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Blog / InterVarsity Christian Fellowship: An Interview with Tom Lin

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship: An Interview with Tom Lin

Tom LinIn May, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA (@InterVarsityUSA) announced that Tom Lin would become the eighth president of the campus ministry. He started August 10.

Tom has been vice president and director of missions for InterVarsity since February 2011, and also director of Urbana 12 and Urbana 15, InterVarsity’s triennial student missions conference. He succeeds Jim Lundgren, who served as InterVarsity’s interim president for the past year. Tom enters his new role as InterVarsity prepares to celebrate 75 years of ministry and experiences growth that’s unprecedented since the earliest days of the Fellowship.

Bible Gateway interviewed Tom Lin (@TomLinNow), author of Pursuing God’s Call (IVP Books, 2012) and Losing Face & Finding Grace: Twelve Bible Studies for Asian-Americans (InterVarsity Press, 1997).

InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA website

Describe InterVarsity and explain its mission.

Tom Lin: The purpose of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA is to establish and advance at colleges and universities witnessing communities of students and faculty who follow Jesus as Savior and Lord: growing in love for God, God’s Word, God’s people of every ethnicity and culture, and God’s purposes in the world. We currently serve over 40,000 core students and faculty in over 1,000 chapters on campuses across the country.

What obstacles are in the way of InterVarsity accomplishing its mission?

Tom Lin: The obstacles we face include some similar ones that the rest of the North American Church is facing today—a challenging post-Christian cultural context, a generation that tends to embrace comfort over suffering for the gospel, and a less biblically literate and less churched generation (which we also see as an opportunity). We face some unique obstacles due to the context of our ministry, such as campus access challenges when universities prohibit InterVarsity from establishing chapters, hosting worship gatherings, or leading Bible studies on campus.

What is your cross-cultural experience and why is it important in your new role?

Tom Lin: Given that the demographics of higher education grow more diverse and opportunities like ministering to international students and students of color continue to grow, I believe that organizations who are able to cultivate cross-cultural competencies and have this as a core value will be in the best position to thrive in the future.

Regarding my own cross-cultural experience, I’ve lived most of my life constantly crossing cultures—from my bicultural upbringing in a Taiwanese family raised in Chicago, to a season of ministry in an overseas majority world context (Mongolia), to many leadership experiences where I’m the only non-White person in the room and am engaging folks who are from a very different cultural background as myself.

How would you characterize the perception of the Bible among skeptics and non-Christian students and professors on campuses today?

Tom Lin: With less than 1% of faculty at leading universities identifying themselves as Christians, we’re seeing skeptics and faculty less and less “neutral” about the Bible, as well as less respectful of it.

Increasingly, they’re prone to attack the Bible or attack the faith of Christian students who identify as believers in the Bible’s authority. These attacks manifest in a variety of ways such as higher criticism, textual criticism, and comparative literature. The vast majority (73%) of elite university faculty believe the Bible is a book of fables and legends.

On a positive note, InterVarsity Press has published a number of helpful books defending the Bible from these attacks in a way that students can understand, such as David Lamb’s God Behaving Badly: Is the God of the Old Testament Angry, Sexist and Racist?.

[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, Prostitutes and Polygamists: An Interview with David Lamb]

How would you characterize the state of Bible reading/engagement among Christian students on campuses today?

Tom Lin: We’re actually more encouraged about this than what the general perception may be among the Christian public today. We’re seeing Christian students who still have a strong belief in the authority of the Scriptures and who study the Bible regularly.

In 2013, we partnered with the American Bible Society and Barna to conduct a study about how InterVarsity students read the Bible. The students surveyed shared that involvement with InterVarsity caused their view of the Bible to change from “restrictive” to “life giving.” Students attributed this change in how they view the Bible to actually reading it, experiencing in-depth study (alone and in community), and learning to apply Scripture to their lives. And while only about a quarter of millennials nationwide read the Bible on a weekly basis, 87% of InterVarsity students read the Bible at least weekly, with 65% of InterVarsity students reading the Bible at least several times each week and participating in at least one group activity focused on encountering God in the Word.

The responses of InterVarsity students stand in stark contrast to research suggesting that the typical millennial might read the Bible three to four times per year.

Describe the ways InterVarsity places an emphasis on the Bible.

Tom Lin: Bible study has been a part of the DNA of InterVarsity since its inception 75 years ago. Jane Hollingsworth, an InterVarsity staff in the 1940s, had attended the Biblical Seminary of New York, an accredited seminary which emphasized inductive Bible study in all of its courses. Jane brought a love for and training in inductive Bible study to InterVarsity in those early years, and it’s remained an essential part of our ministry ever since.

Today, we emphasize the Bible both organizationally and in our daily ministry on the ground with students.

Organizationally, we’ve included love for “God’s Word” as an actual phrase of our purpose statement (one of our four loves), and IVP remains committed to publishing significant Bible study resources.

In our daily ministry, our small group inductive Bible study is a core part of our evangelism strategy called “Groups Investigating God,” and it also remains a core method of discipling Christian students. Bible study training weekends (“dig-ins”), week-long intensive Bible study camps, and Scripture study at every conference including the Urbana Student Missions Conference, are unique hallmarks of InterVarsity’s ministry which reflect our high value for the Scriptures. Lastly, we’ve recently acquired two domain names, HowTo.Bible and college.bible to provide more resources for those engaging Scripture online.

Why is it important for InterVarsity to encourage students to engage with the Bible?

Tom Lin: A belief in the authority and trustworthiness of the Bible and a desire to obey its precepts is a foundational value of ours. Thus, we believe that students learning to study the Bible for themselves is crucial. It’s important for students to be able to articulate biblical themes—such as hope to a world which seems hopeless—in a way that will be compelling to their non-believing friends. As they face criticism for their faith, our students also need to articulate and embody biblical truths through their words and their lives to skeptical friends, family, or professors. We also believe that encouraging students to regularly engage in Scripture will build habits which will set them up well as they seek to learn and live out Kingdom values in their future contexts and vocations.

What is Urbana and why is Bible teaching a central component there?

Tom Lin: Urbana (@UrbanaMissions) is our triennial student missions conference; the largest student missions conference in the world. Over 300,000 participants have been mobilized for global missions since our first conference in 1946. And Billy Graham has often shared that over half of the missionaries in the world have been called due in part to an Urbana Conference.

Since the first Urbana, Bible teaching has been a central component because we believe that students will be most compelled to participate in global mission when they understand the biblical mandate and God’s story of mission in Scripture, rather than compelled merely by charismatic speakers. It’s one of the reasons we’ve incorporated inductive Bible study into every morning of the conference, so that students can study God’s Word on their own rather than simply listen to a speaker’s exposition of the Scriptures (which is also a wonderful hallmark of Urbana).

What’s your vision for InterVarsity in Scripture engagement as you start your presidency?

Tom Lin: Just as I personally have been influenced by InterVarsity’s profound value and practice of Scripture engagement, my hope is that this will only continue to grow and remain strong as we enter into the next season of ministry. Through our daily work on campus, our conferences and camps, and through the books we publish through IVP, InterVarsity will continue to place high priority on seeing this next generation of students and graduates fall in love with God’s Word, studying God’s Word, and living out God’s Word.

What are your thoughts about Bible Gateway and the Bible Gateway App?

Tom Lin: I use Bible Gateway as my main go-to resource online for Bible texts and Bible searches. I’m grateful for the strategic ministry of Bible Gateway.


Bio: Tom Lin serves as President/CEO of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, with previous roles as Vice President of Missions and Director of Urbana as well as Country Director of the student movement in Mongolia. Tom is also the Lausanne Movement’s Regional Director for North America and has served on the Boards of Wycliffe Bible Translators, Missio Nexus, and Crowell Trust.

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Filed under Bible Study, Books, Interviews