The triennial Urbana student missions conference (sponsored by InterVarsity Christian Fellowship) just ended (December 27-31, 2009). It is held only once every three years, it is mainly for college students, and it is the largest Christian conference in America (20,000 people). It always ends at midnight on New Year’s Eve, with all the people worshiping God and taking communion together as we usher in the new year. It is a powerful experience in which the Holy Spirit really moves. It was no different this time around in that sense, though the speakers and topics changed.
I have been to four Urbanas now—once as a college student, once during my Masters degree, once during my Ph.D., and now as a professor. It is named for its original location—the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—which was where it was held from its inception in 1946 until 2003. Starting in 2006 they moved it to St Louis, MO, because it was a bigger convention center.
Urbana is seminal for me in that, during my senior year in college, it was where God called me to go to seminary and to enter the field of missions and missiology. If it were not for God working through Urbana, I would not be doing what I’m doing today. Every single time I have attended, God teaches me something new. And I am thrilled that 25 Biola students have chosen to come this year too.
What I noticed is the fact that most of these college students are what I would call “Radical Evangelicals” rather than “Conservative Evangelicals” as I explain in this blog. The Bible expositor at Urbana, Ramez Atallah, pointed out that many of the issues discussed at Urbana (poverty, AIDS, Creation Care, sex trafficking, racial reconciliation) would have been extremely controversial thirty years ago. People who cared about such things were dubbed “liberals.” Today, all the college students who attended Urbana were on board with these things, as in “Of course! Why wouldn’t God care about such things, and why wouldn’t these be a part of mission, alongside evangelism?” It is a new day, indeed, for which I am grateful.
Here are some sound-bite quotes from the conference speakers. If you are interested in more, go to the Urbana ’09 website to see the full sermons webcast.
“If we want to work with, and not just for, the poor, we need to shed two blinders: our greed, and our Messiah complex… we should be aiming to make greed, not poverty, history.”
—Ruth Padilla DeBorst (Costa Rica, President of the Latin American Theological Fellowship)
“The problem is not whether Western missionaries are needed or not, the question is: how can Western and non-Western Christians work together?”
—Daniel Bourdanné (Chad, General Secretary of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students, which is the parent organization of InterVarsity)
“If you can’t give away your possessions, you’re possessed by them!”
—Shane Claiborne (Philadelphia, founder of The Simple Way)
“Incarnation involves an attitudinal transformation. Our good intentions are not enough unless they are accompanied by humility. We must listen to the poor by learning their names, serving them, washing their smelly feet, eating their food without bringing out our antiseptic creams, listening to their wisdom and local knowledge, and keeping our mouths shut long enough so the poor can speak.”
—Oscar Muriu (Kenya, senior pastor of Nairobi Chapel)
“We should live to be forgotten.”
—Patrick Fung (Singapore, President of Overseas Missionary Fellowship, formerly Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission)
“Prayer only makes sense if God is absolutely sovereign… prayer is God’s way of conferring on humans the dignity of causality.”
—Sunder Krishnan (India, senior pastor of Rexdale Alliance Church in Ontario, Canada)
“If someone speaks about forgiveness easily, he or she has never forgiven.”
—Antoine Rutayasire (Rwanda, dean of the Anglican Cathedral of Kigali)
“We have limited vision—we see problems, not opportunities… be creative! For example, if you aren’t allowed to proselytize, then advertise!”
—Ramez Attalah (Egypt, General Secretary of the Bible Society of Egypt)
