New president heads up InterVarsity

USA (MNN) – On August 10th Tom Lin, president and director for missions of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, will step into a new role as InterVarsity’s new president.

Ever since college, Lin has been a part of the InterVarsity team. During those early years, he helped plant chapters on both his home college campus, Harvard, as well as many others. To name a few of his qualifications, Lin has served under InterVaristy in Mongolia, where he helped launch and direct a new student movement. He’s worked as one of InterVarsity’s regional directors and was also director of Urbana 12 and Urbana 15 among many other things.

But these qualifications do not exempt Lin from the challenges he will face and conquer as president of InterVarsity.

In fact, Lin already sees a couple ahead of him. Lin explains, “The first is campus access challenges. You may know, in the last several years we’ve faced some challenges in our work on campus as the university environment becomes less welcoming towards Christian groups, sometimes hostile.”

In some cases, the validity of InterVarsity chapters have been dismissed. In others, the organization has been viewed as discriminatory for requiring a student to be a Christian to lead a chapter. However, Lin doesn’t see these challenges as anything new.

Instead, he says Christians in other parts of the world have been dealing with this type of situation for years. And, though the hostility towards the Christian organization on college campuses has grown, so has the number of people accepting Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, these challenges, though frustrating, aren’t deterring InterVarsity from continuing to share the Gospel and college campuses across the United States. Lin explains,

“We do see opportunities and ways to tackle these challenges. I think one, we want to continue focusing on our core purpose, which is to build witnessing communities of students and faculty on campuses. I think another important part of our mission, as InterVastiry, is our engagement with university. So we want to grow in engaging the university, the whole university. The people, certainly students and faculty, but also its ideas, systems, and structures.”

The way Lin has heard before, if you can change the university, you can change the world. Will you join InterVarsity in this? In changing the world for Christ?

If you would, pray for Lin as he prepares to fully step into his role as InterVarsity’s president in the months leading to August. Also, pray InterVarsity would be able to keep coming alongside students, sharing the Gospel, and that God would continue using InterVarsity to transform lives.

To learn more about Lin, click here!

To give to InterVarsity, click here!