Interview with John Henry

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 My wife, Mary, and I have served with Youth With A Mission for forty years, since our initial year of training in 1985. Our mission is to help university students connect their education, profession, and calling with God’s global purposes. To do that, we formed a team, founded the YWAM Student Centre in 1998, and developed a university ministries training course that has equipped campus missionaries in about 100 cities across 35 countries.

Today, much of our focus is on Haven House Christian Study Center — a new project designed to create a place where students, scholars, professionals, and missionaries can explore the relationship among faith, vocation, discipleship, and global mission.

Haven House is more than a house or a building. It’s a spiritual and intellectual community, because we are loving God with all our hearts and minds. We want it to become a place where students can ask deep questions about purpose, truth, calling, culture, and the future of society through a biblical worldview.

Over the years, we’ve mobilized hundreds of students from more than 100 universities to over 40 nations through internships and mission assignments. Students served alongside ministries, schools, hospitals, and community organizations while integrating their fields of study with service, evangelism, prayer, and vocational discernment.

What excites me most is helping students realize every field — engineering, medicine, education, business, communications, agriculture, or the arts — can become a platform for God’s Kingdom.

 This vision grew from two lifelong passions: world missions and the university.

I began to see that universities were never intended to be spiritually neutral institutions. A book by Charles Habib Malik, a Lebanese intellectual and the first General Secretary of the United Nations, helped me understand something that much of our world has forgotten. Not only did Malik get the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the first UN resolution, passed, but he also wrote a book titled A Christian Critique of the University. 

Malik brilliantly outlined how history’s great universities emerged from a Christian worldview in which the pursuit of truth was connected to knowing God and understanding His creation.

At the same time, I saw students preparing for careers without understanding how their professions could participate in God’s mission. Many assumed missions were only for pastors or evangelists. 

But Scripture and history tell a larger story. God is the original creator, teacher, healer, communicator, architect, and builder. Human creativity reflects His nature. 

You might say the Church worldwide went to sleep and forgot her story. We’ve been commanded to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, but many Christians are looking for their rescue from the world. Another great 20th-century missionary to India, Leslie Newbigin,  in his book Signs Amid the Rubble, compared the worldview of the modern Western Church to Eastern mysticism. The vast majority of Christians are fascinated with end times and the rapture, and they mistakenly think the rapture is an escape. 

What have we forgotten? Mission history shaped education, literacy, medicine, translation, agriculture, transportation, and communications. Christian leaders emerging from universities produced scientific, medical, and technological breakthroughs. Economic and Governmental systems were established from a Biblical Christian worldview, which codified the understanding that God has given to all humanity the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Universities were founded with a missionary purpose, and missionaries were sent to pioneer schools, hospitals, banking systems, farming practices, and churches. Missionaries translated the Bible, and therefore produced dictionaries and printing presses, because the Gospel is intended to touch every part of life.

That vision eventually led us to say “Yes” to pioneering Haven House Christian Study Center — a place dedicated to forming students spiritually, intellectually, and vocationally for lives of service and leadership. We received a call from a local Christian businessman who had been discipled in a house off the Stockton campus over 40 years ago. He was introduced to me because of our work with students. He and his ministry organization partnered with YWAM Student Centre and purchased the house. 

 Our vision is to see a generation of believers who no longer divide the sacred from the secular, and who joyfully participate in God’s amazing mission to bring the glory of the nations to honor and worship Jesus Christ.

We want students to understand that their vocation is intended to be their ministry - their life’s work is their offering — whether they are engineers, teachers, doctors, artists, entrepreneurs, scientists, counselors, or communicators.

Haven House exists to help cultivate that worldview.

Haven House is becoming a place of discipleship, hospitality, learning, mentoring, prayer, and thoughtful Christian engagement with culture and society.

I believe the university remains one of the most strategic mission fields in the world because nearly every sphere of society flows through it — government, healthcare, law, media, economics, education, and technology.

Modern transportation, “going,” and communications technologies, “preaching,”  have also created unprecedented opportunities for global missions. Technology is not the enemy. It is a tool that can help accelerate Christ’s command to “go into all the world and preach the Gospel.”

 Our approach emphasizes integration.

We do not separate spiritual formation from intellectual development or professional preparation.

At Haven House, we want students to sit together with Christian faculty and alumni at mealtimes to wrestle honestly with faith, truth, calling, culture, and vocation. And, through personal mentorships, we will help direct them toward a deeper love for God and their neighbors, and toward practical ministry experiences through service and missions.

After decades of experience leading students to learn humility through real-world service alongside long-term ministries and organizations, we also hope to help them learn to listen, serve, and honor all people made in God’s image.

As Loren Cunningham said:

“The way you discover your gifts is really by serving, not by searching.”