School of Intercultural Studies

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HIGHER EDUCATION FOR CROSSCULTURAL MINISTRY

Purpose

Our objective is the equipping of men and women who are prepared to cross all the barriers that block people from hearing and believing the gospel and who serve God’s mission to transform individuals and communities.

Partners for Transformation

Founded in 1965, Fuller's School of World Mission has pioneered the major areas of study within missiology. Now, as the School of Intercultural Studies, the school continues to facilitate innovative and relevant teaching and training of missiologists, international church leaders, missionaries, and evangelists. Fuller's integrative approach to missiological education reflects its commitment to furthering God's mission and discovering how Christian leaders can participate in God's worldwide redemptive work.

Students are challenged to minister incarnationally across the ethnic, cultural, generational, and economic barriers in today's global society. In its goal of extending God's Kingdom, the School of Intercultural Studies educates leaders to share God's love with unreached peoples in both urban and rural areas and to bring the Gospel anew to modern western culture. Students also benefit from Fuller's person-centered approach. With the help of their faculty members, School of Intercultural Studies students design their own degree programs to fit their individual goals, competencies and callings. The faculty and staff actively mentor students seeking to become all that God has created them to be.   Concentrations allow students to specialize in mission areas such as children at risk, international development, Islamic studies, leadership, missional church, urban mission, and more.

We at the School of Intercultural Studies believe that we stand at a critical juncture of our global witness. Everything in the past 200 years of global witness has set the stage for a great response to the gospel. Today, God calls Christians of every continent and culture to the task of making Jesus Christ known, loved, and believed in throughout the world. As evidence of this call, there is an unprecedented responsiveness in many populations. The main task lies ahead, but a new factor has been introduced. Because of the rapidly growing non-Western Christian missionary movement, Christian ministry is now the most international, interracial, and intercultural movement in history. The School of Intercultural Studies aims to be a resource for this growing movement.

Furthermore, Christian witness today is being carried on in the midst of tremendous revolutionary changes affecting every aspect of human life. The guidelines and assumptions under which our ancestors labored have been swept away. Christian witness today has radically new ground on which to operate: advances in knowledge; changing political alignments; escalating developments in technology; rising religious relativism; the battle for justice; global effects of poverty; massive migration; growing population of children at risk; clashing of the world’s major religions; and a vastly accelerated secularization of life. Education for Christian witness must prepare believers to share their faith in both word and deed in this new world.

In the midst of such changes, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. This unique calling of Christ continues to result in the multiplication of believers and churches to the ends of the earth.

However, in each situation the Church is to be shaped in a way that affirms and utilizes the most positive aspects of the culture. New believers should not be torn out of their cultural matrix and forced to become "foreign" in order to become followers. In every context, the gospel brings a message of hope that both empowers and transforms.

The goal, then, of the School of Intercultural Studies is to equip men and women who are prepared to cross all the barriers that block people from hearing and believing the Gospel and who serve God's mission to transform individuals and communities.

Globalized Education for Intercultural Studies

The School of Intercultural Studies seeks to help prepare leadership by providing advanced graduate-level education for:

• future missionaries, pastors, teachers and other professionals for crosscultural ministry;
• mid-career intercultural workers; and
• mature international church and faith-based agency leaders.

In order to be effective, people called to communicate the gospel cross-culturally need insight into the theological, historical, and biblical basis of the Christian faith. Building on that base, further study is needed in the areas of theory of intercultural ministry, evangelism, the growth of the Church both globally and locally, knowledge of and approach to non-Christian religions, leadership development, globalization, and transformational development. These subjects are all, therefore, to be studied as proper parts of education for global witness.

The faculty seeks to accomplish its purpose by developing degree programs and delivery systems that combine academic integrity, professional training, and ministry maturation. These balanced delivery approaches include both residential and extension modes that integrate research and field ministry development. The study of intercultural ministries embraces a vast body of knowledge from a wide range of disciplines. The well-prepared worker should see it as an integrated whole. In presenting this area of study through experiential learning, lectures, reading, and research, two dangers are avoided: a frozen intellectual regimen removed from the fast-moving contemporary scene, and a smorgasbord of "hot" transient emphases. Advanced education must be validated by advanced degrees in intercultural studies, yet the degree program must remain flexible enough to equip the people of God to meet the rapidly changing conditions of the contemporary world.

Multilingual and Multidisciplinary Research and Publishing

Though the discipling of the nations is a chief and continuing goal of Christian witness, much remains to be discovered about how individuals and their specific societies are discipled and formed into mature reproductive churches. In most lands, some churches have broken through to great growth and engaged in transformational service, but these examples are often unknown to other parts of the church. This vacuum in knowledge and training facilities handicaps the entire work of Christ in the world.

To meet this need, therefore, the School of Intercultural Studies emphasizes multidisciplinary intercultural research as an integral part of the education process. This approach to higher education emphasizes discovering and teaching new insights concerning the holistic growth of churches in ways which remain biblically faithful and culturally appropriate.

Leadership in Intercultural Studies

The School of Intercultural Studies provides leadership in theory of intercultural ministry by giving continuing leadership to the multiple disciplines in intercultural studies and calling attention to the unfinished and complex task of bringing people to commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.