By Chris Rickert – Wisconsin State Journal –
Over nearly 40 years working with Madison-based InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Scott Bessenecker has helped send thousands of college students on trips to “slum communities” overseas as part of programs to build bridges between those of us living in developed, rich countries like the United States and those of us who don’t.
The point is not to proselytize, Bessenecker says, and not even necessarily to help people dig wells or build community centers or do other immediately tangible good works like in the Peace Corps.
Instead, the summerlong programs might be called “incarnational,” he said.
“That is, they embody themselves by living in the community, rather than by drive-by ministry or ministering from outside of the community to inside,” he said, the point being to encourage students to explore how their “faith relates to global issues of poverty, marginalization, oppression.”
This year students are living in Manila, in the Philippines; Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Managua, Nicaragua; Lucknow, India; and Cairo, Egypt.
Bessenecker, 61, is also the author of four faith-themed nonfiction books, the most recent of which, tentatively titled “Bad Religion, Good News: An Honest Guide for the Spiritually Disappointed,” will be released in the spring.
He lives with his wife, Janine, a watercolor artist, on the city’s North Side, and the two of them have three grown children.
What do the students do while they’re overseas?
We try to de-emphasize doing and emphasize being. It’s not about painting a building or constructing a community center. It’s about hearing the stories of the people that they’re living with. It’s about solidarity and walking alongside them for a few weeks.
It may be that they are helping the family just in life circumstances in basic ways. But a lot of emphasis on hanging out. I try to tell the students, “If it’s important for you to measure something, measure the number of cups of tea you have with one person, hearing their story.”
Some will adjust their major. Like they have an epiphany — like the thing that they thought they wanted to do isn’t really the thing that they wanted to do. So there’s a life trajectory that may get adjusted. Certainly, there’s a generosity.
Has it become more difficult to get students involved in this kind of work?
GenX and Millennials were pretty adventurous in that regard. Millennials I would say were cause-oriented. What I see of GenZ is that they are more career-oriented, but they bring a really powerful desire for inclusivity that loans itself well to travel.
How many foreign countries have you visited?
I don’t count the places I’ve been just because it feels consumeristic, like the world is mine to consume. But I would say I’ve been to dozens of places and many of them in communities that are marginalized.
What can we learn from those living at the margins?
Certainly empathy is a tremendous force to bring about internal change. If we become detached from those whose experiences are radically different, I think we lose perspective and we become excessively introspective, which I don’t think is healthy for us.
Because of your faith, do you get people who assume you hold particular political views or want to convert them?
My vocation as a religious worker often shuts down the discussion after the “what do you do?” question comes up in cocktail parties. So there’s a stigma I bear as a religious worker in America, particularly in the Protestant tradition and particularly because our roots come out of an evangelical space of the ’40s and ’50s.
So what do you do in those cocktail party moments?
If I mention my title — director of global engagement and justice — usually that provokes some curiosity. I myself am only employed because I can raise the cost of my ministry, which includes salary and benefits and travel expenses, and I have lost donors on the political right and left. So the political right may not appreciate my broad view, my generous orthodoxy, and the political left may not appreciate my historic connection with evangelicals or the high view of scripture that I hold.
Read the rest of this story at the Wisconsin State Journal.
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So here’s another InterVarsity story that’s not behind a paywall. (I don’t think.)