The World Comes to College First

by Jacob Clagg with Pastors Kimberly Reese, Nancy Hiser, & Ben Tobias

This past November College First Church of God hosted a Thanksgiving meal for the college students at the University of Findlay, specifically targeting international students. Most students on campus returned home to spend time with their families but that’s rarely an option for international students, especially over a short holiday week like Thanksgiving. That means many of them were holed up in their apartments with no school, no work (since most work at the now closed school), and few if any of their college friends around. 85 people showed up to part take in the Thanksgiving meal, and about 70 of them were international students. A sizeable portion of those students attend College First weekly as their house of worship. Those numbers aren’t astronomical, but with proper context, they tell a whole story.

When school started last year in 2022, there were less than five international students attending College First, and not all of them were regular. Within a single year, College First has pivoted toward providing more and more ministry toward international students, and it’s led to explosive growth. Or maybe the growth has required College First to pivot. To be honest, even the pastors aren’t quite sure which came first, but the unique circumstances, along with College First’s faithful response to it, are worth talking about. It’s a story worth telling and a question worth asking. Why is the world coming to College First?

In early 2023, I sat down for an interview with College First’s Connections Pastor Kimberly Reese, Student and Young Adult Ministries Pastor Nancy Hiser, and former Global Reach Director Ben Tobias. It was the first of three interviews that will help us track the progression of College First’s steps into international student ministry. I began by asking Pastor Nancy and Pastor Kimberly how this all started, and they both looked at each other for a moment with raised eyebrows, waiting for the other to respond. Finally Pastor Kimberly opened up. “We had, I think, one international student who attended College First for the last couple of years,” she said. And it seemed to stay that way through 2021 and the beginning of 2022. But by fall of 2022, something changed. Covid regulations had relaxed, and the doors were being swung wide open for international travel again. That meant that UF was about to have a lot more international students again.

Suddenly, that one international student was bringing new friends to church. “They were just naturally bringing them in… We didn’t have to advertise for the Bible study, they just told their friends, and they started coming,” Pastor Kimberly said. And as College First staff started interacting and talking more and more with these students, staff saw how different the needs of international students were from the needs of American students. Pastor Kimberly remarked, “We realized we didn’t have the right stuff to meet the needs they had. But God was doing more. It seems like God put the pieces of international ministries into place.”

The first need College First recognized was space. The international students were often renting a single bedroom apartment, even though multiple might be staying there. They had no place to meet, hang out, or even eat. Pastor Kimberly described their first idea. “We had an extra room in the building, and we tried it out, having an international student room. We didn’t know if they would show up… and they have!” The International Student room had been an office, and multiple other spaces, but had become something of a storage room when Pastor Nancy was hired on. So, they cleaned it out, bought some furniture, a tv, and a fridge, stocked the fridge with snacks and leftovers from church events, and turned it into a place for international students to hang out, study, and eat.

Pastor Nancy spoke on the initial impetus. “If their families were living here, what would they have that they don’t have? They could go and crash on the couch, have some snacks, and have a conversation with their family, and they don’t have that [here].” And students turned up to use it. In fact, on the day of the interview, we had planned for the interview to take place in the room but a few international students were in there studying at the time, so we moved elsewhere, and we were glad to. Can you imagine how welcome new international students feel when they arrive and learn that the church has a room just for them?

Well, the students noticed, and that has brought more students and more ministry. Pastor Kimberly mentioned, “Because of that, they started coming to the church with needs. They don’t know who else to call, and this is becoming a safe place.” Because of this, College First and UF have also been working closely to see that these students' needs are met. In a number of areas, there are things that College First can do that UF can’t, and vice versa. UF can provide laptops, but they can’t help a student navigate the asylum process. Likewise, UF can’t take food donations and distribute them. UF can distribute coats and gloves, but not other clothing. There are a host of needs, and each partner works together to see them met. Pastor Kimberly said, “The relationship between UF and CF was forced to grow in a fantastic way. It didn’t exist at College First before.” In the past, each institution operated in their own domain, but now both are on mission to see these international students flourish; they’ve united around ministry.

It’s not just “ministry” in the way we typically think about it. Of course, sometimes it looks like Bible studies and coffee, but other times it looks like long rides to the airport, working through health insurance issues, helping them understand legal documents, or providing them with car seats for their young children. These needs come from every part of their lives, but that means the ministry does too. Understanding College First’s ministry requires us to take a broader and more historic view of the term than we sometimes do. College First ministers to international students in the same way that a medical professional ministers to the sick, the way a government official might be a minister to the public, the way an office clerk might administrate, and, of course, the way a pastor ministers to their congregation. It’s a wholistic view of ministry that encompasses all of life.

This new ministry is also letting College First have brand new intercultural and interfaith experiences. Pastor Nancy related a story of a Muslim student who had a host of cultural issues which we might call ‘culture shock’.

‘How do I practice Islam in this new context, where most of my friends and coworkers aren’t Muslim?’ A Muslim woman cannot practice Ramadan faithfully without seeing men. A lot of traditions they grew up with are eroding and they are trying to find out what it means to be a Muslim in the United States, and sometimes being a bread winner. All of their roles are flipped upside down.”

It's in these upside-down moments when College First finds the opportunity to serve. Students like this young Muslim woman are having their first authentic experience of meeting Jesus, and of getting to know what Christians are like. Here College First serves people before they ever come to our faith. Our American world looks “upside down” to international students, and so the ministry has to be upside down too. When the church serves people who are far from home, far from their family, and far from their lifeline, the church becomes their home, their family, and their lifeline. College First has become the church for these international students in precisely the way we wish it could for the whole world.

And this has led to interesting interfaith dialogue. Pastor Nancy related a story where an Islamic international student asked why the church is meeting all of these needs, and Pastor Nancy replied, “Well, we do it because we are followers of Jesus, and this is what Jesus says we should do. Help other people and care for God’s people.” Once, Pastor Nancy asked if she could pray with an Islamic student, the somewhat comical response came when the student said, “I’ll pray to Allah, and you pray to God, and maybe something will work.”

The upshot is that this kind of ministry gives back in tangible ways for the Church. College First has experienced firsthand how international students have stepped up to volunteer for ministry. Some are regularly volunteering for children's ministry like VBS this past summer, and other youth events. Three students recently signed up to help serve at a dinner function at the church, and they were all Muslim students. But this also brings up potential issues. Larger churches might be used to running background checks on volunteers who are working with kids, but that’s difficult for international students who don’t have a Social Security Number. Pastor Nancy said that College First has had to reconsider and change processes which worked for Americans but don’t quite fit international students. “Sometimes what happens is, when students try to do something, when they don’t fit into the normal process, people just stop helping them… their square peg doesn’t fit in the round hole, but that doesn’t mean we can’t figure it out though.”

Pastor Kimberly echoed the same concept but sees how it applies to the whole church. “That idea is applicable to every ministry that a church would interact with,” she said. “If you see a need and God is bringing you to it, you change your culture to meet the need. It can’t always be convenient. That’s not what Jesus taught us.”

So, it seems that the world is coming to College First. In many of our mission fields, local people have taken up the work and we no longer need missionaries. But Pastor Nancy is hoping that God brings mission-minded people here that have a desire for global ministries. Isn’t that a paradox? We need people to come to Findlay, Ohio, to do global ministry work. It’s an upside-down world. “There is a huge opportunity for people to do global missions here at this church because the world is here, the world has come to Findlay, Ohio, for grad school,” Pastor Nancy said, laughing. “They are so open to hear and to have those relationships and conversations.” Why is the world coming to College First? Who knows? Pastor Nancy and Pastor Kimberly seem to think God is up to something, and so College First is heeding the call to serve.