And how its other-focus must confront us

Nathan Brown
Master of Arts (research) student
Avondale College of Higher Education

Revival: I’ve been following the theme through denominational publications over the past few years. I’ve been looking for a particular Bible passage—Isaiah 58—but I’ve been disappointed.

The chapter’s ripe for consideration. These religious people—the people of God, no less—are seeking God with fervor. They worship Him daily and “delight” to know His ways (verse 2). They fast and repent, but God seems unmoved and unresponsive, even silent.

Then, speaking through Isaiah, God responds in a way that confronts them and must confront us. The kind of revival I want from you, says God, is to serve those who need your help. Release people from the things that hold them back. Help the oppressed find freedom. Feed the hungry. Provide shelter to those who are homeless and those who need it. Share clothes with those who don’t have enough (6, 7). Even if we have only a little, God calls on us to be generous to those around us.

It’s remarkable: the spirit of Jesus and the heart of faithfulness to God are so other-focused that even our spiritual renewal is not about us, reaching out instead to the poor, the oppressed, the hurting and the hungry.

In Isaiah 58:8–12, God promises blessings in response to this kind of revival. In effect, He says if the people are less focused on themselves, they’ll find Him working with them and through them to bring healing and restoration. This is the revival the people are seeking, a renewal of their hope and purpose as found in God with a real sense of His presence in their lives and community.

We don’t know how these first hearers of Isaiah’s call to this truer revival responded. But as Jesus confronted the same issues (see Matthew 23), perhaps there are always those who are content with mere religion, while others hear the call to revival in a way that truly changes us and those around us. Perhaps that’s why Isaiah’s voice still echoes and challenges us today.—Adventist World

Nathan is book editor at Signs Publishing Company.

University slogan suits Christians

Nathan Brown
Master of Arts (Research) student
Avondale College of Higher Education

A new slogan and marketing campaign launched by my other higher education provider earlier this year has caught my attention—and imagination.

Deakin University’s new attempt to encapsulate, position and promote itself in a single, bold word is “Worldly.”

As someone who grew up in a church environment, I don’t think I’d ever heard this word used positively, so the idea of successfully pitching this to the university intrigued me. “Worldly,” it seems, is the word that best sums up what Deakin aspires to be and why prospective students should choose to study there.

The continuing roll out of the marketing materials has added to the picture of “Worldly” as a promise to expand a student’s experiences and understandings of our world in a wholistic way, becoming engaged with, interested in and passionate about—as well as relevant and useful to—the wider world. This, as counterintuitive as it might initially sound, is exactly what Christians, churches and church-based entities are called to do and be.

The Christian’s relationship with the “world” should always be one of tension, best summed up by James in a call to care about the world around us, particularly those in need, at the same time as we “refuse to let the world corrupt us” (James 1:27, NLT). It’s in this second sense that the word “worldly” has been a negative and even threatening or dismissive description in most common Christian usage.

However, we also need to reclaim and redeem “worldly”—in the best sense of the word—as part of our sense of identity and mission. After all, it’s the motivation ascribed to God Himself for His mission to our world: “For God loved the world so much that He gave His only son . . .” (see John 3:16, NLT). That mission includes us—and the rest of the world. And we are called to be “worldly” agents of His kingdom mission.

Hope amid the Rwandan horror

Nathan Brown
Master of Arts (Research) student
Avondale College of Higher Education

Carl Wilkens had been country director for the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) in Rwanda for about four years in April 1994, when he found himself in the midst of an unfolding genocide. During the next 100 days, more than 800,000 Rwandans were murdered in a frenzy of ethnically motivated killing. The rest of the world virtually ignored it.

ADRA, Seventh-day Adventist Church and United States government representatives urged Carl and his family to escape, but Carl knew his departure would leave members of his staff in danger. So, while his wife, children and parents evacuated to Kenya, Carl stayed and did what he could to help and protect others caught in the madness.

I’m Not Leaving is the remarkable story of Carl’s experience. It’s not a history of the Rwandan horror—“the stories in this book are completely inadequate to represent the horror and loss that happened during the genocide. It was so much worse than I could ever write.” It’s more personal. Carl tells stories of working to save lives and reflects on how these experiences changed his relationships.

As such, I’m Not Leaving is a story of hope rather than horror—although the horror is only just out of sight. Carl’s task is to personalise the people who endured these tragedies, undoing the work of the murderers whose method objectified their victims. His is a story of courage and faith, demonstrating these matter even in the most brutal of circumstances.

Not greatly developed as a book and drawn significantly from tape recordings Carl made during the genocide, I’m Not Leaving reads as the raw notes and stories from the frontline, where life is heartbreakingly tenuous and stubbornly resilient.

Without labouring its point, Carl’s story is a call to live courageously, faithfully and compassionately, whatever the cost, and to trust God with our lives and our service to Him and others.