The concept of student ministry has been around for a long time. Some use the example of Daniel and his three friends in exile in Babylon as an example of the first Christian student group.
The first chapter of the book of Daniel tells us that these four young men were to be trained along with other fine young men who had been taken captive from Israel in the language and literature of Babylon. This was obviously a challenging situation for these Jewish youngest as the Babylonian way of doing things didn’t necessarily match up to God’s law. Thus, Daniel boldly asks permission to not defile himself with Babylon food and wine and the first student fellowship is formed as Daniel and his friends are tested by the royal guard, eating only vegetables and drinking water.
Over the centuries not much is not known about Christian student fellowships until more recent times. From the later part of the 1800’s there is information that suggests God was starting to stir the beginnings of what would eventually become worldwide student ministry under the banner of IFES (the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students). A prominent example is the CICCU Student Christian Union at Cambridge university.
CICCU was officially formed in 1877. It was a group of Christian students at Cambridge university who desired to make Jesus known to their student friends. Not to be out done, OICCU (the Oxford version) was founded soon after in 1879. Gradually, a number of such Christian student groups began popping up throughout Great Britain and even the world!
The British Christian student unions eventually formed a national organisation to help unite and coordinate them all. Today this is called ‘UCCF’ (the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship). In 1947, representatives from ten such national Christian student movements came together in Boston, USA where they decided to form an international organisation to help link all these national movements. This was the beginnings of IFES.
The work of IFES was not just to help and oversee already existing Christian student movements, but also to pioneer new ones. During the days of the Soviet Union this was hard in the individual states that made up the Union, but after its fall, IFES style student ministry began propagating throughout these countries.
In Moldova throughout the 90’s student contacts began to be formed by visiting missionaries until by the end of the decade there was already effective ministry taking place and a leadership structure formed consisting of both Moldovans and international volunteers. By 2004, CSC (Community of Christian Students) as it was called, became officially registered. After this the ministry spread and became established also in the Northern City of Bălți. This resulted in two student ministries, one in Chișinău, the capital city, and the other in Balti, the second city of Moldova, which function even until this day.
The aim of the two CSC groups, as in any ministries one would hope, is to do evangelism and discipleship, with the IFES specific of this being concentrated on students. There are a number of means that are used to try and obtain these goals, which will be presented shortly. Before that it is worth mentioning that something that probably makes the CSC groups different to other similar ministries is that the emphasis is on student leadership. After all who is better placed to reach other students than students themselves. Thus, the intention is that each CSC group will be led by a group of Christian students with the help and guidance of a more experienced staff worker.
In Bălți, here are some of the ways we are trying to achieve the aim of doing discipleship and evangelism:
Socrates Club
Over the past couple of years, one of the most popular events in our student ministry has been the Socrates club. This is a monthly evening where 4 speakers (often but not always students) share a topic for 15 minutes and then answer questions on it.
The most recent Socrates club was attended by 41 people and there were talks on ‘the principles of love’ and ‘everyday Metaphysics’ sandwiching a presentation of our CSC activities and a talk on the difference between grace and legalism. Some photos here!
Bible and Life conference
The conference is based on different levels of training. The first presents the basics of the Christian life, the second is on the topic of preparing and leading manuscript Bible studies and the third level is about discipleship. An encouragement for us is that we have five people from Balti have completed level three and so we now have five members of our student group who have been through all three levels of training! Next semester, we will have to do for the first time ever in Moldova level four or get them involved in helping run the seminars of the other levels! Here are some photos
Rethink! Mission Week
The main evangelistic event each year is to organise a mission week for students during the autumn term. Here is some info about the most recent one last November:
After much planning, the event finally arrived in early November. The first evening (4th November) took place at our office and was a preparation time for Christian students and other helpers who were taking part in the event. Then, from 5th to 7th November, each day we went out to start inviting students to come to the evening talks, which were held in the festivities room of a local and well-known hotel. We invited students by giving out flyers and attracting their attention by playing songs on the guitar. One group had a particularly interesting experience as the director of the educational institute that they were visiting called them into his office. Initially, he was very angry, and they thought that he was going to call the police. However, after they explained that they had come to tell people about Jesus and invite them to an evening event, he all of a sudden, and almost miraculously, changed and said that they could go around all the classes taking place and give out flyers!
We had three evening talks, each on a different subject: Why does suffering exist? / Was Darwin right? / and what is the secret of happiness? We had planned for 80 people to come and were nervous that there would be nowhere near that number. But actually, on the first evening there were nearly one hundred people. On the second, over a hundred and on the final evening around 150! Of these, 86 people left their contact details and on the last evening, 26 indicated that they had prayed together with Slavko Hadzic, the speaker. There is a video of one of the days here and some photos from day two here
We also have other regular activities such as English club, Bible studies, Kino Klub and special events!
