SVM2 Catalyzes Student 'Missionary' Movement
College and university students are critical to bringing the Gospel within reach of every individual, according to American world mission leader Ryan Shaw.
Shaw, 35, leads the Student Volunteer Movement 2 (SVM2), which seeks to mobilize churches worldwide to make evangelical Christians accessible to every individual through student missionaries.
SVM2 calls them "message bearers" to bypass the historical baggage the term "missionary" carries.
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The reason for the focus on students is that the majority of missionaries today were "first … touched with [a missionary] vision when … in college or university," Shaw found through research.
It is also a biblical strategy to have students serve as missionaries, he noted.
"God … loves to use young people and … raise them up for big exploits in His Kingdom," he said, alluding to recorded church history. "And we see that heartbeat of God all the way through the Scriptures as well."
Moreover, students are usually in a less responsible position than adults, he added.
Christian unity and cooperation is another crucial factor in fulfilling the Great Commission, Shaw emphasized.
SVM2 helps leaders of Bible schools, campus ministry organizations, local churches and denominations to "have some idea of how to integrate mission vision more into the ministry," he highlighted.
The organization seeks to do this by providing a broader and common vision of raising 100,000 student missionaries. This is half the number of additional missionaries needed to complete the Great Commission, say mission strategists.
A student missionary is to devote at least two years of his or her life to bringing the Gospel to the unreached upon graduation. These young missionaries must be placed strategically among unreached individuals.
Shaw, an ordained minister of the Pentecostal/Charismatic Vineyard movement, defines an unreached individual as a person who has access to an evangelical believer but has been forgotten by the church. This is unlike missiologists who tend to work in terms of ethnic people groups. Around 6,000 people groups out of a total of 16,000, or over a third of the world population, is still unreached.
SVM2 is not an organization unto itself.
Instead, it seeks to contribute to the work of other Christian organizations as a coach or cheerleader. And groups that grasp this point usually open up to the work of SVM2, Shaw noted.
"Most of our role is not actually with students themselves in terms of the (SVM2) staff," he said. It is partnering with ministries that actually serves the students.
He said: "So our real target is the leaders – how can we encourage them, how can we coach them, how can we catalyze them, how can we empower them with some of these basic tools."
SVM2 also seeks to fill the holes hindering Christian cooperation toward the fulfillment of the Great Commission.
Through research, Shaw identified two holes – a lack of "deep" and "intense" prayer and a lack of emphasis on long-term missions for actual church planting.
The response to SVM2's vision has been "very positive," Shaw commented.
The organization is expanding rapidly across the globe through partnerships with local Christian organizations. In fact, Shaw said he has had to turn down many opportunities to start SVM2 in Argentina, Brazil and Peru. This is because he plans to focus on Asia.
He is relocating his base from Izmail, Turkey, to Chiang Mai, the largest city in northernThailand. Once there, he plans to focus on training. An internship, school of missions and an annual regional conference for mobilization and discipleship are in the pipeline.
One of the organization's strategies is to start weekly global prayer teams that meet for two to three hours to pray for revival. The group also plans to conduct Bible studies on God's heart for the nations and to organize student mission fellowships outside of campus ministry fellowship time to explore topics such as mission mobilization and contextualization.
Origins of SVM2
Shaw founded SVM2 in August 2002. He had received the vision for the organization back in 1996 while listening to an assistant pastor talk about the 19th century Student Volunteer Movement.
The Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions (SVM) was started by 100 students in 1886. In one generation, nearly 100,000 students joined SVM campus groups and more than 20,000 of them sailed overseas to bring the Gospel to the unreached people groups worldwide. TSVM gave rise to many of the campus fellowships that exist today. Due to the influence of the Social Gospel, however, SVM dwindled and was eventually dissolved in 1966.
At the conclusion of his preaching at a recent event in Singapore, the assistant pastor asked if such a movement could happen again. He asked attendees to kneel and cry out to God for a new generation of the SVM.
While weeping, Shaw prayed for God to raise a worldwide movement of young Christian missionaries.
With the encouragement of his mentors at Fuller Theological Seminary, he researched on trends related to students in missions. As he did that, God put a vision in his heart to start an organization. This initially took the form of eight organizations cooperating to mobilize Americans.
SVM2 was constituted in due time. The name of the former student missions movement was retained mainly to honor the forefathers in mission history, Shaw expressed.
"(SVM2) has nothing to do organizationally with [SVM]," he said. "But the spirit [SVM] embodied and the passion and the fervor and the sense of commitment … we want to see that reproduced in today's generation."
Taking the name of the former movement would also help those who know of it appreciate the newer movement, he added.
The future of SVM2: star-crossed?
How does SVM2 intend to safeguard itself from heading the way of its predecessor?
Shaw is not worried. Liberal theological tendencies are more or less contained within the Western world as a whole. They do not affect places like African countries where SVM2 is currently operating.
Nevertheless, SVM2 is "very, very heavy-duty focused" on teaching the basics of the foundational doctrines of evangelical Christianity through its literature, the organization's leader assured.
