chance to meet missionaries and attend special mission-focused convocations and seminars.

The theme for the week was “[un] REACHED,” with Romans 15:20-21 as the key verse: “and thus I make it my ambition to preach the gospel, not where Christ has already been named, lest I build on someone else’s foundation, but as it is written, ‘Those who have never been told of him will see, and those who have never heard will understand.'”

The week kicked off on Sunday with a welcome dinner for visiting missionaries in the Williams Stadium tower. Spiritual Life Directors from the Office of Student Leadership welcomed more than 130 representatives from 60 mission agencies. On Tuesday, the missionaries spoke to students in the weekly residence hall meetings.

The mission representatives also had booths on the first, second and third floors of Arthur S. DeMoss Learning Center where they networked, educated, mentored and recruited students throughout the week. Students had the chance to get to know them more personally by having a meal with them in Reber-Thomas Dining Hall.

In Monday’s convocation Jossy Chacko, the founder and International Director of Empart, a global ministry that exists to ignite church planting movements among unreached people, shared how he became involved in the mission movement while he was a businessman.

Marilyn Lazslo spoke in Wednesday’s convocation about her experience as a Bible translator in Papua, New Guinea.

In addition to hearing from missionaries, a series of events throughout the week exposed students to different cultures and helped them get involved with missions work.

On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, a special interactive “Experience Ethnos” series exposed students to the customs of Tibet, Afghanistan and Kenya.

On Thursday night a concert featured the Children of World International Children’s Choir, followed by an international coffee and tea tasting. Children of the World, part of World Help, includes orphaned and disadvantaged children from all over the world who speak and perform songs in English and their native tongue on tours across the United States.

Liberty is also proactively promoting involvement in global missions through a fundraiser to build and fund a school in Rwanda. The Restore Rwanda project was born from a recent mission trip that Liberty students took in November 2011. More information on that project can be found on Restore Rwanda’s facebook page.

• Listen to a Mission Emphasis Week interview from Liberty Journal Radio.