Dear friend,
Today, we no longer have to travel overseas to reach foreign students since there are about 50,000 international students in our schools and they come from countries such as Malaysia, Indonesia and China.1 This provides us the opportunities to reach these students on our shores and the International Students Ministry (ITM) was started in January 2021 for this very purpose. By the grace of God, this has also open doors for us to work with local churches that want to reach foreign students.
In December 2020, just before ITM started, we met the leaders of a Burmese congregation who shared their burden and setbacks in reaching Burmese students. We started praying regularly with them and early last year, God allowed ITM to contact 15 Burmese students through Instagram. By the end of 2021, that number grew to more than 100! This greatly encouraged our brothers and sisters from the Burmese congregation and we were able to work together to befriend the students and to bring the gospel to them. One of the students even introduced us to her course mates who also came from Myanmar and on New Year’s Day this year, we sent them each a local snack and met them online to get to know them.
Last September, our ITM staff met with the pastor and youth leaders of an Indonesian congregation and explored how we can work together. Their members first joined us in a small-scale digital community service project and because they had enjoyed themselves, 20 of them came for another event of a similar nature subsequently. It is exciting to see how we can mobilise young people from this congregation to use community service events to reach their non-believing friends.
In our Christmas campaign last year, we got to know nine Christian students from Malaysia in another community service event that reached out to migrant workers. These students were looking for a local church to attend, and we were able to introduce them to churches that welcomed them into their community. Thank God these students can now have good spiritual support even though they are far away from home.
We are really thankful to God for His providence, for opening doors for these engagements and for us to partner the local churches in the gospel work. Please continue to pray for ITM to be both a blessing to the foreign students and to the local churches.
1From the United States International Trade Administration: https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/singapore-education
All Glory To God,
Richard Tan
National Director
