Student missionaries discover Christ’s presence while cleaning toilets

Posted: 8/22/07

Student missionaries discover
Christ’s presence while cleaning toilets

By Jessica Dooley

Communications Intern

The ideal summer vacation usually doesn’t involve cleaning restrooms or talking to families of prisoners every day. But for more than 160 college students, this is exactly what they believe God wanted them to do.

Through the Baptist General Convention of Texas’ Go Now Missions program, 167 college students devoted their summer to spreading the gospel. Some had the opportunity to minister overseas or around the nation; others served in Texas.

As Deborah Perry finished up her sophomore year at Stephen F. Austin State University, she prepared to embark on a journey of a lifetime. While most students were dreaming of lazy afternoons by the pool or the money their summer job would bring in, Perry began packing for an eight-week adventure in East Asia.

A career missionary baptizes a young man in Japan. Several Go Now missionaries served in Japan this summer.

She teamed up with other college students to minister on a college campus, learned the language and served two weeks meeting needs in another city in East Asia.

Perry first felt a pull toward East Asia in late December, and in March found out she would be sent to there. She had never been overseas, so to prepare she began memorizing Bible verses and talking with the other girls from her team, two who had been to East Asia before.

The team’s main purpose was to “build relationships and share the gospel with everyone” they met.

“They want to practice English so it was easy to make friends and build relationships early on,” Perry said.

 At the end of the summer, the team witnessed 27 people become new followers of Christ.  Go Now Missions has been sending students to this city for 13 years, but this was the first time the group sent a team to this university, and Perry considered it a great success.

“God really prepared the hearts of a lot of students there,” she said.

Whitney Travis, a senior at Texas A&M University, spent nine weeks of her summer in Huntsville ministering to families of prisoners who were being released each day.

“It was hard to hear the stories everyday because they all ended sadly,” Travis said. “There is so much brokenness in the world.”

She also helped with the People of Peace Bible study for ex-offenders. With the volunteers like Travis, the Bible study has decreased the rate of those who returned to jail by 40 percent.

Baylor University Junior Marshall Cook served in Chicago where he facilitated various ministries such as feeding the homeless, networking with area businesses and charities and putting on a rock concert at church. But Cook was humbled and truly felt the presence of Christ most when he was cleaning the bathroom.

“I was cleaning up the bathroom on a Saturday night, and it was absolutely filthy,” he said. “But, it was when I was cleaning that I stopped for a second. It was as if I knew right there in the middle of cleaning up urine and hair that Jesus was right there with me. And this was something he was a part of as well.”

But Cook wasn’t the only who found Jesus in a bathroom. Summer Caniglia, a senior at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, interned with a missionary in Japan and mobilized short-term teams. She also led Bible studies for business people and college students. And she witnessed a baptism in a bathtub in the wee hours of the morning.

“I think that one of the most exciting things was when we had the opportunity to baptize a new brother in our bathtub,” she said. “He had become a believer that night and after we told him the story of the Phillip and the Ethiopian, he told us, ‘There’s no water in Tokyo.’ Someone replied ‘You can be baptized anywhere, even in a bathtub.’  So we baptized him in a bathtub at 3:30 in the morning.”