While chatting about sports and crazy roommates in a Parisian youth hostel, two travelers were sharing the love of Christ with a new friend.
The travelers were Mat Alexander and Matt Davis, team members of the University of Mobile’s (UM) youth hostel missions trip. As part of a five-member team, their goal was to experience and impact a post-Christian European culture, an environment where Christianity is no longer the dominant worldview.
For one month this summer, they traveled as traditional tourists through major European cities while meeting and building relationships with fellow travelers.
With fellow UM students Bethany Arndt and Laura Lovelady, and UM’s director of spiritual life Neal Ledbetter, they traveled through Holland, France, Switzerland, Germany, the Czech Republic and Austria May 14–June 13.
The group’s motto was “12 cities, 30 days, 5 friends, 1 purpose.” That purpose was to build relationships through conversation as a means to share the gospel.
The five, who often referred to themselves as a family, ate and journeyed together while sleeping at youth hostels, supervised lodgings that served as a temporary home to young people traveling the continent.
‘Seed planting’
“These were people who might have never met a Christian otherwise,” said Ledbetter, who had led groups of UM students on the unconventional missions trip the previous two years.
Davis, a member of Shiloh Baptist Church, Saraland, said the group built a common bond with other travelers before sharing the gospel, often by listening to music and playing board games with their hostel roommates.
When conversations turned to questions about God and religion, the students shared their beliefs and explained their reasons for being born-again Christians.
“It was all seed planting and relying on God,” Davis said.
Rather than being “abrasive, in-your-face,” about sharing the gospel, he continued, the team just “waited for the conversation to go there.”
Ledbetter said the people they met seemed curious about them. In a culture where religion is individualized, the Christian Americans stood out.
When people saw the group camaraderie, they would linger to find out what was different about the UM students.
“For the first time, some people saw the genuine community that is only possible when fellow believers are together,” Davis said.
In a place where buildings of importance in Christianity’s history are empty and turned into museums, Ledbetter said the team members’ hope was to point out to the people they met how God is at work in their lives and in the world, and that this realization would bring them to accept Christ as Savior.
The UM students are staying in contact with some of the travelers through e-mail and Facebook, a social networking Web site. The extended contact opens doors for further ministering opportunities with them. “If nothing else,” Davis said, “some people now have someone praying for them when they wouldn’t have before.”
Each member of the missions team kept their families and friends informed of their daily excursions by writing on an individual travel blog and posting pictures on UM’s Web site, which can be viewed online at www.umobile.edu/blogs.
Other UM students have also had the opportunity to spend time during their summer on mission trips. Over the summer break, groups of UM students traveled to Australia, Bangladesh, Niger, Brazil and Wales, some serving others by teaching Vacation Bible School, building chapels and prayer walking.
In addition to local missions opportunities, approximately 10 missions trips are offered throughout the school year through the University Missions program to countries such as Barbados and Ireland. (UM)
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