‘GO week’ offers students a passport to the world

The student-led organization Global Vision sponsored “GO week,” Huntington University’s annual mission emphasis week, Oct. 26-28.

The club worked with Campus Ministries to develop four chapels that would give students the chance to explore mission opportunities through daily life, short-term trips and long-term mission work.

The first chapel was on Tuesday morning and featured a panel of local professionals. The panelists discussed how to be a missionary while working in secular jobs. Luke Fetters, Ph.D., associate professor of ministry and missions, facilitated the panel.

“We’ve really tried to cater to the non-ministry, non-missions major by having people talk about how any job can be a mission field,” Mark Wiley, senior and student leader of Global Vision, said.

The panelists emphasized that while not everyone may be called to long-term missions, everyone can be a missionary in some way.

“I really liked hearing real-life experience about expressing your faith beyond the HU bubble,” sophomore Cassie Wieckert said. “They [the panelists] told us what it’s really going to be like. They focused on how it’s important to show their faith because they can’t always be constantly telling people about their faith.”

Wednesday morning featured a more intimate panel in Longaker Recital Hall. The panel focused on the impact of short-term mission trips.

A primary purpose of “GO week” was to encourage students to find creative ways to be involved in missions, Wiley said.

“A goal we have is just to make our students more aware of what’s going on outside of Huntington and outside of the country,” he said. “We realize we can’t promise to send 100 missionaries to China, Africa, South America and Europe every year, but we can always be made more aware and just be thinking and praying for those who are overseas.”

Wednesday evening’s chapel, Ekklesia, offered students a “Passport to the World.” Four of the dorm lounges on campus represented different areas of the world, complete with decorations, food and statistics about the outreach needs in each location. Baker and Roush lounge was Africa, Hardy and Wright lounge was Central and South America, Livingston second lounge was Asia and Australia, and Meadows lounge was Europe. Each area had a speaker from a mission organization focused in that part of the world.

Paul Cox and Jessica Hollopeter of One Mission Society spoke in Roush lounge, discussing the needs in the continent of Africa. Hollopeter, an HU alumnus, said she feels events like Passport to the World are beneficial to students who are seeking to discover what their mission call is.

“For me, it was about the calling,” she said. “It wasn’t so much about the mission organizations, but it was about hearing from so many different people about so many different people. I think that’s really when God began to place it on my heart, and I think that’s what these events are really about: steering people in the direction God wants them to go.”

To receive chapel credit, students were required to visit three of the four dorms. At the beginning of the night, paper passports were handed out to each student and were stamped at every location visited. These were collected at the end of the night.

“GO week” concluded with Thursday morning’s chapel. Hubert Harriman, Ph.D, president of World Gospel Mission, spoke about long-term missions and how it has evolved in recent years.

This chapel, and all the events of “GO week,” was aimed toward making the HU campus more globally aware, Wiley said.

“We just want to come up with practical solutions and awareness things that our campus can get involved with,” Wiley said. “Things that will stick around, that are easily transferable from us to the next group of students, to the next chapel, to the next whoever that comes in. Our biggest goal is that our campus is one that is globally aware. And the more globally aware we are, the more projects and ideas will be able to come through this campus year after year.”