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Home / Resources / Current News Stories / Mission Seeks Foreign Missionaries among International Visitors
April 9, 2009
by John M. Lindner
Overseas Students Mission is looking for foreign missionaries here in America--those who already know the language and customs of mission-field countries, including those closed to Americans. It hopes to tap an under-exercised source of new mission personnel: foreign students in America.
 According to OSM President Bill Bray, there are 623,000 foreign nationals in the USA as students and trainees. An estimated 10% of them are evangelical Christians. They come from nearly every country on earth, including those lands closed to missionaries from America. Recruiting, training and sending them back to their homelands as missionaries would add an additional 6,000 missionaries--many of them in areas difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to reach as missionaries.
OSM photo shows Bill Bray and his wife, Ivy.
According to Bill, the Charlottesville, Va. based ministry fills a unique role. There are hundreds of churches and scores of agencies seeking to partner with indigenous ministries overseas, plus 40 to 50 ministries seeking to evangelize foreign students in America. While not neglecting an evangelistic witness among foreign students, OSM’s main focus is to befriend, train and encourage Christian foreign students to return to their homelands as missionaries.
John Sung of China
Bill cites two outstanding historic examples. One was Sung Sang-Chieh from Fukien Province in eastern China. A brilliant student, after receiving his bachelor’s degree at Wesleyan University in Ohio, Sung did post-graduate work at Ohio State University, where he earned both his master’s and doctor’s degrees in chemistry in only five years.
One day he asked his agnostic professors, “Who made these laws by which chemical reactions are governed?” They had no answer.
 So Dr. Sung began reading books on philosophy and religion, seeking an explanation to the mysteries of life. He found his answer in the Bible. Learning that Christ had died for his sins, he accepted His atonement for his sins, and began to read his Chinese Bible day and night. Before he left the States he had read it through 40 times.
OSM photo shows Dr. John Sung, who returned to China to preach Christ.
He soon realized that he could not be a half-way Christian. Christ demanded his total commitment. He surrendered to God and was filled with the Holy Spirit. On his way back to China, he tossed his bachelor’s and master’s certificates overboard, and when he arrived back in Foochow in November 1927, he presented his doctor’s degree to his father, saying, “I won’t need this any more.”
Adopting the Christian name of John Sung, he then began evangelizing house to house and village to village, even the remotest areas of China, preaching Christ first to small groups, then to hundreds, then to thousands, and ultimately to tens of thousands. When the China Inland Mission sent missionaries to a place “where no missionary had ever gone,” they found a thriving church of 300 believers, the fruit of Dr. Sung’s preaching.
Even though he died of intestinal tuberculosis at the age of 43, he became known as the father of 10,000 churches.
Bakht Singh of India
 Another foreign student who had a tremendous impact on discipling his own country is Bakht Singh. Raised in a Sikh family in Punjab of India, he came to Canada as an engineering student at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg in 1929. He was befriended by a Christian couple, John and Edith Hayward, who invited him to live with them. They gave him a Bible, and their Christian lifestyle and testimony were influential in leading Bakht Singh to trust in Christ.
OSM photo shows Bakht Singh on one of his visits to the U.S. sponsored by OSM in the 1950s.
When he returned to India, his father met him in Bombay and demanded that he give up his “foreign religion.” When Bakht Singh said Christ was his only reason for living, his father disinherited him.
Bahkt Singh began going house to house witnessing for Christ and discipling those who confessed Christ. Known for his meticulous Bible teaching, he trained scores, then hundreds, then thousands of disciples, who carried his message and method throughout India. Some say Bakht Singh and his disciples were responsible for planting 2,000 churches.
Two of them were instrumental in leading Prem Pradhan to the Lord in northern India. Prem was a Nepalese member of the Indian Army, who after his conversion returned to his homeland to sow the gospel. He is considered by some to be the first Nepalese missionary to establish a beachhead for the kingdom of God in what was then known as the world’s only Hindu kingdom.
Bill Bray’s job is to locate and raise up more John Sungs and Bakht Singhs, and even lesser infantry personnel in God’s army.
Man on a mission
It’s not an easy task, but Bill is uniquely qualified to spearhead the effort. He experienced the missionary call at a Youth for Christ camp when he was 13. After graduating from high school, he studied missions for two years at Moody Bible Institute and participated in short-term student mission trips to Canada, Mexico and Spain.
“The Mexico trip really opened my eyes to the needs of poorer nations,” he said.
 In 1966 his mentor and OM founder-president, George Verwer, challenged Bill to join an Operation Mobilization program in India. After training in England, he drove a seven-ton truck loaded with Christian literature through Europe, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan to India.
OSM photo shows Dr. Bob Finley, founder of Overseas Students Mission, as well as International Students, Inc. and Christian Aid.
Arriving in Bombay, he recruited young people from Kerala and Tamil Nadu to join a short-term OM team. Among them was a 16-year-old named K.P. Yohannan, who later went on to found Gospel For Asia. Bill’s team drove to Rajasthan State and practiced “hit-and-run” evangelism, distributing tracts and street preaching at every opportunity.
“I was the only foreigner on the team,” he said. “The Indians did most of the public speaking because my white skin was hindering the acceptance of the gospel message and creating riots. So I learned to sit in the truck. The longer I was with the team, the more I realized how important it was to keep a low profile. That’s when it first dawned on me that the day of the traditional foreign missionary in India was over.”
His escapades finally caught up to him in Calcutta, however, where Indian authorities detained and deported him to Burma because of his evangelistic activities. Burmese authorities didn’t want him, either, but U.S. authorities intervened and arranged a 78-hour tourist visa for him in Thailand.
In Bangkok he quickly got involved in literature evangelism, Christian journalism, and eventually formed the Thailand Christian Information Service. His 78-hour visa was renewed again and again, and became a working visa that enabled him to stay seven years!
He returned to the United States in 1972, and has worked as an editor, writer and advocate for Christian Life magazine, Campus Crusade, the 700 Club, Christian Aid, and Gospel For Asia, among others. In the early 1980s he spent a week interviewing Dr. Bob Finley, founder of OSM and Christian Aid, and wove the meat of those interviews into three of K.P. Yohannan’s best-selling books. The first one, The Coming Revolution in World Missions, has had a profound impact on a generation of pastors and missionaries and has seen a distribution of over 1.5 million copies.
Bill and his wife, Ivy, first began working part-time with international students through OSM in 1997; Bill was appointed president in March, 2008.
The OSM challenge
 OSM
Photo: At an OSM-sponsored discussion a student from Tibet wants to
know how Jesus Christ compares with Buddha and the Dalai Lama.
Bill has discovered the work of OSM is more complex and demanding than he expected. He has learned OSM has to seek convergence with major ministries, such as International Students Inc., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Bridges International (the international student branch of Campus Crusade), and scores of smaller organizations. Altogether he says there are foreign student ministries on 850 American college and university campuses.
“We must do the missionary recruiting and training, while not competing with the evangelistic outreach of these very excellent ministries,” he said. “The effort requires disciplined love and international fellowship for the sake of the gospel.”
The task is difficult, but the vision compels him forward. Bill is now organizing a ten-year initiative, called “The Decade of the International Student,” to be launched at Urbana 09 in St. Louis during the Christmas holidays. Partners are needed to support the effort to place 6,000 new missionaries on the field. Who knows, one or two of them might be the next John Sung or Bakht Singh.
“God has done it over and over again through the centuries,” Bill said. “What drives us forward is the conviction that He will do it again!”
For more information on OSM go to www.OSMission.org. For additional information on Bill and Ivy Bray missionaries go see www.Bray-Missionaries.org.
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