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David needed rest. He’d had a long week of hitting the books and so he lay down in his dorm room bed and tried to sleep.

The shrieks of a young girl interrupted his sleep. David imagined nine year-old girls crying for help in Bangkok as they were forced into prostitution. He had been praying for Bangkok and its oppressive global sex trade and child labor for two years. The shrill screams came from the next dorm room, and David quickly realized the crying emanated from the TV. Still, he was transfixed by the girl’s screams. He knew he needed to respond to God’s calling.

“I know that in three weeks we’re probably not going to end injustice,” David said, anticipating his first trip to Thailand. “However, I believe that wherever God’s people go, so he goes. I hope, therefore, that by our very presence, we can be salt and light in the communities we interact with.”

David has since been to Thailand twice; he taught English to children, prayed with and befriended local people, and interviewed missionaries and staff from non-governmental organizations working with the poor.

Upon graduating this year from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he plans to relocate to Bangkok where he will learn more Thai, reconnect with a network of missionaries and agencies, and begin to put his urban planning skills to use.

David is one of many North American students responding to a call to use their skills and education to minister among the urban poor. During the summers of 2001 and 2002 InterVarsity Christian Fellow-ship’s Los Angeles Urban Project and Inter-Varsity’s Global Urban Trek took students on a series of short-term urban missions trips to the poorest of the poor in such places as Calcutta, Mexico City, Nairobi and Cairo. Seventy students have made formal, longer-term commitments to serve among urban poor for anywhere from several years to a lifetime serving, “to, for, or among the urban poor.” Students who participate in the Trek are accepted only if they’re willing to seriously consider committing their lives to longer term service in the city. After two years, 140 students have gone on the Trek.

Scott Bessenecker, director of Inter-Varsity’s global projects including the Global Urban Trek, believes these urban projects have drawn from a “pool of people who are serious about their majors, about justice and about Jesus.” For his part, he’s trusting God for one thousand student commitments over the next five years. This movement of God in the city, he believes, is that evident.

Trek students serve in places where entire families live in small shacks or lean-tos without electricity, running water or proper sewage and garbage collection. Disease is rampant and most people are unemployed. Living conditions are harsh.

Heidi Williams, a recent graduate of Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, decided to serve among the urban poor in August 2001 after ministering in Calcutta for several weeks. There she assisted a Sisters of Charity orphanage and, along with other students, helped a few women develop their paper-making skills as part of a micro-enterprise. “It is through my time with people,” she says, “undereducated children in Seattle, street women in India and Muslim refugees in Nairobi, that God continually calls me, reminding me of their faces and how much he loves them and wants them to know him.”

After serving in Bangkok, Thailand, last summer as a teacher, Edwin Ubeda, a graduate student, says, “I am currently studying Latin American literature, and a Spanish writer once wrote something similar to this: ‘The plutocracy recites poems, while the poor cannot read and write.’ It is because of an awakening to this reality that I desire to serve Christ and the urban poor.”

These students-writers, counselors, engineers, business leaders, lawyers-are finding ways to apply their skills and education to further God’s kingdom in urban slums.

“My studies have definitely helped me to understand a lot of the issues I’ve seen already among the urban poor,” says Alissa Gren. “Issues such as large-scale immigration to cities, a sense of or lack of community identity, social development of boys and girls in urban poor communities, the role of women and the nature of families.” Alissa will soon graduate from Boston University in Sociology. She plans on doing social work for five years in Manila, Philippines.

Servant Partners, an urban ministry planting churches among the poorest of the poor, is one mission agency experiencing a windfall of students signing up to serve in the city. Since the agency’s founding seven years ago, Servant Partners has seen over 120 young men and women go through their urban internship program, most of whom were recent graduates. This movement of students has depended upon young missionaries living in true discipleship to Jesus, according to Tom Pratt, chairman of the senior leadership team of Servant Partners. “I think the basic issue is based on bringing the Scripture to bare so that students on campus can understand issues of justice, of God’s concern for the poor and their opportunity to participate.”

Pratt says, “You’ve got be asking questions about, ‘Why are people in college in the first place?’ ‘What’s the real goal here?’ ‘Is it to prepare yourself for service to your neighbor, or is it to primarily prepare yourself to be financially and socially successful in life?’ If students can begin to make those choices on campus, see the Scripture’s teaching about the poor, and get some modeling, it’s actually amazing how many people are open to consider living in ways that serve their poor neighbors.”

Noting the distressingly small portion of students who eventually work in full-time missions, Bessenecker says, “I think what we can do is make a call to one hundred percent [of students] to a commitment” to serving the urban poor in some way. “[We can] broaden the net to all students to bring their degrees in ways that matter to the kingdom to the poorest parts of the world.”

Alissa hopes to minister in “a squatter community and also possibly partner with a ministry to prostitutes doing outreach in a red light district.” Heidi says that her “big dream” is to do “counseling for women in Afghanistan who have been brutalized by years of civil war, and through this bring God’s love and healing into their lives.”

Students like Heidi and Alissa are answering this challenge to urban missions. By God’s grace, many more may follow their examples.

Mark Kramer and his wife, Cynthia, serve various missions agencies as freelance journalists in Madison, Wisc. See and for information about various urban ministry projects.