When the “mission field” is difficult to visualize or relate to, students may slip into a default view:
A) “Missionaries” are usually someone else,
B) “Missions” are always somewhere else.
There are far too few who have gone to the uttermost parts and I join with you in beseeching the 'Lord of the Harvest' to send forth laborers. But I also recognize that He does not intend to send most of our students to distant lands. 90+% of all college students will probably be in God's will as they spend their lives working in/near the major metropolitan centers of this country, most of them in traditional marketplace careers.
CityLights Urban Projects are designed to help give new eyes and new hearts to these students to embrace God's call to be what they should be where they are.
As the Lord helps us continue to grow in inculcating lifestyles of witness and grace into our students, CityLights can play an invaluable part in shaping life directions. I'd like to encourage you that there are several discipleship issues where short intensive experiences like these may help them make breakthroughs:
(1)The call of God on every believer's life, "You are my witnesses…." This, in scripture, usually involves risk and faith-deepening dependence on God as one leaves one's comfort zone and takes God's love to "the unlovely, the least, the lost". CityLights reinforces taking risks….
(2)Careers--these are gifts God gives for service to the body of Christ and to the world that God seeks to bless and draw to Himself. A disciple's choices of how to use career should probably not be controlled by climate, scenery and where the most money can be made, but by where their giftings and skills are most needed for the Glory of God. For example, a believer with a new medical degree may evaluate opportunities very differently than a non-believer when given a choice of going to a suburban community with 1 doctor for 2,000 residents, versus an urban one where there is 1 doctor for 20,000…or none at all. The likely location where the great majority of today’s students will live out most of their lives is in, or near, the great urban centers of our country (in 1800, 2.5% of the world lived in large cities, in 1900, it was 9%, in 2000, 50+ %). InterVarsity's task, in part, is maturing them as disciples and servants to live the Gospel in these very places. CityLights can help show them how…
Other consideration's include:
(3) The extremity of need in most core cities, and the riches of faith we find there. The city has so much to teach our students. In the suburbs, folk may be distracted from their own spiritual poverty because of the physical resources they have available (the "Laodocian Principle"). But in broken cities, the myths of self-sufficiency are laid bare. Because of this, the cities are often where the deepest wells of faith are found--the true riches of radical dependence and trust in God. "You will never know that God is all you need until God is all you have." Giants of faith I've met are often folk with little else. CityLights will stretch their faith…
(4) The disproportionate emphasis in scripture on God's concern for justice, mercy and compassion to be shown the oppressed, defenseless, widow, orphan, poor. The Apostle James boils down the heart of a biblical ethic of society to this--"pure religion and undefiled is to
care for widows in their distress and orphans…." Have some of our students not personally seen this modeled in their previous experiences? Some students may relate to my own background: because of lack of exposure or opportunity, I was benignly indifferent toward widows (which could include women left to raise families alone, like single mothers) and orphans (fatherless children). CityLights can help teach them to see and to care….
Finally (5), we can consider the radical witness that Gospel priorities have to non-Christians on a secular campus. In our culture where production and consumption are twin altars, the evidence of lives committed to mercy, justice, grace and servanthood are not merely "candles in the rain" but "searchlights". This is why Mother Theresa's life commanded such attention and respect, and in part, Diana's as well. CityLights students can be "lighthouses" as they form communities back on campus committed to demonstrating God's love to the 'least of these'. Living in a generation when dreams and heroes have died, one of the deepest felt needs of students--Christian and non-Christian--is significance, something big enough to be truly worthy of their lives. As we seek to reach this emerging millennial generation for Christ, discipleship programs that demonstrate the Gospel give credibility to everything else we do and say.
Our prayer is that with your involvement and help, CityLights continues to grow as a strategic program for discipling your students, healing them by the Gospel and leading them more deeply into God's presence and purposes, growing in them His heart for the world.
All of this, for the sake of the campus and the glory of God.
Thank you for your partnership in the Gospel!
