Student Power in Urban Transformation: Assessing InterVarsity Urban Project Training Systems for Their Potential in Generating Next Generation Leadership for the New Global City

Every year evangelical churches, missional organizations, para-church ministries, denominations, and Christian colleges and universities recruit high school and college students to participate in short, intensive service or ministry projects in central cities or urban neighborhoods across the U.S. Hundreds of such service projects exist, involving thousands of students annually. These short-term urban mission programs comprise a portion of the conservatively estimated one million short-term missionaries that are sent each year cross-culturally from more than forty thousand sending entities in the U.S. alone. The portion of these sent to U.S. urban centers often focuses on helping students take compassionate action on behalf of the urban poor. Participants may serve in soup kitchens, vacation Bible schools, neighborhood cleanups, painting projects, home repair, etc.
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), an evangelical ministry to college students, has, for more than thirty years, run urban projects that contain similar features. However, the construction of these projects often goes beyond service to represent a complex composition of features reflecting other institutional goals that are intentionally woven in. These features include such things as discussions about race and racial reconciliation, training in urban theology, an exploration of God’s concern for the poor, or issues related to community development. The ultimate focus of these projects has more to do with the development and transformation of the participant than with the delivery of compassionate service, although such service is a common goal. And yet without intentional, deliberate construction of student pathways or onramps that motivate, equip, and facilitate a connection to transformational ministries in the city, these projects can, even with their sophistication, have the same basic, short term, net effect of a service project. With the universal forces of urbanization and globalization shaping the experience of the poor in U.S. urban contexts, service projects, however compassionate and well intended, are an inadequate offering toward affecting long-term change, and certainly toward demonstrating the transforming power of the Gospel.