OpinionJournal - Taste: Meeting in St. Louis

re: Kathy Gilsinan reports: "ST. LOUIS--At the age of 24, Heather Nichols has taught songs to kids in Thailand and has been to Africa twice to assist surgeons. She has led a missionary trip to inner-city Philadelphia and is about to do another. And she closed out her year here in St. Louis with more than 22,000 of her closest friends in Christ. /For five days, the ordinarily sluggish streets of downtown St. Louis were teeming with fresh-faced evangelicals clutching custom-printed Bibles emblazoned with the motto "Live a life worthy of the calling"; 23,000 of these were donated by the International Bible Society, at printing costs between $40,000 and $50,000. /The convention, called Urbana, has been going on triennially for the past 60 years, but this year it finally outgrew the venue at the University of Illinois for which it is named. So the organizers at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship moved the operation to the St. Louis convention center to accommodate its expanding girth; and Urbana Director Jim Tebbe hopes that St. Louis, as a result, will become known not only as the Gateway to the West but also the "Gateway to World Missions." /With more than 300 mission agencies, relief and development organizations, and schools present in a sort of shopping mall for the faithful, the gateway was wide open..."...