Every university student in Australia must be reached with the gospel of Christ, according to the newly appointed National Director of the Australian Fellowship of Evangelical Students (AFES).

And while the tertiary education system undergoes enormous changes in many quarters, Richard Chin says the simple, long-term aim of preaching Christ must remain the number one priority for the national body, which coordinates the work of around 120 staff on some 50 campuses nationwide.

Currently the interdenom-inational chaplain at Wollongong University, Mr Chin was announced as the organisation’s new national director in August. Not surprisingly, after almost nine years at Wollongong, he sees university ministry as being of enormous strategic value. But he believes the reason for this is not as obvious as it may seem.

“I don’t think the strategy is that University students are more able, and gifted people, and therefore are more likely to change the world,” he says. “But I do think the strategy revolves around their stage of life.

“People make enormous decisions in those young adult years, which makes them ripe, under God, to be transformed by the gospel. They so happen to be gathered in large numbers at universities. You could say the same thing about school in a way, but there is something about leaving school that makes it different. There is a sense of independence, and you feel more like an adult.”

Mr Chin also knows the importance of university ministry first-hand. He became a Christian in 1983 at Mid Year Conference, where he was challenged to put Jesus as number one in his own life. “I was saved at a university conference, and I also saw a large number of friends who had their lives transformed in that context, even as Christians.”

At that same conference he heard a young Ivan Lee, now Bishop of Western Sydney, talk about how he had given up studying medicine to enter full-time ministry. “I remember thinking, ‘what are you doing?’” he admits. “But as the years rolled on, the gospel gripped me and I realised that as a doctor, I could be involved in ‘saving’ peoples’ lives for 60 or 70 years. Or I could be involved in preaching the gospel and seeing people saved for eternity.”

Mr Chin plans to stay on at Wollongong two days a week, serving the AFES group on campus. “It’s important that I continue to be a Bible teacher first and foremost,” he says.

Since 1991, the AFES group at Wollongong has grown from 15 students, to a team of 12 staff and around 250 students regularly involved. But Mr Chin emphasises that the growth has all happened ‘under God’ through a number of people, and says the same about the recent growth in the national AFES movement.

“It was [previous national directors] Andrew Reid and Kerry Nagel who took AFES to its current position. Andrew was the one who really began to place staff on the campuses to serve the students and prioritise evangelism. Kerry opened the floodgates and recruited a huge number of staff workers, including myself.”

In addition to working with student groups, churches and other local supporters, Mr Chin says the next phase in this work is to raise up and consolidate long-term staff teams. He hopes to see a campus director, full-time women’s worker and an international worker partnering the students on as many campuses as possible (around 20 or 30 campuses don’t yet have AFES staff).

Mr Chin believes ministry to international students is crucial to the future of student work. “We’re in a phase of history where overseas students are coming in unprecedented numbers, willing to hear the gospel. They’re the ones who will go back to their home countries as missionaries knowing their own language and culture. What better missionaries can we send overseas?

“Undergirding that is still this desire to reach every student on every campus with the gospel of Christ.”

Much of his time as national director will be spent serving area directors, who work on campuses and devote one day a week to supervising fellow staff in their ‘area’ of Australia. But he says, “My family must be my first ‘parish’. This means that I must not be away from my family too much.” Together with his wife Bronwyn, they have four children aged between 9 and 3 years.

As far as his AFES ‘parish’ goes, he sees a crucial part of his job to be ‘guarding the gospel’ and shepherding the AFES staff in their own Christian lives. “It is the truth spoken in love that leads to godliness. So I also have to keep guarding us against doctrinal error, and ungod-liness,” he says. “It has to begin with me, so I want to be transparent in working in those areas, for my family and AFES.”

Many universities around the country are undergoing significant changes, with the removal of common lunch hours on some campuses making times for Christian meetings hard to come by, but also representing a drive towards greater efficiency. But Mr Chin believes universities must be preserved as a place where students are encouraged to prioritise Christian learning.

“If ever there is a place where we should be able to talk through issues and ideas with a sense of freedom, it should be universities,” he says. “They are places of free speech and ideas. It is a place to learn, so why not utilise that opportunity to learn about Christ in the Scriptures?”