Service trips promote Pepperdine’s mission

Back row, from left, Stephanie Cook, Arianna Porrini, Jackson Shumway, Araceli Valdez, Monique Go, Jessica Stromberg, Rebecca Want. Front row, from left, Alison Barragan, Dominique Galloway, Addy Rogers, Nia Nimmers, Alondra Gomez-Leyva, Salina Pearce- Harris, Lyndsey Chu serve in Wahiawa, Hawaii during Project Serve: Surf the Nations (Photo courtesy Alondra Gomez-Leyva).

Pepperdine sends its students all over the world to serve.

Students can mentor youth through the Boys and Girls club in San Carlos, Arizona, help with environmental sustainability and disaster relief in Puerto Rico or help with hunger and homelessness on Oahu, Hawaii.

What they don’t do, at least through the university, is actively spread the Gospel. While individual students are welcome to share their love of Jesus while serving, the university itself doesn’t sponsor mission trips focused on proselytizing.

“Service is what Jesus is calling us to do …” said Peter Thompson, director of the Pepperdine Volunteer Center. “… We go into it wanting to show God’s love.”

Thompson sees God working through these programs as well as the lives of the students.

Many people at Pepperdine believe service trips are more appropriate given the educational mission of the university, while still serving the Christian commitment of the campus and making a positive impact on the community.  Pepperdine offers a variety of ways students can volunteer through the Volunteer Center, welcoming students of all religious backgrounds to participate on service days or Project Serve trips.

Service is the call

Thompson believes that trips don’t necessarily have to be labeled Christian or Gospel-focused because people can show Jesus through the service they are doing.

When he participates on service trips, Thompson said he uses St. Francis of Assisi’s model, “Show the love of God always, use words when necessary.”

Students may express their faith during Pepperdine’s volunteer opportunities such as the Project Serve sites, weekly service opportunities and awareness weeks.

“If you want to find it, it’s all there,” Thompson said.

Thompson has led several Project Serve trips. He has found that if service trips are too focused on sharing the Gospel, students tend to separate themselves from the trip. Even praying can make some students uncomfortable, Thompson said.

Thompson said they have a hard time at the Volunteer Center getting students interested in trips. They have had to cancel three trips this year alone because the interest was low.

“There was this one trip where they had to stop a trip there because they couldn’t send Christian enough people,” Thompson said. “Students had the opportunity to help people with addiction and abuse problems and support them for a week. But we couldn’t match with them. Same thing happened with a refugee program. They were wanting a specific type of Christian and Pepperdine couldn’t provide that. We’re not the same as Biola or another university where you have to sign a statement of faith.”

A Pepp Post survey of 50 students found that only 23 percent of students have participated in a Project Serve trip.

This map shows places where students have served, per the Pepp Post poll.

“I think the emphasis on service relates to Pepperdine’s service, purpose and leadership model,” said David Lemley, an assistant professor of religion specializing in ministry. “It’s a way to express the Christian mission without calling for every participant to claim the Christian faith. I think it’s an effective way for this kind of institution to do a type of practical ministry. However, it is not necessarily service that makes evident the basics of the Gospel or work of Jesus and the Spirit. It could be a way of demonstrating the good news, but, in my experience, our institutional service efforts don’t make explicit the relationship of this work to the saving acts of God, the good news of Jesus, or the Spirit’s mission through the church.”

Lemley has participated in door-to-door evangelistic events as well as street witnessing efforts and short-term partnerships with international missionaries through Let’s Start Talking. Let’s Start Talking is a popular mission option in the Churches of Christ that equips and sends North Americans overseas into non-English speaking countries for the purpose of facilitating life-changing conversations.

Lemley helps place Pepperdine students into church ministry opportunities by overseeing religion internships and administering a ministry grant from the Pepperdine Center for Faith and Learning.

While Lemley said there are some student-led missions on campus that share the Gospel, he doesn’t know of any that share the Gospel outside the Pepperdine community.

Lemley said Pepperdine students can share their faith through Veritas Forum, which hosts presentations for people who are seeking, and Celebration Chapel, which gives students a chance to preach the Gospel.

The poll found that about 70 percent believe that Pepperdine’s service-focused trips have a positive impact on the student community, and 65 percent believe mission trips to share the Gospel would have a positive impact.

A Pepp Post found that about 56 percent of students surveyed thought Pepperdine should sponsor mission trips.

Lipscomb University, a fellow Church-of-Christ-affiliated university in Nashville, does sponsor mission trips to share the Gospel, Tyler Kemmerer, director of Lipscomb Missions, said.

University staff helps organize the trips, though they solicit donations from individuals and churches to support their administrative costs. Each team fundraises the cost of their trip and each student has a fundraising goal for the team. Lipscomb offers 18 different trips, most of which mix service with sharing the Gospel. Very few are focused on just sharing the gospel.

Lipscomb sponsors missions trips because a few students and graduates caught a vision and believed that if missionary opportunities were offered, students would take advantage and be called to go, Kemmerer said.  

Gospel-focused trips also fit Lipscomb’s missions statement: “Lipscomb Academy is an intentionally Christian community with a mission to equip students to love to learn, learn to love, and live to serve. “

Today, over 700 Lipscomb students participate on trips, and more than 40 percent of their graduating students will participate in one or more mission trips during their time at Lipscomb, Kemmerer said.

Kemmerer previously worked for Pepperdine in Housing and Residence Life, as an adjunct professor and served as the visiting faculty in the Shanghai International Program. His service work at Pepperdine included recruiting graduating seniors to teach abroad and serve as vocational ministers.

Service has always been a pillar of Christian ministry and it often goes hand-in-hand with mission,” Kemmerer said. “Pepperdine’s population is religiously diverse and many students do not share the Christian faith. I believe the emphasis on service is a way to engage both Christian and non-Christian students who want to serve. Certainly, within these trips, there is still the opportunity for Christians to share their faith and explain why they are motivated to serve.”

Roughly 30 percent of Lipscomb’s student body claims to identify with the Church-of- Christ, Kemmerer said. At Pepperdine, just shy of 12 percent of the undergraduate student body is Church of Christ, according to the Office of Institutional Effectiveness.

Pepperdine attracts students from all over the world, with all different backgrounds of religion. Roughly 42 percent of students surveyed declared themselves non-denominational Christians, whereas 23 percent were Roman Catholic. Nearly twice as many students surveyed reported they were atheist or agnostic than Churches of Christ, the tradition Pepperdine is affiliated with.

Missions are meant to be church sponsored

Linda Truschke, campus minister for the University Church of Christ, believes that missions fits better with the church’s call to action.

“I think this fits better into the church wheelhouse,” Truschke said. “Educational institutions can educate and provide services and prompt people to think but a church has the mission and calling of bringing people to the foot of the cross. Universities and churches have different missions, even if the university is a Christian one.”

Pepperdine’s religious diversity makes it difficult for the university to sponsor missions. Even within the same religion such as Christianity, there can be doctrinal discrepancies over baptism or Jesus’ return.

“It might be difficult for a university to set out the ‘doctrine’ of what would be taught, or how it would be taught since so many students come from different Christian backgrounds,” Truschke said. “Even their ideas of what the Gospel looks like could be described differently. It seems like a very difficult thing for an educational system to have to figure out but not as much for a church.”

Through his experience of missions and service trips, Charles Wyffles, a junior chemical engineering major, agreed that Gospel-focused missions trips shouldn’t be the focus of any educational institution because this is the church’s job. Universities should be focused on education.

Wyffels has worked at the Volunteer Center for three years, participated in Campus Ministry missions trips the past two years in Mexico and participated in a service trip to bring water to Africa.

During his time in Mexico, Wyffels had the opportunity to build relationships with children in an orphanage and help build houses in Tijuana. He had the option of participating in group prayer but decided to not be involved because it was “not his thing,” Wyffels said.

He said he prefers to live every day by example.

“If you want people to see Jesus in you, that’s what you should be doing,” Wyffels said.

Junior psychology major Brooke Gautreau thinks that because Pepperdine is affiliated with the Churches of Christ, she would expect them to promote religion.

“However, there are a lot of people who are annoyed by it because they are not religious or not part of the Church of Christ,” Gautreau said. “I think that a person should have the right to pursue religion if they want to, but at the end of the day, they decided to come to a Christian university.”

The poll found only 20 percent of students would be interested in going on a Church of Christ-affiliated missions trip.

Service and sharing go hand in hand

Alondra Gomez, Ariana Porrini and Monique Go serve in Wahiawa, Hawaii during Project Serve: Surf the Nations (Photo courtesy Alondra Gomez).Regardless if a trip has the label missions, it still has the ability to show people the love of God, said Dusty Breeding, the youth and campus minister at the University Church of Christ.

“I believe that all service projects share the Gospel,” Breeding said. “In Matthew 25, Jesus contends that the righteous are those who fed the hungry and clothed the naked. That sounds like the Gospel to me.”

Breeding has an extensive background in ministry in Kenya. He started a nonprofit ministry building ovens in Africa, while working with Made in the Streets, a Christian organization that focuses on rescuing children off the streets in Kenya.

He and his wife also helped establish Pepperdine’s International Program during the summer that works with Made in the Streets. Students can take a nutrition class and a humanities class while in Kenya.

One of the things Breeding said he loves about Pepperdine is the commitment to the Christian tradition, while being completely inclusive of all, regardless of how they identify with the faith tradition.

“I think the university’s support of sharing the Gospel is great,” Breeding said. “With that said, there’s no such thing as a Christian university, Christian music or Christian jewelry. Inanimate objects cannot have faith. People have faith. If we think Pepperdine is going to share the Gospel, we’re mistaken, as it is the students, faculty and staff who are truly serving as representatives of Christ.”

Breeding said that short-term service or missions trips are more about a personal transformation than the transformation of others.

“In this sense, it’s a learning opportunity and is critical to the university experience,” Breeding said.

Setbacks to Gospel-focused missions

From left, Monique Go, Alondra Gomez-Leyva, Jessica Stomberg, Arianna Porrini, Alison Barragan, Jackson Shumway, Salina Pearce-Harris, Nia Nimmers, Lyndsey Chu, Araceli Valdez, Dominique Galloway, Addi Rogers, and Stephanie Cook serve in Wahiawa, Hawaii during Project Serve: Surf the Nations (Photo courtesy Alondra Gomez).

Daniel Rodriguez, divisional dean of Religion and Philosophy, speculated that one of the reasons even churches are shifting toward service- focused trips is today’s society and the changing norms.

“People come to the place of, ‘Who am I? I’m a Christian, I claim Jesus Christ as my Lord and savior, but who am I to tell other people that they’re wrong?” Rodriguez said.

Students these days don’t want to step on other people’s toes. They strive to be politically correct and sometimes that means not sharing the Gospel, Rodriguez said.

Rodriguez himself served as a missionary for several years, and now teaches ways to properly do missions to other churches in the area. He thinks Pepperdine should have missions and as a ministry professor he wonders why Pepperdine doesn’t have that option.

“One of the challenges we would face at Pepperdine is the question of who we are going to mission to,” Rodriguez said. “A lot of people believe that all religions are going to the same place and so who would the mission field be.”

In order to have missions, Pepperdine would need someone to lead them. Faculty or staff would need to direct the mission trips. In order to execute a successful missions trip, it takes anywhere from five to seven months of preparation.

“Preparation includes fundraising, team bonding and learning the skills necessary to effectively teach the Gospel,” Rodriguez said. “The issue is finding a professor with the time and dedication.”

Kenna Syphax, a junior interpersonal communication major, said missions trips to share the Gospel would be popular if Pepperdine offered them but it would likely drive away the students who weren’t religious.

“Almost everyone can agree on helping people, most people can’t agree on religion,” Syphax said.

Elizabeth Maccoy completed the reporting for this story under the supervision of Dr. Christina Littlefield and Dr. Theresa de los Santos in Jour 241 in spring 2018. Dr. Littlefield supervised the web story.