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I am sitting here listening to Keith Green live from the Uni versity of the Nations, Kona
Hawaii. He is inspiring the students to consider a life in mission: it is a significant
thing that he is stirring up students at the YWAM University. It rather reminds me of
a lot of things, many of them that seem to be in th e past, like youth and the passion
of youth, like the absence of passionate voices for Jesus in the time of now.
You know it is so easy to be drawn into reminiscence at times but the other response
is to take up the mantle that Keith left behind in that pl ane crash back in 1982. Of
course he wasn¶t the only ³passionate´ voice during that period, Billy Graham was
also pulling great crowds when he held a ´Crusade´ and Jesus followers all over had
a passion for Christ that was probably similar to the early da ys of being a ³Jesus
follower´ when the locals started calling them/us ³Christians´ as a derogative term.
I guess that is what Jesus meant when He said the world would hate us because it
hated Him first. Remember too that He warned us about bei ng ashamed of the
Good News. Ashamed may seem too big a word but how many of us are intimidated
by the competing worldviews of today? How many of us are scared that someone
may ask us about our faith, because we feel we do not have the answers or we may
make a fool of ourselves?
There is no way to compare the 70s and the 80s with the disinterest that we are
experiencing latterly, or is there? The period leading up to the 80s was a period
where the Church had a presence . It wasn¶t only the passion of the people o f God,
but that did help. It was time when Saddleback Church and Willow Creek Church in
America were both founded. The Jesus freaks of the seventies were hippies who
started reading their Bibles .
God was at work during that era in a way that, it seems, He is not working today. Of
course He, being sovereign, is entitled to commence another season. But perhaps
there may be another reason why God seems removed, we may be the reason.
If the Seventies and Eighties were an era of excitement in the Church, and the
Church itself had a certain standing in the community, then possibly we can learn
from the habits and lives of people of faith from a yesteryear and apply that which we
learn to the way we live in this age.
There was a number of things that stood out during the period in question. There
was a high regard for Scripture, as I said earlier the Jesus freaks ³evolved´ from the
Hippy community as a result of reading the Bible and it became a part of their culture
that to quote from the New Testament ³th ey held things in common and they met
daily to study and pray.´
The story is told that Lee Strobel started reading the Bible to ³prove it wrong´
because his wife found Christ. The Bible proved him wrong and now he wrtes books
on what the Bible does say. Saddleback church started with the young pastor and
his wife running a Bible Study from home with one other family attending.
The other thing to say is that we are to be a people of prayer, Jesus taught us how
important this was and challenged us to ³pray the Lord of the harvest to send out
workers to bring the harvest in.´
It is a big job but we can do all things through Christ Jesus who enables us.