Dallas Christian College took 118 students and 42 faculty/staff (and some family members) to the International Conference on Missions, where they joined over 6,000 others from all over the world under the theme “Hope for the Nations.”  They participated in corporate worship, were challenged by speakers, and conversed with missionaries and church leaders from around the world, each in a unique area of the Kingdom. Our desire was for each student to meet people from places they had never been, who spoke languages they did not know, doing work of which they were previously unaware had a connection with the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20).  We wanted them to be inspired to serve the Lord in ways they had not considered previously.

Our prayer was that the ICOM experience would plant and water “seeds” that the Lord would grow as each student develops as a disciple of Christ, engaging in their calling to the work of Christ in the Church and in the world.  One of our students’ greatest needs is understanding their calling, namely how the Lord has designed and shaped them uniquely to serve and impact the world.  As Frederick Buechner famously said, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  I will probably never be fully aware of the fruit that will be borne from this experience through the coming years, but I am convinced that the Lord was doing work in each of their lives.  One student shared this:  “The International Conference of Missions was a conference I did not know anything about, let alone what I was getting myself into, that would turn into an experience of a lifetime . . . I thought, ‘ICOM will not be for me,’ but apparently, I was wrong.  After attending ICOM and talking to many different missionaries, I want to attend a mission trip one day, hopefully soon.”