SST program, today a number of SST units make links with MCC service

workers or with indigenous Mennonite leaders and institutions. As originally

stated, SST's objectives were 1) to examine and experience the culture of

another country; 2) to participate in the giving of service to people in need; 3)

to experience an intensive relationship as part of a small group with one or

two faculty members before he [or she] has decided on his [or her] collegiate

and vocational goals; and 4) to contribute to a climate of international

understanding and interest on the Goshen College campus.³¹By living with

host families throughout their SST stay, students are immersed in another

language and culture, forced to "break out of the shell" of their own culture

and "exposed to human need" and thereby "motivated to understand and work

at the human problem."³²Wilbur Birky, director of the SST program since

1994, now proposes that the incarnation can indeed enrich one's

understanding of the SST vision:

Let us propose the Incarnation as an act of divine imagination rooted in a profound realization that even God could not know and understandthe human condition without entering intoit, to experience it in the body. That was a true cross-cultural experience. So a description of at least the early parts of Jesus' incarnation applies aptly to the SST experience: it is to give up one's customary place of comfort, to become as a child to learn a new language and eat in new ways, to be received into a new family, to work in the mundane "carpentry shop," to attend the local house of worship, to question and be questioned, to experience frustration and success, and to learn to serve in the very "thick" of life. This is service-learningin the context of crossing overinto the life of the "other."If necessary for God, how much more so for us is this knowledge by experience for compassionate action.33

31_{"A New Program for Goshen College," 20 May 1967, 4-5.}

32_{"The Study-Service Trimester Abroad," March 1971, 11.}

33_{Wilbur Birky, "SST: Vision, History, and Ethos," 1997-98 SST Faculty}
Handbook, Goshen College. Emphasis in original.

18