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Jim Ramsay, senior director of field ministry for The Mission Society, reports on his experience at Urbana 09. He witnessed what he called "a new generation" of people devoted to God and fighting injustice. 

A new generation

I just finished attending the huge Urbana 2009 student missions conference. Over 15,000 young people gathered to learn about and explore commitment to God’s mission in the world. It has been an amazing time.

As I have listened to the sessions and had well over 100 individual conversations with students, I began to see an exciting pattern develop. It is clear that God is calling a new generation to His mission. No surprise there – every generation is called by God to His mission. Yet each calling has its unique characteristics – each generation has aspects of God’s mission that is revealed with more clarity than other generations may have had. They come with new passions and new ideas. The same Mission of God, but new facets and approaches.

There is an exciting passion among students to confront issues of injustice and poverty with the power of the Gospel. This isn’t a fuzzy “do-gooder” type of approach, trying to come up with human solutions – the approach that has characterized various “social gospel” attempts of the past. This generation seems to be gifted with a radical abandon to Jesus Christ and a willingness to confront systems of poverty and injustice with the light of the Gospel. They seem to experience the deep offense that such systems are to the Creator and feel compelled to challenge and change.

As I listened to them and felt this passion, I realized that it is not a negation of what has gone before, but it really is that God is stirring something new. Those of us who are a bit further along in years – parents, church leaders, mission leaders – need to recognize what God is doing and do all we can to encourage, to advise, and to release this incredible energy and passion.