Next year, 2024, will mark the 50th anniversary of the Perspectives on the World Christian Movement, the adult education course with 250,000 alumni that has done much to mobilize the Christian Church for world mission. For two decades I have supervised graduate students taking Perspectives and commiserate with Professor Elayne Clift about the deteriorating state of students’ work.

How could it be that graduate students delivered such appallingly poor papers and presentations? They’d gotten undergraduate degrees; why couldn’t they write in sentences? Why were they devoid of originality, analytical ability, intellectual curiosity? (1)

The academic landscape has changed vastly in the last half century with online information technologies, exorbitant tuition, and declining standards. Sadly, student expectations that higher learning should entail minimal rigor have crept into the missionary enterprise. The mindset to “let the world learn English” impedes the necessary bonding with a new culture. Attrition from the field is more likely when an inherent lack of foreign language skill is paired with a persistent bond to the home culture via social media and electronic devices. 

Their laptops and smartphones provide them unlimited access to their families and own culture and it makes it much more difficult to do the work of incarnation. Incarnation…is perhaps the most important part of the “successful” missionary’s life abroad. (2)

Only 20 percent of U.S. secondary school students studies a foreign language. Moreover, only a tiny fraction thereof advances to a third or fourth year, where creativity and critical thinking skills are honed. At the college level, the decline is precipitous with only 7.5 percent of students enrolled in any foreign language course (3). And that percentage has been steadily declining given the shuttering of hundreds of university foreign language programs (4). This trend is bizarre given that

Of all the skills that a person could have in today’s globalized world, few serve individuals – and the larger society – as well as knowing how to speak another language. People who speak another language score higher on tests and think more creatively, have access to a wider variety of jobs, and can more fully enjoy and participate in other cultures or converse with people from diverse backgrounds. (5)

Interventions against this drift begin with parents, teachers, and influencers (youth and missions pastors) of middle and high school students, who must encourage the teens to stick with language learning. Even earning C grades is a worthwhile tradeoff so that a working knowledge of a foreign tongue is inculcated. Yes, rigor is required, but look at the potential rewards.

A foreign language learned in high school can become instant college credit. The College Level Equivalency Program (CLEP) offers 90-minute, multiple choice subject examinations in Spanish, German, and French for $90. If the cost of a four-year Bachelor’s degree is $100,000 and the 12 semester hours earned by exam comprises ten percent of that degree, do the math and consider the stewardship opportunity. But what about other languages such as Chinese also taught in high schools? From Afrikaans to Yoruba, New York University offers challenge exams in 40 languages also worth 12 semester hours each.

I am all for young adults taking a “gap year” between high school and college, but most are oblivious to the value of spending that gap year embedded in a foreign culture. If they did so, they then could undergo the Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) with a native speaker evaluator. For about $500, up to 19 semester hours of additional college credit can be earned via one OPI telephone call and transcripted as follows using Spanish as an example (6).