Cross-cultural training on the field. Great Commission living in action.
Why is a global perspective important in this day and age? That’s a broad topic . . . but a simple answer would be that the world is at our doorstep, and we have been commissioned to reach it with the Gospel. At Northland, we’re all about the Great Commission. It may be that our graduates will serve in the midst of an unreached people group, or perhaps they will be active participants of a support network back home. In either case, their training should include experiences that would take them beyond theory. They should be able to see, touch, hear, smell, and taste the world that belongs to the Ecuadorian Quichua mountain people, or the francophone urbanites of Montreal, or the Mukhuwa tribesmen of Mozambique. One could only imagine what might happen if every graduate of Northland had a global perspective because each participated in a program where he or she actually engaged another culture for a significant length of time. The missions programs of our churches would be infused with new energy; missionary recruits would be better prepared, and the flow of new candidates would increase; new fields would be opened, because the pioneering spirit of veteran missionaries would be captured by these new recruits.
Northland’s GO Study Abroad program is designed to allow students to spend one semester of their college experience in hands-on ministry in a cross-cultural setting, while maintaining the sequence of their academic program. This program is a unique blend of internship training combined with Northland Online courses that extends for fifteen weeks or the normal length of a semester. The internship portion of this program provides for cross-cultural ministry involvement, mentoring, and evaluation by the missionary who lives on the field. The online course work adds additional credits (number of credits may vary) to the student’s load, providing the needed classes for the student to continue his program of study while on the field.
GO Study Abroad launched this fall of 2009 with five pilot students studying in France, Zambia, Chile, Australia, and China. For the program launch, we have specifically chosen these sites based on their location and the various challenges each location might present. The program is designed so that any number of students can participate in a given semester. So, in the immediate future, we anticipate upwards of twenty—and later even up to eighty or one hundred—students participating in GO Study Abroad each semester.
GO Study Abroad Student Guide
GO Study Abroad Overview (Host)
Contact CGO to learn about hosting a Northland GO Study Abroad student.