GYC 2012 Acts: The Revolution Continues

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Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

GYC 2012 Seminar: Power to Change the World - Jesus, Arabic, and Kale

Elizabeth Williams

Human Rights and the Gospel

This message was presented at the GYC 2012 conference in Seattle, Washington.

For other resources like this, visit us online at www.gycweb.org.

But my name is Mindy Ron, and I teach at Southern Adventist University.

And myself, as well as Paul Howe and Petra Howe, they're right there.

We are going to be presenting a seminar called Power to Change the World, Jesus, Arabic, and Kale.

And I'm gonna be doing the first session this afternoon on human rights and the gospel.

Dear Heavenly Father, thank you so much for Jesus Christ and his love.

Lord, I thank you so much that you died for every single person in this room, and as we behold Christ, we become changed.

Lord, I just ask that you take the words that I'm going to speak today and just fill me with the Holy Spirit, because it's not by might, not by power, but by your spirit.

And I ask that all the people in this room are filled with the Holy Spirit as well.

But ultimately, may we Take what is said today and through the power of your spirit, apply it to our lives so that we can serve others for your glory, Lord.

Thank you so much in advance for just blessing now.

He, a bit older, is originally from India.

1 day, the boy asks the girl to accompany him to his native land.

Like any girl, if you're in love with a boy, she happily consents, leaving her family and friends behind, desiring just to be with her beloved.

After their long journey is complete, the boy takes the girl to a large house, hands her over to complete strangers, and promises to soon return.

Shocked, betrayed, heartbroken, the girl realizes that she has been sold to a brothel and that she must perform sexual services to pay off her debt.

She staunchly refuses to participate in such acts.

Until Being beaten and tortured, she ultimately complies.

A few months later, she is taken to the doctor for a health exam.

I heard it at the United Nations 10 years ago.

I'd never heard about human trafficking before, but this is a human rights issue.

I'm walking down a path in Malawi, Africa.

Has anyone in here been to Malawi, Africa?

So I'm walking down a path in Malawi, Africa.

To my right are these beautiful eucalyptus trees.

There's tea plantations everywhere, and they're electric green.

However, as I continue to walk, I see on this side of me that there's kids washing their utensils in a ditch of dirty water.

On the other side, I see these people that are barefoot, have hardly any clothes on.

Gopani, and the lighting is not the best in here right now, but if you look closely, you can see that her hands are nubs.

She had leprosy back in the 1950s and 1960s and was treated at Malamulo Sanitarium, a Seventh-day Adventist institution at that time period.

She lives in a little teeny mud hut, And when it rains, it's a mud floor.

And basically, she walks like a monkey because of the leprosy that has affected her body.

Guys, this is poverty, and this is a human rights issue.

I walk into a big ward at Malamulo Hospital in Malawi.

It's a malnutrition ward, and there are scores and scores of mothers and babies.

You can't really see this baby, precious, precious child, But when you look into these babies' eyes, it's just like they're dead.

They're lifeless because of malnutrition.

As these babies get food and as they grow, etc., life comes back into their eyes.

Guys, this is hunger and this is a human rights issue.

But the question is, what are human rights and what in the world are we as Seventh-day Adventist Christians supposed to do with human rights issues?

Human rights are rights regarded as fundamentally belonging to all people.

But where in the world did human rights phraseology come from?

Well, what happened was, after World War II and the Holocaust in the 1940s, a group of people got together and they created an organization known as United Nations in 1945.

How many of you guys have heard of the United Nations before?

And 1 of the reasons for the United Nations was to avert a World War III and to avert another Holocaust.

And so as such, they decided to include human rights phraseology in the UN Charter.

And they decided to create a document known as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

How many of you guys have actually heard of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights?

I see a couple of my former students in here, so hopefully at least a couple people have heard of this before.

So Eleanor Roosevelt actually spearheaded this drive.

And here are some of the rights that are included.

Article 5 says, no 1 should be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment.

Article 9, no 1 shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile.

Article 15, everyone has the right to a nationality.

How many of you guys appreciate actually having a nationality?

Petra Howe

What Do We Do With Diversity?

Did everyone have a good night last night?

Welcome to Power to Change the World, Kale, Arabic, and Jesus, or Jesus, Arabic, and Kale.

That's probably the correct order of the words.

This particular seminar, the title has actually been changed.

It is now called, what do we do with diversity?

Dear Father in Heaven, we thank you for your love for us.

I have no right to be up here speaking this morning.

I pray that you will be our speaker this morning.

May self be dead and out of the picture and may your name be glorified.

I pray that each and every person in this room, including myself, may have our ears opened to hear your message for us today.

I sat bolt upright in my bed under the mosquito netting.

Pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew, pew.

I nestled back down under the sheets ready to go back to sleep when I heard a voice.

And I looked out my bed and there was my dad on his hands and knees next to my bed.

We went on our hands and knees out of my room into the hallway.

There, my sister Martina and my mother were already waiting on their hands and knees.

All around us, We heard explosions, screams, and shattering glass.

Dad said, we need to go down to the basement.

There was a staircase which led down to a half basement connected to our house.

But before we could get to that staircase, there was a tall glass door and floor to ceiling glass windows that we had to crawl past.

Screams were coming from that direction, shattering glass.

Dad dashed across it, got behind the brick wall on the other side.

And then we went down the stairs into the basement.

There were still many windows, but there was 1 room with no windows, the hot water heater room.

We huddled in there together, and dad began explaining what was happening.

For the past 8 months, we had been living in Kigali, Rwanda.

My dad was working at the Adventist dental clinic.

We were planning on staying for at least 6 years.

I was almost 8 years old, and I was loving it.

And then that night, April 1994, my dad was sitting up late listening to the Voice of America on his shortwave radio.

As he was listening, he thought he heard a distant explosion.

A couple minutes later, a phone call was from a friend who had connections with the UN.

Homan, the president's plane was just shot down as he was returning from some meetings.

There's trouble on the way." A few hours later, at 5 a.m., a car bomb exploded just a couple blocks from our house.

It was the signal that unleashed a flood of terror on our city.

That car bomb was the thunder that I heard.

And those raindrops hitting our tin roof were bullets.

2 tribes, the Hutu and the Tutsi, an age-old conflict finally come to a head, such hatred for each other that they could no longer live and function in each other's presence.

In a hundred days, A million people shot, hacked apart, and bludgeoned to death, mostly Tutsis.

And our Adventist dental clinic compound was at the center of the conflict zone.

Bombs, grenades, and bullets coming from all directions over our roofs.

We huddled in that hot water heater room.

My mom told us the story of Elisha and the angel army that protected his city, the chariots of fire.

Gradually, as there began to be breaks in the fighting, people started coming to our house.

We were the only house with a basement in our part of the city.

Missionaries running from bush to bush, crawling along the ground with mattresses over their backs to protect them from bullets, Rwandese, Tutsi fleeing for their lives, and Hutu who did not want to participate in the killing, adults and children, 50 of us crowded into that dark, dank basement.

After some time, a crowd of 20 men came to the gate of our compound.

Paul Howe

Effective Missions: Moving Beyond Good Intentions

Welcome to Jesus, Arabic, and Kale, Power to Change the World.

The title of my seminar will be Effective Missions, Moving beyond good intentions.

Now it's a little bit intimidating for me to follow up after Mindy and Petra, both of whom are very excellent and skilled and smooth presenters.

So it's even more important than normal that we start out with prayer this morning.

Our Father in Heaven, this morning I ask that you send your Holy Spirit to this room.

Put your words in my mouth, your thoughts in my head.

Lord, I also pray that the Holy Spirit will be an interpreter for me, so that if I am unclear in the things that I say, that people will perceive them clearly.

If I happen to say something wrong, that you'll block that out.

And speaking of blocking out, Lord, I pray that your angels would kick the devil and his angels out of this room, so we would have peace and your pure sweet presence here this morning.

As you are no doubt aware, I am the fortunate husband of Petra.

And as I was listening to Petra speak this morning and watching her, as for me watching her and even following her are 2 things that I'm rather accustomed to, I started remembering back to an earlier point in our relationship shortly after we became engaged.

We didn't really tell anyone for a while, but after about a month, we figured we should draw a few people in, particularly her parents, because she was not yet 21.

In the state of Maryland, we would need her parents go ahead.

So at the time, I was working in the state of Maine at the US Attorney's Office and she was with her family in Maryland.

And so I cut out of work a little bit early and drove all night down to Maryland and got up early the next morning.

The whole family, you can easily picture this, is sitting around the table, right?

And they're wondering what in the world I'm doing there, having cut out of work, which is fairly unusual for me.

You'll see a little later in the story, I tend to be very focused on work and getting things done.

But they were, you know, all ears as to what was happening.

And so various topics of conversation went around and around the table.

And I was just trying to gauge the situation and see when is the right moment.

How can I set this very important conversation up correctly?

As I was looking around, I noticed that the grass in the front lawn and back lawn was pretty long.

And in my family, we often show love and appreciation by doing stuff.

I'll just get up and go mow the lawn and show that I'm kind of like a hardworking, upstanding sort of guy that will be able to support Petra, you know, the perfect son-in-law.

So I jumped up, left the breakfast table, went out, fired up the mower, it was an old push mower, and started mowing.

And the rest of the family was like, oop.

And eventually Petra's dad had to leave and go to work, so he was gone.

Now, Maryland, 4th of July, we're talking like 95 degrees with ridiculous humidity.

So I'm pushing this mower and sweating and sweating and sweating, thinking very happy thoughts about how I'm giving myself the perfect setup.

Meanwhile, Petra and her family are inside like, what's going on here?

So I finished with the back lawn and moved toward the front lawn.

As I went through the gate, I failed to close the gate.

Now, I not only failed to close the gate, but I failed to introduce you at this point to the main character of the story, whose name is Tinka.

Tinka is a rambunctious, fun-loving, cute English bull terrier belonging to Petra's parents.

Among her many attributes, staying at home is not part of the list.

And so when Tinka saw this window of opportunity, She made a break for freedom, unobserved by anyone.

In fact, it was only later, after I was just putting the mower back in the shed and coming into the house, into what I thought would be kind of a triumphal entry, that I heard something that sounded like a weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The family had discovered that the dog was gone, and they noticed that the gate was open and immediately realized that it was me who had left open the gate.

But I was still feeling good and rosy with all this exercise and sweat and I thought it might be possible to grab victory from the jaws of defeat.

And so I said, look here, it's really easy.

You know Tinka, She's an extremely annoying, rambunctious, kind of aggressive dog.

The first thing she's going to do is just go find someone, jump all over them, maybe knock down their kids.

So let's just call the pound that's where she's going to be.

Now if I had approached this a little more diplomatically and not used some of these negative words in describing the beloved family pet, maybe we would have gone to the pound.

And I just need to parenthetically interject here that this story I'm telling, it's my version of the story.

If Petra was up here, we might hear a slightly different version.

So with that said, Petra and her mother and sister started walking through the subdivision.

It was a very large subdivision with a lot of streets, walking along calling, Tinka, Tinka, Tinka, and crying and crying and crying.

I should have joined in with the calling and with the crying, but I didn't.

Instead, I kept harping on this fact that we needed to go check out the pound.

Kept talking about how Tinka was just so annoying that she was bound to get in the pound sooner or later.

And then when that seemed to not be having the desired effect, I inserted a few other golden nuggets like, why are you calling her?

Why do you think that she might come now?

About 2 hours later, the girls were cried dry, and everyone was pretty grumpy.

We came back home, contacted the pound, and she'd been there the whole time.

And so I thought, you know, this is my moment.

But I started out in this speech of like, you know guys, if you had just listened to me, we could have saved so much time.

We could have gotten her read just immediately.

And I was just kind of reaching the apex of this self-congratulatory speech when I realized what you have probably already realized.

And that's that my social standing with the family was somewhere below 0.

In fact, It took me the rest of the week just to kind of get back on decent speaking terms with a lot of people, including Petra.

And the right moment to ask these delicate questions never came around.

In fact, I didn't end up talking to Petra's parents about our impending nuptials for another 4 months, which delayed our wedding considerably.

We ended up having a year-long engagement, which I do not recommend.

Like, personally being engaged is miserable.

It's like all of the bad sides of marriage, but none of the good points.

If you're going to get engaged, it's a good idea to get married, at least that's my perspective.

So it was a pretty miserable time all around.

I'm telling you this story for 3 reasons, 1 of which is that good intentions are not sufficient.

When I went down to Maryland, I had the best possible intentions.

When I mowed the lawn, when I gave suggestions on finding Tinka, it was all with the best intentions, or at least as good of intentions as a young man can have when he wants to marry a girl who's out of his league.

But all my good intentions actually didn't help that much.

They were counter-effective in the end and it didn't work out at all as I planned.

Now I could have told you a number of sobering stories about how mission work sometimes ends up in a similar state.

How good intentions translate into stuff that is not only not effective, but highly detrimental.

But thank goodness for Petra and Mindy who insisted that we were going to keep all of these talks somewhat positive.

And I did not tell any of those stories, but keep in mind that there is a lot of mission work that goes forward with a lot of good intentions, but it fails in a similar way to my trip down.

And I'll get back to that in just a minute, but my second point is something important to get over at the outset, and that I'm not a perfect person.

As you heard from the story, the way in which I went about perhaps the whole procedure.

You know, it might have been a good idea to talk to Petra's parents even before I talked to Petra, but I didn't do that.

I didn't go about this in the best possible way.

And the same thing is true of me even as a missionary.

I've worked in Nepal and some in Honduras, Zimbabwe, and most recently managing a hospital in Ethiopia.

And in none of those situations was I a shining example of what a missionary could and should be.

It was more that I saw God working in spite of the mistakes that I made.

I know that many of you in this room are more experienced missionaries than I am.

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GYC 2012 Seminar: Power to Change the World - Jesus, Arabic, and Kale

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