ST. LOUIS, MISSIOURI (ANS) -- InterVarsity Christian Fellowship has chosen a fiery Black Pentecostal woman from Chicago, Brenda Salter McNeil, to wrap up a week of intensive decision-making for college students here at the Urbana09 missions conference.

Brenda Salter McNeil

She will preach the closing message and lead the midnight communion service for over 17,000 students and missionaries at the Global Connections exhibition.

The closing event culminates a gut-wrenching week for many who are being daily called to tear down spiritual idols in their lives and follow Jesus Christ into missionary service. Some who come here will also consider this conference their spiritual birthdates.

At the last Urbana in 2006, all 20,000 attendees made spiritual decisions on the conference pledge cards. Over 300 professed first-time decisions for Christ and over 5,000 made full-time missionary vocations.

The four-step “invitation” process at Urbana is designed to provoke every attendee to actively join God’s mission to humanity at some level.

Dr. Brenda McNeil, a Scholar in Residence at Chicago’s North Park University, is a mother of two who runs a successful consulting firm. Her company, Salter McNeil & Associates, guides institutions and ministries in how to transform themselves into multi-cultural formats and promote racial reconciliation.

Her latest book is “A Credible Witness: Reflections on Power, Evangelism and Race” (InterVarsity Press, 2008). In an interview with ASSIST News she said that the book is based on Christ’s interactions with the woman at the well in Samaria, and it will form the basis of her closing message at the communion service.

“My message is a call to engage people in evangelism that doesn’t just reconcile them to God but to each other as well,” she said. “We’ve been preaching a very limited, American version of the gospel that has too long allowed people to isolate and segregate themselves from each other.”

McNeil’s New Year’s Eve message will tell her own story, how she had to go through her own Samaria in Birmingham, England. There, she says she was confronted by the “Black British” from Bahamas and Jamaica who didn’t recognize her degrees and experience.

She had to relate to them from outside her sphere of expertise and skill, without the trappings of power that she is used to in American culture.

“I was simply a black woman who had the grace to step into my calling with them. As I listened to their stories and told mine to them, I empowered them to step into their prophetic roles,” she says.

This, she says, is the key to working with university students today. “They want to see a life actually lived out. This generation is already global and diverse by default. Now they need to develop the skills to use this diversity in relating the gospel to others. To do this, you need to tell your story and listen to theirs.”

She also plans to give the students a warning against some of the current trends in evangelical missions. “The call to diversity and inter-cultural service is much more than just social service. Soul change requires the use of spiritual power and it cannot be done without prayer and learning how to do spiritual warfare.

“This is not something that I am doing because I was born black or a woman or because I have earned a long list of degrees, found privilege and gained experience. Unless we do this kind of evangelism through the power of the Holy Spirit, by listening to God and by speaking his word to injustice -- then failure is certain.

“The students need to hear this prophetic message, and not just rush off to rescue those being sexually trafficked, enslaved and exploited.”

William (Bill) Thomas Bray, 62, has been a bi-vocational Christian journalist since 1966 and frequently contributes to ASSSIST News Service. He is on assignment this week for ASSIST News at the giant Urban09 student mission’s conference in St. Louis. He is also president of the Overseas Students Mission, a Charlottesville, Virginia non-profit that combats the brain drain from developing countries and works with indigenous peoples.