JCFN's birth, in the history of two movements

JCFN was born between 1990 and 1991, at a moment when two fields were growing together in the United States: the international-student mission movement, and the emerging work of follow-up for students returning home after studying abroad. This account traces the history of both movements, and how they converged.

2011 was not only JCFN's 20th anniversary. It also marked 100 years of organized ministry to international students in the United States. John R. Mott is remembered as a leading figure in the Student Volunteer Movement's mission network of 100,000 students, and as chairman of the famous 1910 World Missionary Conference in Edinburgh (whose centennial was marked by gatherings in Tokyo, Cape Town, and Edinburgh itself in 2010). Mott was also a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and a leader in the YMCA's worldwide growth. Less known is that in 1911, this same Mott helped found the first international-student mission organization in the US: the Committee on Friendly Relations Among Foreign Students (CFR). When CFR began its work in April 1911, there were 415 Japanese students in America. Most were eager to bring their training home to Japan's development, and many struggled to adapt to daily American life. CFR made reaching Japanese students an early priority, and in 1965 the organization was renamed International Student Service (ISS).

1950s–1970s: CFR/ISS's contribution over its first 40 years was, by any measure, an outstanding one. It was likely the only mission organization in America focused on international students at the time. In 1952, under missionary-statesman David Adeney, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF) began its own international-student ministry. International Students, Inc. (ISI) followed in 1953, then the Southern Baptist Convention's international-student work in 1955. Ambassadors for Christ, serving Chinese students, began in the 1960s through Campus Crusade. International Navigators started reaching international students in 1977, and HIS (Helping International Students) began in Manhattan, Kansas, in 1978.

1981–1991, ACMI and beyond: The decade leading up to JCFN's founding saw a rapid growth of new international-student ministries across the US. The most significant single event may have been 1981's first national conference on international-student ministry, which brought together nearly every active organization and formed the Association of Christian Ministries to Internationals (ACMI), a network that has held gatherings to train staff and volunteers for 30 years since. Organizations founded in the 1980s alone included International Friendship Ministries (1981), the Reformed University Fellowship-International (1983), Campus Ambassadors (1984), the Portland-based coalition FOCUS (1985), China Outreach Ministries (1988), Chi Alpha's international-student division (1989), Horizons International (1990), InterFACE Ministries (1991), and HIS International in Columbia, South Carolina (1991).

Alongside the growth in ministries, the number of Japanese students coming to America was climbing sharply: from 4,223 in 1971, to 14,020 in 1981, to 40,700 by 1991. JCFN's ministry was born exactly when the time was ripe. As both the mission field and the number of Japanese students grew, so did the number responding to the Gospel. Within the decade from 1990 to 2000, Japan ranked first or second among all nations sending students to the US.

Alongside the joyful reports of Japanese students following Christ came a sadder pattern: on returning home, many could not find Christian fellowship, could not adjust, and drifted away from Christ. Who would support these returning students? A few international-student ministries offered some resources for returnees, but far more work remained to be done to prepare them.

By God's leading, at a conference in the late 1980s, Ned Hale (then head of IVCF USA's international-student ministry) and I were soaking in a hot tub, brainstorming. Out of that came one idea: hold a conference specifically for returning students, immediately following the Urbana Missions Convention, called a "Post-Urbana Conference for International Students." I thank God that idea became reality, and that JCFN was born from it.

When JCFN began in 1991, how much was really understood about international-student reentry and returnee ministry? Almost nothing, and intentional returnee ministry was, for practical purposes, nonexistent.

The concepts of "returnee" and "reentry" didn't surface until the late 1990s. But looking back at early-1900s Student Volunteer Movement reports and other mission literature, there are repeated references to concern about the effects of discrimination Japanese and Chinese students faced on the West Coast and elsewhere, and worry over how these students, once home and in positions of leadership, might come to feel about America. That worry about hostility toward the US would later be borne out by the role some returnees played around Pearl Harbor. A century ago, the near-exclusive concern about returning students was what harm they might do to America, not how they might be prepared to build up their own nations and serve as ambassadors for the King of Kings.

The term "culture shock" came into common use in the late 1950s and early 1960s, describing the stress and emotion of encountering a new and different culture: the sense of being a foreigner, of not understanding, of confusion. A student heading to America might expect that kind of disorientation. But surely, the thinking went, finishing one's studies abroad meant nothing but a happy return home? It came as a real surprise that many returnees experienced something bigger than the culture shock of being in America: "reverse culture shock," the experience of being a stranger in one's own country. By the 1970s this phenomenon had a name, "reentry," and from the 1970s through the 1990s NAFSA (the Association of International Educators) became a driving force addressing international students' reentry and employment back home.

1983–1993, the first reentry literature: Before 1983 there were a few articles on reentry but no books. Dr. Clyde Austin of Abilene Christian University became the key figure bringing reentry to wider attention, publishing Cross-Cultural Reentry: An Annotated Bibliography in 1983 and what became the "reentry bible," Cross-Cultural Reentry: A Book of Readings, in 1986. In 1984, Lisa Espineli Chin wrote Think Home, the first book written specifically on the reentry of Christian international students. NAFSA published two of Chin's later reports, and in 1993 Nate Mirza of International Navigators' international-student ministry wrote Home Again: Preparing International Students to Serve Christ in Their Home Countries (revised 2005).

Fewer than ten years had passed since reentry literature, general or Christian-specific, began being published at all when JCFN got its start. Since then, Think Home has been revised and republished in several countries by other mission organizations, and newer titles have followed: ISI's New Horizons (2008), Overseas Campus Ministries' Returnee Handbook for Chinese students (2009), and IVCF/USA's Back Home and Coming to America/Returning to Your Home Country (both 2011).

JCFN has stood, and still stands, as an encouraging model for international-student ministries worldwide: in preparing students for reentry, supporting returnees, and building networks with receiving churches back home. What JCFN learned over its first 20 years is directly valuable to nations like China, India, and Korea that now send large numbers of students to the US. It mattered a great deal that Setsu (Kuroda) Shimizu, as an expert and leader in returnee ministry, was able to share JCFN's story at international mission-strategy gatherings including I-CARE (2008), the Lausanne Asia-Pacific International Student Ministry Consultation (Singapore, 2009), and the Third Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization in Cape Town (2010).

By God's special grace, at the 1990 Post-Urbana Conference for International Students, a handful of students took the first steps toward a ministry to support returning Japanese Christian students. Their faith and courage have already borne much fruit for God's glory, and will bear more still.