World weary

                                        

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Did you see the picture of Marwan, the 4-year-old Syrian boy recently found wandering in the desert near the Syria-Jordan border?

A news photo of the refugee child went viral on social media. It attracted far more attention than the hundreds of Syrian refugees who cross the same border every day and night to escape the murderous war in their country. Turns out Marwan wasn’t alone; he had temporarily fallen behind his family members, who were among about 1,000 Syrians making the chaotic border crossing that particular day. Relief workers reunited the child with his parents about 10 minutes after the photo was taken.

People around the world responded to the photo because it depicted a lost child, dragging a plastic bag with his few belongings, seemingly alone in the world. Who wouldn’t feel compassion for this little boy? His personal, heartbreaking plight is easier to understand than the struggle of millions of refugees experiencing the same thing.

 “A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” That statement is attributed to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, who knew something about engineering death on a mass scale. He understood that most people can’t fully comprehend events affecting great multitudes — especially if those events are happening far away.

Media have radically changed the global landscape since Stalin’s time, however. News travels instantaneously. Digital devices bring us images of tragedies, wars and disasters 24/7, if we choose to watch. But that poses a new problem. The constant onslaught of events and information dulls our senses. We have our own daily problems. We turn away. Americans in particular, living far from many of the world’s conflict zones, tend to turn inward.

“It’s not that Americans are disinterested in foreign affairs, it’s that their interest is finely calibrated,” observes geopolitical analyst George Friedman. “The issues must matter to Americans, so most issues must carry with them a potential threat. The outcome must be uncertain, and the issues must have a sufficient degree of clarity so that they can be understood and dealt with.”

There aren’t that many global crises that neatly fit such criteria in these confusing times. The outcome of the war in Syria is uncertain, but its multiple causes and combatants are anything but clear to us. Does its eventual outcome, regardless of who wins, threaten us directly? Hard to say. One could say the same of the current troubles in Ukraine, Venezuela, Egypt, Thailand, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and other places. Trouble is always brewing somewhere. Let them sort it out, we say. We’re tired of being the world’s policeman. 

“Whether this sentiment is good or bad is debatable,” says Friedman. “I would argue that it is a luxury, albeit a temporary one, conferred on Americans by geography.”

Weary of years of war and overseas entanglements, many Americans are ready to withdraw behind our spacious borders — physically or psychologically — until something so big happens that we can’t ignore it.

That’s a national choice. But God calls His followers to greater things. If we serve Him, we are citizens of the world, no matter how chaotic the world may seem. In my last column, I asked how we can continue to go into the world and make disciples as a new age of upheaval dawns. Withdrawal is not an option for world-hearted Christians, because it implies one of two things: fear or indifference.

God is not indifferent about the world. He is passionately concerned about every people, every culture. The more suffering and turmoil a nation is experiencing, the more intensively He is working to bring His grace and mercy.

“This past month we have seen an amazing outpouring of God's Spirit,” said IMB worker Brady Sample,* who lives in violence-torn Kiev, Ukraine, a nation on the edge of cracking apart. “God is moving. This event is causing people to pray, and while they are praying for peace in the land, God is trying to bring peace into people’s hearts.”

No matter how difficult the destination or the situation, He will go with us. In fact, He’s already there, waiting for us to meet Him.

Don’t miss the appointment.

*(Name changed)

Generational challenge confronts global church

                                      

(PHOTO) SEARCHING FOR ANSWERS—In a Cairo neighborhood, a child walks by an Egyptian flag painted on a wall — with apparent symbols of a Muslim crescent and Christian cross added. As the often-violent struggle for freedom continues in Egypt and other countries, larger demographic forces are at work. Sixty percent of all Egyptians are under 25. The total population of the Middle East and North Africa surpassed 430 million in 2007 and likely will top 700 million by 2050. One in every three people in the region is between 10 and 24. About one in every five people on earth is between the ages of 15 and 24. They want jobs and better lives, but prosperity alone isn’t enough. They want something more. “People here are craving life,” said a mission leader in the Middle East. “They’re craving change and not just political and economic change. Their deep heart cry is for answers.” PHOTO by Joseph Rose


The global spread of democracy doesn’t look nearly as promising as it once did.

High hopes for lasting freedom appear to be fading in Russia, Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia, to name a few countries where authoritarians, extremists, corruption and other forces have undermined fledgling democratic institutions. Dictators have fallen like bowling pins in some places, but the vacuum they left behind hasn’t necessarily been filled by freedom. Elsewhere, police states have proven surprisingly resilient in the face of challenges from globalization, demands for change and the spread of social media.

In the Middle East, epicenter of massive movements for change, “observers are increasingly cynical about the prospects for democracy, arguing that the Arab Spring has turned into an Islamist winter,” reports the journal Foreign Affairs. Radical Islamism is the biggest threat to liberty in the region. However, Foreign Affairs argued that “instead of fretting over Islamists, the international community needs to have a more nuanced conception of political transition in the Arab world and should strive to bolster institutions and economic reforms in post-Arab Spring countries.”

Maybe, but diplomats and democracy activists said the same thing when now-deposed dictators were still in power. Building durable democratic institutions and reforming national economies take time, even under favorable conditions.

Meanwhile, there are larger demographic forces at work worldwide.

New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently compared three major countries: China, India and Egypt. Very different societies, very different governments. “But there is one thing that all three have in common: gigantic youth bulges under the age of 30, increasingly connected by technology but very unevenly educated,” Friedman wrote. “[T]he one that will thrive the most in the 21st century will be the one that is most successful at converting its youth bulge into a ‘demographic dividend’ that keeps paying off every decade, as opposed to a ‘demographic bomb’ that keeps going off every decade. That will be the society that provides more of its youth with the education, jobs and voice they seek to realize their full potential.”
India counted 560 million people under the age of 25 in 2011. Of that number, 225 million were between the ages of 10 and 19. In Egypt, the largest country in the Middle East, a million people are born every nine months, according to one estimate. Sixty percent of all Egyptians are under 25. The total population of the Middle East and North Africa surpassed 430 million in 2007. It’s expected to top 700 million by 2050. One in every three people in the region is between 10 and 24. Asia, by far the largest demographic region of the globe with more than 4 billion people, likely will increase to 5.3 billion by mid-century.

About one in every five people on earth is between the ages of 15 and 24. Eight in 10 of them live in Africa and Asia. As population growth rates stabilize or even decline in the West — particularly Europe — future growth will come almost entirely in the global East and South. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. The “demographic dividend” Friedman identified could benefit many countries — if young workers can fuel productivity and prosperity in once-poor areas of the global East and South.

They want jobs. They want better lives. But prosperity alone isn’t enough for them. Even freedom and democracy aren’t enough. They want something more — and they are absorbing ideas from all directions.

“We’re sitting on a tectonic plate that is shifting,” a mission leader in the Middle East told me last year. “If expectations continue not to be met, we'll see another [political] earthquake. But this is a really good time for anybody who wants to discuss ideas. The marketplace of ideas has changed radically. For the Gospel, we need to be in the conversation.”

Another Christian worker in the region put it this way: “People here are craving life. They’re craving change and not just political and economic change. Their deep heart cry is for answers. What they grew up with is not giving them answers. [The current political turmoil eventually] will create even more of a spiritual harvest. What men meant for evil, God will use for good.”

Most of the people groups currently unreached or unengaged by the Gospel live in the vast eastern and southern regions experiencing rapid population growth. Most of the countries in those regions have a high percentage of children, teens and young adults.

Making disciples among them is the great generational challenge facing the 21st-century church.

Genessa Wells: a brief, passionate life for God

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Everybody remembers where they were on Sept. 11, 2001.

Stan Aaron* remembers even more clearly where he was one day before the 9/11 attacks — awakened with the news that his 24-year-old friend, Genessa Wells, had died in a bus accident in the Egyptian desert. “I wept deeply,” he says, “And I still get overwhelmed with emotion thinking about her.”

Remembering Wells, a Southern Baptist teacher and musician who served in Egypt for nearly two years, has that effect on the people who knew her. Tears, then joy.

“Everyone wanted to be around her,” recalls another of her many American and Arab friends. They couldn’t get enough of her laugh, her goofy comedy routines, the trademark shuffle in her step folks kidded her about.

And her voice. The voice of an angel.

“She sang all the time,” recounts another friend. “Not always praise songs, but most of the time.”
It wasn’t really about music for Wells, though she was a gifted musician. It was about worship. “One of the last times I saw her, we went on a retreat to the beach,” says the friend. “She gave me voice lessons on the beach and made me practice letting my voice go — just allowing myself to praise God and not be timid about it. She pushed me to do it.”

Another colleague learned a lot about worship just by watching and listening to Wells sing: “The Graham Kendrick song, Knowing You, came alive for me as Genessa led us in singing it — beautiful voice, tears streaming down her face, as she sang those lyrics to the Lord.”

Wells, a Houston native and graduate of East Texas Baptist University in Marshall, planned to pursue her study of music in seminary after she came home from Egypt in October 2001. She never made it back. But she packed enough passion for several lifetimes into her brief life. Shortly before she moved to the Middle East in 1999, she wrote:

“I could give up (on overseas service) and get married and become a music teacher. All of this is very noble and to be quite honest, sounds good to me! But in my heart, I want to change my world — more than I want a husband and more than I want comfort. I need this opportunity to grow and to tell others about Jesus. One of my favorite praise songs says, ‘I will never be the same again, I can never return, I’ve closed the door.’”

Two years later, in her last email home, she quoted another praise song:

“‘Open the eyes of my heart, Lord, open the eyes of my heart, I want to see you … shining in the light of your glory …’ It seems that everything we do comes down to one thing: His glory,” she said. “I pray that all our lives reflect that. … It seems like a floodgate has been opened in my heart [to share God’s love]. I have a passion for it I never knew God had given me. He’s given it to me for His glory.”

She struggled with doubts, fears and anxieties like everyone else. But she found God even more real in the depths of her despair, and her strength was renewed: “If we never step on the rock in front of us, we go through life at the same shallow level where we started,” she said.

She shared her passion for God with Egyptians, with Palestinians in refugee camps in Jordan, with Muslims in France, with Bedouin in the desert.

“The desert is becoming one of my favorite places,” she wrote six months before her death. One night under the stars, “the Bedouin prepared a meal for us, even made bread for us over a fire. We ate with our hands and washed the stickiness off by rubbing them in the sand. We told riddles in Arabic and English. … I honestly would not want to be anywhere else but here, where God has put me. He gives me more than I can imagine.”

The world-shaking horror of 9/11 overwhelmed the news of a young woman’s solitary death in the desert, at least at first. Yet the story of Wells’ short, luminous life began to be told again and again. The following year, at a camp in Michigan, Southern Baptist “Acteen” girls studying Wells’ life decided to hold a memorial service for her. They included quotes from her letters and emails, words from her favorite songs, sand and camel cutouts to represent her beloved desert.

It was “the most moving presentation ever shared in our times at camp,” said camp leader Karen Villalpando. “The girls will never forget Genessa. I will never forget their simple service and the young woman who inspired it.”

Tom Hovies, who was tutoring middle schoolers at the time, shared Wells’ story with them and asked them to respond. One of them wrote: “Not many people nowadays are willing to give their life to serving God. I think it was incredible for that girl to use her life for the Lord our God.”

More recently, pastor/author David Platt profiled Wells in his bestselling book, Radical.

“Most people in our culture look upon this story as a tragedy,” he wrote. “A young woman spending the last days of her life in the remote Egyptian desert, only to die in a bus accident. Think of all the potential she had. Think of all she could have accomplished. Think of all she could have done if she had not gone there.”

Yet from the perspective of Christ, it is a story of reward.

“Rest assured, Genessa does not regret missing one moment of the American dream in light of the reward she now experiences,” Platt declared. “This, we remember, is the great reward of the Gospel: God Himself. When we risk our lives to run after Christ, we discover the safety that is found only in His sovereignty, the security that is found only in His love, and the satisfaction that is found only in His presence. … [W]e would be foolish to settle for anything less.”

When Genessa Wells’ belongings were returned to her family in Texas, her grieving older sister, June, found a Scripture passage folded into Genessa’s Bible: Philippians 1:3-12. The Apostle Paul wrote that letter under difficult circumstances, to say the least —imprisonment in Rome for the sake of Christ, to be followed by eventual execution.

The last verse in the passage immediately grabbed June: “Now I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that what has happened to me has actually served to advance the Gospel” (Philippians 1:12).

“I knew [then] that she was where she was supposed to be,” June said. “I strive to be the person my sister was at only 24 years of age. To have that legacy, to know that you did what God placed you on earth to do, to serve Him. I miss my sister, but I have no doubt in my mind, heart and soul that we will be rejoicing when we reunite. And when I see her again, she will shuffle toward me, smile that silly grin and squeal, ‘Yay! You’ve come home!’”

*(Name changed)

Holding their breath in Egypt

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For Sabri,* the daily lurch between excitement and fear has settled into queasy uncertainty about Egypt’s future — and what it holds for followers of Christ.

Sabri, a white-collar worker who lives with his family in Cairo, is an evangelical Christian. When massive demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square and other cities sparked national demands for freedom in January, he joined many other Egyptians in hoping positive change might be coming after decades of stagnation and dictatorship.

As a member of Egypt’s embattled Christian minority, he also wondered how Islamic extremists would react to the situation.

Hope and concern, however, took a temporary back seat to terror as chaos spread. Longtime Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak first tried to hang on to power, then lost his grip amid bloody clashes on the streets — and behind-the-scenes maneuvering among contending government factions and the military.

“There were no police on the street,” Sabri recalls of the worst moments leading up to Mubarak’s exit. “It was very scary. We had to guard our homes. We would stay up all night in the street with whatever we could carry — a bat or a piece of metal — just to defend ourselves. There were criminals and guns firing all the night. Everything was moving very fast and we didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. We didn’t know what was right or wrong [politically], so our prayer was: ‘God, whatever You think is right, we are asking for Your will to be applied.’”

Mubarak stepped down Feb. 11, unleashing a wave of euphoria among millions of young Egyptians calling for freedom. Political tensions have eased in the months since, or at least moved to other stages, as the military runs the government while the nation prepares for elections in September. World news coverage has shifted to more violent locales — such as Libya, Syria and Yemen — as movements for change continue to shake the Arab world.

Police have returned to the streets of Egypt’s cities, but crime is on the rise.

“Business is not yet back to normal,” Sabri reports. “The police are scared of taking action because they are afraid the people will attack them.”

Everyone is “holding their breath” and waiting for what happens next, adds a recent visitor, as the young reformists, the old power structure, the military, secularists and Islamists jockey for position. Despite the disillusionment of recent days, a deep sense of pride in the change that has been accomplished remains from the early, heady days of the demonstrations.

“They are proud of what they have done, and there seems to be a sense of hope about the future that we haven’t really seen in the past,” says the visitor, who lived in Egypt for many years. “There’s also a great deal of caution, like they’re trying not to get too excited. One man said, ‘It’s going to be five years before we see the results.’”

What about prospects for minority Christians, who continue to suffer attacks by Muslim extremists?

The worst such incident in recent weeks occurred May 7, when a radical Muslim group, the Salafis, assaulted a Coptic Christian area of Cairo. The attack resulted in 12 deaths, at least 200 injuries and the burning of two churches. Enraged, Copts took to the streets to fight back. The Salafi movement, Coptic leaders charge, is trying to foment sectarian civil war between the Muslim majority and Coptic Christians, who comprise about 10 percent of Egypt’s 83 million people.

The conflict illustrates divisions that could sabotage change throughout the Arab world, according to Anthony Shadid and David D. Kirkpatrick of The New York Times.

“The revolutions and revolts in the Arab world, playing out over just a few months across two continents, have proved so inspirational to so many because they offer a new sense of national identity built on the idea of citizenship,” they wrote in a May 21 article examining the fissures confronting reform movements.

“But in the past weeks, the specter of divisions — religion in Egypt, fundamentalism in Tunisia, sect in Syria and Bahrain, clan in Libya — has threatened uprisings that once seemed to promise to resolve questions that have vexed the Arab world since the colonialism era. … [T]he question of identity may help determine whether the Arab Spring flowers or withers. Can the revolts forge alternative ways to cope with the Arab world’s variety of clans, sects, ethnicities and religions?”

The situation is “supremely complicated,” says Sabri, who urges outsiders not to jump to conclusions about where Egypt is headed. “For Mubarak to step down, that’s a miracle. For unity between average Egyptian people in the street — Christians and Muslims together — that’s a miracle that’s still happening now. There are miracles happening from a spiritual point of view.”

The many young, educated people who demonstrated for democracy in Tahrir Square support religious liberty for all Egyptians, he believes. Other forces do not — including the influential Muslim Brotherhood, banned under Mubarak but now allowed to participate in politics.

“I would be very concerned if the Muslim Brotherhood or the extremists get power over the parliament,” Sabri warns. “If they write the new constitution, it will be more tight on us as Christians. They’re not going to do it through violence. They’ll try to do it very smoothly so they don’t lose international support.”

Some Christians don’t intend to stick around to find out which scenario plays out. They’re leaving the country, or considering it. Sabri, however, isn’t going anywhere. He’s using this historic moment to share the hope of Christ with other Egyptians.

“Muslims are asking a lot of direct questions — questions we’re not used to being asked” without years of relationship building, he says. “Now you can meet somebody in the subway and he or she wants to know the truth.”
*(Name changed)

After Osama's death: violence or mercy?

Flying into Cairo on the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, we heard something terrible was happening in New York and in Washington, D.C., the city we had departed approximately 15 hours earlier.

A photographer and I had come to gather material for a profile of the great Egyptian city. But as we watched the planes fly into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on our hotel-room TVs — and learned who was behind the attacks — we wondered if and when we would be able to leave the hotel, much less the country. How would a couple of nervous Americans fare on the “Arab street” in that moment?

The next morning, we decided to find out.

No sooner did we emerge from a taxi in a Cairo neighborhood than we were surrounded by a crowd of Egyptian Muslims — not to be taunted or threatened, but to be comforted. They led us by the arm to a nearby coffee shop and surrounded our table, offering the passionate expressions of friendship and condolence for which Arabs are famous.

They didn’t want to believe Muslims had participated in the airborne attacks on thousands of innocents. They begged us to convey their grief and deepest sympathies to the victims’ families and to all Americans when we went home.

“We would never do this,” one man urgently repeated, tears in his eyes, as he gripped my hand. And he meant it.

But Osama bin Laden would do it.

A veteran terrorist determined to exact revenge for his many grievances against America and the West, bin Laden was quite willing to plan the attacks, carry them out through his al-Qaida terror network — and proudly claim responsibility for them. And it was only the beginning, he promised. Many more assaults would come and many more innocent people would die until the terrorists’ aims were accomplished.

So began the attacks and counterattacks, the violence and retaliation, the skirmishes and full-scale wars that continue to this day across multiple borders. But Osama bin Laden is dead, shot down May 1 in a U.S. operation after a nearly decade-long manhunt that began in the days following 9/11. Few war-weary people — not just in the West but also in the Muslim-majority nations most affected by his bloody ideology — will mourn him.

Will he become a martyr? An enduring symbol of radical Islamic defiance of the decadent West? An inspiration to new waves of terrorist true believers? Perhaps. Even if al-Qaida has suffered a mortal blow, others will take up its radical cause. The United States and other nations will take the actions they see as necessary to defend themselves and their interests. The cycle of attack and counterattack might continue.

However, the “Arab Spring” now under way in many parts of the Middle East and North Africa suggests an alternative future. Millions of young adults are bravely — and nonviolently — pushing for change and freedom, even in the face of violent repression in some countries. Their aspirations, openly expressed on the streets and through the potent tools of social media, suggest that history might (emphasis on might) have rendered the bin Ladens of the world irrelevant.

These peaceful revolutions will be hijacked by extremists or crushed by dictators in some places, but in others they will take root.

In another generation, young Muslims might even reject radical Islamism altogether. Naïve? Who would have believed that the Soviet empire would collapse in the space of a few years? The pace of change in our era is unprecedented in human history.

Whatever happens in the political realm in the days to come, however, an unseen kingdom is silently spreading across the region: the kingdom of God. It is a kingdom of justice and mercy, and its power comes from divine love, not weapons of war. It is beholden to no earthly nation; it transcends all cultures.

Muslims, like all other people, hunger for God. Millions of Muslims are seeking Him. More and more are finding Him through His Son, Jesus Christ. Persecution of Christians and churches in the Muslim world has increased, along with the exodus of many traditional Christians targeted by extremists. Yet reports of Muslims deciding to follow Christ, regardless of the consequences, continue to emerge from across the world. They continue to tell of dreams and visions of Jesus, of their desire for a close relationship with a God of mercy, of indescribable joy when they meet Him.

As we walked the streets of Cairo that sad day after 9/11, a Muslim man approached us near Al-Azhar University, the intellectual center of Sunni Islam for more than a millennium. Every night for years, he said, when he closed his eyes to sleep, he had seen a bright cross. “What does this mean?” he asked. We told him of the Lord who extends mercy and salvation to all who seek Him.

Don’t be afraid to tell the person who may ask you. The love of Christ is a far more powerful force than hatred, fear, war or vengeance.

Cry of Arab youth: 'Enough!'

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It’s no coincidence that so many of the people you see demanding change on the streets and squares of Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Yemen and other countries in the Arab world are young.

They’re the expanding majority, for one thing. Two of every three people in the Middle East are under 24. Half of greater Cairo’s 18 million people are under 30.

And they’ve had it.

“Kefaya!” (enough) is the Egyptian Arabic word heard loud and clear in many of the protests. It’s also the unofficial name of a grass-roots political reform movement in Egypt, but it has taken on a far wider and deeper meaning in recent days. It has become a cry of anger, of despair — and of determination. Young people in the region have had enough of being ignored. Enough of being abused. Enough of being silenced. Enough of being forgotten. Enough of being left behind as the rest of the world rushes ahead.

“The regimes and the leaders are the ones under fire, but it’s really about despair over the future,” said Sami Alfaraj, director of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies, in an interview with the Associated Press.

Egyptian opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei
admitted as much. “It’s all [led by those age] 30 and below … who want a future and a hope,” he told a reporter as the protests gained momentum.

Food shortages — and food prices — in many Arab countries are increasing. Jobs are decreasing. Opportunities for young adults with good educations to get ahead often depend on family “connections” and bribes. Political, social and religious freedoms vary from country to country, but they generally fall far below the liberties Arab young people see their counterparts enjoying in other parts of the world.

David, 23, an Egyptian-American follower of Christ, will never forget the first time his parents took him to visit relatives in Egypt. He was talking loudly on the street when his parents nervously told him to be quiet.

“I can say what I want!” he protested.

“No you can’t,” they sternly warned him. “This is Egypt!”

In that moment, David understood why his grandfather, an Egyptian Christian pastor, had left his beloved homeland many years before. “Why do people come to America, like my grandfather?” he asked. “Because of the freedom of speech and religion. These are the kind of rights every human deserves and that we don’t have in Egypt.”

Not yet, but change might be coming.

Customs die hard in ancient societies, however. The youth-oriented culture that dominates the West remains a foreign import in the Middle East, despite the nightclubs and pop scene in Cairo, Beirut or Amman. Youth still defers to age, parents, elder brothers, tribal chiefs, imams, kings. Young, unmarried men have little standing in most communities. Young women — even less.

MORE THAN HALF THE WORLD

But the sheer number of young people has skyrocketed throughout the region —and in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Europe and North America are aging; much of the rest of the world is getting younger.

“If you look worldwide at the percentage of the population under the age of 30, it’s more than 50 percent,” says Mike Lopez, director of the International Mission Board’s student mobilization team. “That age group is going to make a significant difference, for better or for worse, in the state of global affairs in the future. How are we addressing this in our evangelism strategies?”

By 2009, the number of college students worldwide had more than doubled — to 130 million — over the previous 50 years, according to Ken Cochrum, strategist for student-led movements at Campus Crusade for Christ.

“If taken as a whole, this generation of college students would constitute the world’s 10th-largest country,” Cochrum reported in the August 2009 edition of Lausanne World Pulse. Forward-looking governments “have realized that their future depends upon a well-educated population who can compete in today's borderless ‘glocal’ economy.”

Those governments, joined by corporations and advertisers, “invest millions of dollars each year attempting to influence students and the choices they will make for the rest of their lives,” Cochrum observed. “What about the church? What level of urgency and intentionality do we give to making disciples and building Christ-centered movements among students today?”

Today’s students, he stressed, “will determine tomorrow’s culture. ... The next few years represent a significant window of opportunity.”

That certainly applies in the Middle East, where millions of students and other young adults have had “enough” of the old way and want something new. They’re looking to others their age to lead the way.

There’s a historical precedent worth considering: Jesus, who spent part of His childhood in Egypt, was about 30 when He started turning that part of the world upside down.