International Fellowship of Evangelical Students

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The International Fellowship of Evangelical Students (IFES) is a worldwide association of about 160 evangelical Christian student movements worldwide, encouraging evangelism among students. The goal of the organisation is to establish local autonomous student movements in every country where there is tertiary education. The member movements cooperate to pioneer new work and to strengthen existing groups.

The organizational centre of IFES is in Oxford, England. Lindsay Brown is the current General Secretary and Las Newman the Associate General Secretary. Dr. Daniel Bourdanné will be installed as the next General Secretary (pending General Committee approval) at the IFES World Assembly in 2007. He has served as Regional Secretary for Francophone Africa since 1995.

Contents

[edit] History

In 1947, the initiative was taken to establish an umbrella organisation of Christian students. Representatives from Australia, The Netherlands, Great-Britain, Canada, China, France, New Zealand, Norway, Switzerland and the United States came together in Boston (USA) to strengthen evangelism, discipleship and world mission among students all over the world.

At the end of the 20th century, IFES had already grown to an organisation consisting of movements in 140 countries. Currently there are about 30 countries where there is no recognized student witness. Most of them are Muslim countries.

[edit] Activities

Representatives of all the member movements gather once every four years at the "World Assembly", where the General Committee meets to conduct official business of the fellowship. The last World Assembly occurred in July 2003 in Dalfsen, Netherlands and was the most widely represented student ministry event in history. The next World Assembly is in July 2007 in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

For students, regional conferences are organised once in a few years. In Europe and Eurasia, there is the European Student Evangelism Conference. In 2000 it was held in Aschaffenburg, Germany, in Győr, Hungary in 2004 and will be held in Linz, Austria in 2008. The last East Asia Regional Conference was held in Jakarta, Indonesia in May 2005. This event attracted around five hundred students from all over East Asia.

IFES also offers Summer- and Year-teams (www.ifesinteraction.org), which are comprised of students and recent graduates who use their holidays or an academic year to help establish student movements in Europe and Eurasia by pioneering new work or assisting established movements.

Christian literature distribution is also a feature of this ministry. InterVarsity Press (UK and USA) and Ediciones Certeza (Latin America) are two examples of regional publishing houses.

Student missions conferences occur frequently in the fellowship. Examples of this are Urbana (North America), Mission Korea (South Korea) and "Whom Shall I Send? (Sudan). Plans for future conferences are developing, and at present there are such events planned in India, Rwanda, Malawi, Sierra Leone, Sudan, Ghana, Kenya and Nigeria. There is to be Eurasia’s first-ever missions conference in Ukraine, and others in South Korea, Taiwan, Jamaica, Mexico, and probably also Bolivia and Guatemala in Latin America.

[edit] Member movement

According to the philosophy of unity among all Christians, IFES allows only one member organisation per country, although in some bilingual and multilingual countries (i.e. Canada, Belgium, Switzerland), there are parallel organizations for different linguistic groups. Member movements include:

[edit] Europe

[edit] Francophone Africa

  • Groupes Bibliques des Elèves et Etudiants du Cameroon (Cameroon)

[edit] North America

[edit] Latin America

[edit] East Asia

[edit] Oceania

Around the world, more than 160 movements are connected to IFES.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Douglas Johnson, A Brief History Of The International Fellowship Of Evangelical Students, Lausanne, Switzitzerland, IFES, 1964.
  • Pete Lowman, The Day of His Power, Leicester, Inter-Varsity, 1988. ISBN 0-85110-794-X
  • Alice Poynor, From the Campus to the World: Stories from the First Fifty Years of Student Foreign Missions Fellowship, InterVarsity Press, 1986. ISBN 0-87784-947-1
  • David M. Howard, Student Power in World Missions, InterVarsity Press, 1979. ISBN 0-87784-493-3 (Brief history of North American students in mission beginning with the Haystack Movement through the SVM to the SFMF.)
  • C. Stacey Woods, The Growth of a Work of God, InterVarsity Press, 1978. ISBN 0-87784-741-X (Early history of InterVarsity/USA)
  • Keith & Gladys Hunt, For Christ and the University: The Story of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship of the U.S.A./ 1940-1990, InterVarsity Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8308-4996-3
  • Lindsay Brown, Shining like Stars - the power of the gospel in the world’s universities, InterVarsity Press, 2006. ISBN 1-84474-167-2

[edit] External links

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