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Autumn 2007 | Volume 30, Number 2
| Features
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Jennifer Jantz
A new generation of global leadership
Seaside Port Dickson is a short 50-mile escape from Malaysia’s largest city, Kuala Lumpur. It was there that 550 mission-hearted people aged 25–35 from more than 110 different nations met in September 2006 for the Lausanne Young Leaders Gathering. They had been selected from more than 1,000 applicants worldwide and targeted as the next generation of world Christian leaders.
Among them was North American delegate and 2006 Seattle Pacific University business administration graduate Jennifer Jantz. “It was a time to network in order that the whole church may bring the whole gospel to the whole world,” says Jantz, who was nominated as a delegate by Delia Nüesch-Olver, associate professor of global and urban ministry at SPU. “For many of us, it was as close to eternity as we can get this side of heaven.”
Jantz studied, worshipped, and made friends with a global cast of highly motivated peers. She received “extraordinary resources and access to mission leaders one could only wish to meet,” such as Peter Kuzmic, recognized as the foremost evangelical Christian scholar in Eastern Europe.
The fact that the Lausanne congress of young Christian leaders convened in a country where Islam is the state religion was an opportunity for both ministry and dialogue with Muslims, says Jantz, whose home is in Littleton, Colorado. She met delegates from numerous religiously restricted and closed countries, and likened the experience to Revelation 7:9–10, where it says people from every nation and tribe will one day stand before Christ’s throne and glorify him.
Since the conference, Jantz has traveled on a steady round of mission trips and Lausanne follow-up in the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, and Mexico. She thinks daily about how to best connect her major in business administration — and minor in global and urban ministry — to international ministry.
In the meantime, Jantz promotes missions, works with a church- planting committee, and develops a database that links passionate people with compatible ministries. She is also a planner of next year’s first-ever Lausanne Business Leaders Gathering in Alexandria, Egypt. “Our responsibility as Christians is to know what is going on in our world and to take a stand for Christ,” she says. “We are to intervene in the face of injustice, take on the cause of the poor, speak up for those who do not have a voice, befriend the lonely, welcome the foreigner, and partner with those who are suffering because of their faith.”
—By Clint Kelly [ckelly@spu.edu]
—Photo by Fritz Liedtke
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