*This is the seventh installment in a series of articles that are designed to help unpack the practical implications of the We Have a Dream declaration that has been entrusted to us as a family of Friends here in Mid-America. Using Acts 2:17 as a holy compass, We Have a Dream seeks to discern and describe the specific directions that God is currently calling the people of EFC-MAYM to take so that the “dream of the gospel is lived out … in our local churches, in the communities where our churches serve, and in the family of churches called Evangelical Friends Church-Mid America Yearly Meeting.”
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.’”
– St. Anthony the Great (251-356), The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
Spring is in the air here in Mid-America. The temperature is beginning to rise, the flowers are beginning to bloom, the song birds are beginning to return, and spring training is in full swing as baseball fans prepare expectantly for opening day.
While most of us are eager to get back outside again at this time of year, many others are passionately engaged in an indoor event that has become one of the most anticipated rites of spring in our country. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament will provide an opportunity for hundreds of talented, young athletes from 68 of the best collegiate teams in the nation to compete for a national championship. Famous for its unpredictable bracket busters and unbelievable buzzer beaters, this month-long journey to the final four has become better known over the years as “March Madness.”
Oddly enough, there is another remarkable journey taking place this month that will go largely unnoticed for the vast majority of Americans, even though its significance is ultimately much more far-reaching and long-lasting than anything that may happen on a basketball court.
From March 12-19, approximately 140 high school students from across Mid-America will travel south of the border to invest their entire spring break in loving, serving, encouraging and learning from their Mexican brothers and sisters as together they seek to know Christ and make Him known. “Spring Invasion,” a short-term mission program sponsored by EFC-MAYM in cooperation with Coahuila, Mexico Friends Churches, has been hosting student mission teams in Mexico since 1993. Spring Invasion allows students to participate in an affordable, intensive, foreign mission experience in a cross-cultural setting. Invasion also provides a place for youth groups to be challenged and stretched together, discovering the godly pleasure that comes from Christ-like sacrifice and service. Invasion not only helps students develop a mission-minded world-view, but also allows them to take a beginners-level peek at exploring a missionary life and ministry calling for themselves.
And so, it begs the question: While so many other young adults in our country will spend the bulk of their time and money in various forms of self-indulgence over spring break this month, why would so many young men and women from our Friends churches across Mid-America be willing to sacrifice their entire spring break in order to spend themselves on behalf of others? And in a day when so many of our oldest voices are campaigning for the construction of higher and thicker walls between the United States and Mexico, why would so many of our youngest voices cry out for the opportunity to build deeper and stronger bridges with our Mexican neighbors? How does one explain this version of “March Madness”?
Perhaps it has something to do with a good and beautiful dream:
We have a dream that the youth in the church be equipped as disciple-makers. What if every day was like a mission trip? What if adults saw the children and youth of our churches as warriors in the Kingdom, and we walked with them and also sent them out? What if we gave more space for new expressions of the church lived out? (cf. 1 Tim 4:12)
It was a dream like this that led a young man named Anthony, the son of wealthy landowners, to abandon his earthly fortune in order to pursue a heavenly one. “If you want to be perfect,” Jesus said, “go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasures in heaven” (Mt 19:21). In obedience to the call of Christ, Anthony gave away some of his family’s lands to his neighbors, sold the remaining property, and donated the proceeds to the poor. He then left home to live an ascetic life in the Egyptian desert where he became better known as “Abba Anthony,” a spiritual warrior who founded a new and increasingly necessary expression of the church that we now know as the monastic movement.
And it is a dream like this that continues to lead many other young men and young women in our midst today to make similar sacrifices in order to follow the call of Christ upon their lives as fully devoted disciples of Jesus. This dream has led some of our young adults to leave their families here in Mid-America in order to serve as disciple-making missionaries in Africa, India or China. This same dream has led others to leave the comforts of home in order to establish new disciple-making ministries right here in Mid-America among our unreached neighbors in Lawrence, Oklahoma City and Houston.
I don’t know about you, but I am convinced that we could use a lot more “dreamers” who are obsessed with this type of “madness” in our churches, and in our world today. As Christian missionary-martyr Jim Elliot once wrote in his journal while serving among the Huaorani people in eastern Ecuador, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.”
“Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith and in purity” (1 Timothy 4:12)
– David O. Williams, General Superintendent
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