The sun-splashed campus is a major, multicultural training ground for evangelicals -- a group expanding quickly in the developing world and that wants to reconvert Christianity's traditional strongholds in the West.

With 4,900 students from 100 denominations, Fuller vies with Texas' Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for the title of America's largest seminary. It's also a leading institution on evangelicalism's left flank.

The Pasadena-based seminary has three parts: a conventional School of Theology and two pioneering graduate programs; a seminary-based clinical psychology school; and the School of Intercultural Studies, or SIS.

SIS, which marks its 40th anniversary with a Nov. 7-10 conference, has sent about 3,500 graduates across the world as teachers, administrators, pastors and evangelists. It also helped attract many international students to Fuller's School of Theology.

"Fuller was a pacesetter. We all owe Fuller a lot," says professor Terry Muck of the newer mission school at Kentucky's Asbury Theological Seminary.

Originally, SIS trained mainly mid-career missionaries from the United States and Canada. Gradually, students from overseas became the majority.

Today, those students make up a third of the program, largely because of visa and financial roadblocks faced by internationals hoping to study in the United States.

Fuller also provides training for overseas students in their homelands through Internet "distance learning" and cooperative programs with a dozen international campuses.

Younger evangelicals intend to combine evangelism and social action and, unlike old "social gospel" liberals, emphasize efforts by Christian groups rather than relying on government action.

Dean C. Douglas McConnell says SIS students will work in developing nations where large numbers migrate, the HIV/AIDS epidemic is devastating populations, catastrophes put severe pressures on church leaders, average ages are declining and huge numbers of children are exploited for labor, combat and sex trafficking.

Yet, Fuller analysts also consider the West a growing mission field. In Amsterdam, for instance, just 50,000 of the 735,000 residents are regular churchgoers, with 30,000 in growing immigrant churches that eventually want to re-evangelize the Dutch. In Britain, only 1 percent of those ages 18 to 35 worship regularly.

In the United States, says professor Ryan Bolger, many traditional congregations thrive, but there are growing pockets of thoroughly secularized young adults. To reach them, evangelists are creating "postmodern" fellowships that shed most traditional forms of organized religion. Meanwhile, new immigrants need culturally attuned churches.

SIS's founding mantra was "church growth," meaning mostly numbers. Today it's "church health," emphasizing social impact and deeper Christian devotion. But one aspect of the founders' concept remains: sophisticated analysis of social groups, rather than simply seeking converts one by one.

McConnell stresses another constant. He says zeal for spreading the message to everyone everywhere remains central "for any Christian who has a firm commitment to the uniqueness and amazing offer of salvation in Christ."

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