You should know there's a new slj site! Check it out

 
 
Urbana^® 2000
—the inside scoop
Paul Grant, writer
Madison, WI

By the time you read this article, you may have heard a lot about Urbana 2000, InterVarsity’s Student Mission Convention. Urbana 2000 is the nineteenth convention in more than half a century. The first was held in 1946, on the beautiful campus of the University of Toronto in Ontario. Now the convention is held in Urbana, Illinois.

At Urbana 2000, you’ll have the unique experience of worshiping with 19,000 people from all over the world. You’ll hear story upon story of what God is doing. I went to Urbana 93 as a high school senior. It blew apart my little world, and my life has never been the same since. For the first time I saw the scope of it all—God is alive and active in the world, so much more than I had ever thought. In my small group at Urbana, for example, there were nine young men from seven countries on five continents. After Urbana, I could no longer live, think or worship the same again. I had gotten a taste of something so much bigger, so much grander than my daily drudgery, that continuing my faith on the same comfortable track would be equivalent to going back to the horse ride at the local department store after riding a twenty-story roller coaster.

Between now and December, you may hear a lot about Urbana 2000, much of it using superlative adjectives: biggest, boldest, broadest, most fantastic, most flamboyant, most frenetic! Are you the sort to tune out or turn off to such purple prose and shameless verbosity? Then read on for the inside scoop!

The theme for Urbana 2000 is “Because God first loved us.” It’s taken from 1 John 4:19: “We love [Jesus, each other, the whole world] because he first loved us.” God loves us! When we begin to know the love of God, we respond and join in calling all creation to worship God. At the convention, many of the dialogues, seminars and speeches will elaborate on the theme—for example, “Because God first loved us, he created us in his image” and “Because God first loved us, we love the downtrodden people of the world.”

Psalm 117:1–2 says: “Praise the Lord, all you nations! Extol him, all you peoples! For great is his steadfast love toward us, and the faithfulness of the Lord endures forever. Praise the Lord!” How bold! Here is David, the king of a small and relatively insignificant country in its day, telling everyone to worship his God. That could sound arrogant, except that David justifies his call: “for great is his steadfast love.”

The nations will worship Jesus because of his love toward them. That love moved him to die for us, to suffer abuse for us, to serve us to the point of humiliation. Thanks be to Jesus, because without such love, God would be a holy monster—holy, but with no love to pull us out of the mess we’re in. God loves us, and the content of the Urbana convention will build from that foundation. At the same time, Urbana 2000 will help students develop a broader understanding of God’s ultimate purposes in the world.

Our student generation has shown a remarkable and much-needed commitment to worshiping God. As our Creator, Savior and Head, God is worthy of praise: he deserves our praise because every breath we take is a gift from him. Urbana 2000’s director, Barney Ford, pointed out to the Urbana 2000 planning team that older generations tend to feel closest to God when they are doing things, like evangelism and service. By way of contrast, our general age group—say, late teens to early twenties—tends to understand worship as using our voices to proclaim Jesus’ glory. We often use the words worship and singing worship songs synonymously.

While our first impulse is to worship in songs of praise, biblical worship is much more than that. One succinct way to describe missions is calling the nations to praise the Lord. Urbana will present the call to worship God as a cornerstone in declaring the biblical basis for missions. If our worship has no legs to carry the gospel to the ends of the earth, no teeth to stop injustice or create justice, or no force to change our lives on Monday through Saturday, it is impotent at best, and maybe even false. At Urbana, we’ll explore a more holistic worship. We’ll stretch our minds by thinking critically about our faith’s implications for our lives. We’ll develop our emotions by learning to feel about injustice as Jesus did. We’ll strengthen our hearts by paring away our hypocrisies. And of course, we’ll exercise our vocal cords by singing songs of praise—passionate, intelligent, diverse, multi-lingual, prayerful and truth-filled songs of praise!

One of the running biblical themes for Urbana 2000 will be God’s passion for community: God lives in Trinitarian community and desires community with humans enough to die for them. We will see that the call to mission is so much more than a few verses at the end of Matthew (the Great Commission), but is in fact one of the central thrusts of the whole Bible.

We will see how worship and mission are inextricably intertwined. Our worship will be combined with prayer for the lost, giving for the hungry and weak, and education about our world. And you’ll meet people who lead amazing lives.

Actually, the people and their stories are among the most memorable treasures you will find at Urbana—more than the sessions or the workshops. When I went, I met a Canadian missionary from Somalia and saw the scars on his body from gunfire. I met a Filipino who helped women in Manila’s slums teach their children to read.

If you take a look at the lineup of speakers, you will probably not recognize the majority of the names. These people are not accomplished orators who spend two hundred days a year preaching at conventions: they are people doing something in the world. Their stories are actually more powerful, because while they are all eloquent and passionate, they back up their words with lives committed to serving Jesus by any means necessary.

When I went to Urbana, my safe little bubble burst. I could hear the cries of the world ever more clearly and see Jesus’ intervention shine ever more brilliantly. When you walk through the exhibitors’ hall, you will see row upon row of missionaries—not hawking their wares like a home improvement show, but willing to talk with you about your options for serving God around the world. You will be amazed at the diversity of their efforts, and moved by the level of cooperation and unity among the mission agencies.

Sometimes it seems that Christianity is a million miles from our professors and the people in our classes, but at Urbana you will see otherwise. One time I had a class with an American professor, who spent the better part of the hour mocking Christianity as a dying fad. (Ironically, he was teaching a class on the ancient Babylonians.) And yet the next day I had a class with a nominal Buddhist professor from China, who said that the late twentieth century explosion of Christianity is the most widespread and significant development in human history, including the invention of the wheel. That’s something I want to be a part of. See you at Urbana!