GYC 2025: Seeing the Invisible

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

Stephen Waterbrook

The Fire that Sends

Dear Heavenly Father, we have this consecrated time where we can ponder our lives.

We're here not by accident on this New Year's Day, but we're here to seek You as You reveal to us the invisible things of our lives.

And so we pray that during our time together, we will catch a glimpse of that invisible will that you have for our lives and how we can meet you at that burning bush and see you in a new way.

Please send your angels and your spirit as we spend this time together.

I am honored and humbled to say that I have been a part of this movement from its earliest spark, Before we knew what it would become, and frankly, I never imagined we would reach the year 2025.

When we packed up after that first small conference in Southern California and prepared for the second in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I remember the phrase that passed almost reverently from person to person, something is happening.

We said it because we believed it, that God himself was stirring, that we were witnessing the first vibrations of the last great movement before the return of Christ.

We knew we were entering the final sprint of Earth's history.

In those early days, we operated on conviction more than capacity.

I remember sitting with friends on borrowed furniture, stuffing folders, addressing envelopes, licking stamps, and mailing invitations to that first GYC conference.

We had no budget, only credit cards and faith.

We were literally putting money we didn't have onto plastic, trusting that if God had truly called us, he would pay the bill.

You could say that GYC, as you'll see on the slide, is partly responsible for nearly everything most precious in my life.

I met my wife Katie through this movement.

She has been my closest ally in both adventure and exhaustion.

And somewhere between those conferences and the mission fields that followed, we found ourselves with 3 children who I pray will catch the same vision.

Children who already sense that faith was never meant to stay within the borders of convenience and comfort.

And for that reason alone, I will always be grateful that GYC exists.

Tonight or this afternoon as we open Exodus 3, we are stepping again onto holy ground.

Whenever God's people settle into comfort, He kindles something that demands attention.

He does not necessarily begin with institutions or committees.

He begins with a single soul who stops long enough to notice that a bush is burning.

So let us open the Bible together in Exodus 3.

In Exodus 3 we find This passage, and the angel of the Lord appeared to Moses in a flame of fire from the midst of a bush.

So he looked and behold, the bush was burning with fire, but the bush was not consumed.

Then Moses said, I will now turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn.

This afternoon we're discussing from the fire to the nations.

I was born in Muskegon, Michigan in February of 1978 after a record-breaking blizzard and raised in the Lansing suburb of Okemos, a Midwestern town that appeared peaceful from the outside but felt far less so within our home.

My father, an orthopedic surgeon, was quiet and detached.

My mother, a nurse, was loving but unstable, wrestling with alcohol even as she tried to hold our world together.

My sister Sarah and I grew up in a house that could appear normal to strangers but pulsed with loneliness once the doors were closed.

I learned early that conversation was not connection and that stability could vanish without warning.

I had to figure things out on my own, to read the room before I entered it, to make sense of moods that shifted like the Michigan weather.

Ours was an Adventist home and label, but not in life.

I sometimes say I was given a badventist upbringing.

We believed in the framework, but skipped the substance.

On Sabbath, I was allowed to choose between church and sports, and you can guess which 1 an athletic boy chose.

I could recite the songs and navigate the rituals, but I had never met the living God those were meant to reveal.

I went to public school through college, shaped by teachers and peers who valued intelligence, skepticism, and measurable success.

Faith, when mentioned, was something for the sentimental and the weak-minded.

When I left home for college, I believed that effort would save me, that if I worked hard enough, read deeply enough, and achieved visibly enough, the emptiness would retreat.

Achievement offered the control I so craved, a way to manage what I could not heal.

My childhood had been a vast sea of emotional loneliness, and I thought success would build a bridge out of it.

But as I continued my studies, I began to realize that performance was no substitute for peace.

I'd like to take you to the summer between my freshman and sophomore years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which is a great little town if you've never been.

I was enrolled in Biology 102, a compressed summer course that felt like an academic boot camp.

My professor walked in that first morning without greeting, turned on the overhead projector, and with the brisk certainty, with brisk certainty wrote 2 words on the projector.

God on the left and science on the right.

Without hesitation, he drew a thick black line around and through the word God.

And said matter of factly, we're not here to debate.

Then he launched into the day's lesson as if nothing monumentous had happened.

His actions seemed abrupt, unnecessary, almost theatrical, but also in a strange way, like a challenge.

Around me, pens kept moving, but I felt a jolt of quiet resistance.

I barely knew what I believed in at the time, yet something about that casual erasure felt dishonest, as though he had crossed out more than a word.

It planted a restlessness I couldn't quite define.

I left class that day unsettled with questions I didn't yet have the words for.

I only knew that if erasing God was supposed to make life clearer, it hadn't worked.

When I walked out of that biology lecture hall, I told myself that if God were real, he could survive honest scrutiny.

And So in that strange blend of youthful arrogance and sincerity, I resolved to start from 0.

I would suspend belief, not to mock it, but to test it.

Whatever could endure the weight of evidence, I would keep.

I began reading voraciously, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, theology.

I was particularly drawn to the Eastern traditions, to the quiet poise of Buddhism and the serenity promised through detachment.

Suffering, they taught, arises from desire.

I tried mindfulness before the term became fashionable.

Sitting in silence, focusing on breath, chasing stillness.

But beneath the calm, the same old self remained restless, proud, and unbearably aware of its own limitations.

Every system I studied, every practice I tried, came back to the same central premise.

And I knew myself too well to trust myself with my own redemption.

I read the mystics, the skeptics, the modern prophets of progress.

I listened to the physicists who told us that the universe had no purpose, that consciousness was an evolutionary accident, that morality was a biochemical convenience.

I respected their intelligence, but found their conclusions unbearable.

A world without meaning might be explicable, but it was not livable.

If everything was random, then beauty was an illusion and love a neurological trick.

Yet beauty still moved me and love still mattered.

Gradually, against my own expectations, the figure of Jesus began to re-emerge.

Not the domesticated version I had half experienced in childhood, but the historical, disruptive 1 who touched lepers, silenced storms, and forgave executioners.

I had encountered many philosophies that tried to explain suffering.

Only 1 God who chose to share in it incarnationally.

The Fire that Sends

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