by Anna Lee-Winans
In the light of the 2030 Calling, how do we prepare our souls for revival? This Advent Season, as we observe and remember the coming of Jesus into a broken and oppressive world, I remember another time of observing new life coming into the world. I was seven months pregnant leading our Graduate Christian Fellowship fall retreat weekend on faith, vocation, and Sabbath rest. Somewhere on a commuter bus between Long Island and NYC, Sally (name changed), an international graduate student from China, asked me how to become a Christian. We talked through the Good News of great joy, the Kingdom that Jesus preached, and prayed together as Sally was birthed into new life.
“Why do I feel like my heart is on fire?” she asked.
“Because the Holy Spirit is coming into your soul to live with you forever.” I said.
In serving with Graduate and Faculty Ministries for the last 11 years, I’ve come to recognize that the university is our beautiful and broken parish, existing within the beautiful and broken US ecosystem where we join Jesus in the work he is already about. I have learned that in addition to my evangelism plans, recruitment goals, my dreams of planting out every corner of every campus, students and faculty are whole people and that expanding ministry does not have to come at the exclusion of an engagement of the whole person. Sally was drawn to our fellowship through our engagement of her head, heart, and hands.
Discipleship of our Heads**
Sally learned that her mind mattered to God. As a communications student, she would graduate to become the director of communications for a foreign consulate in Beijing. In that season of grad school, she followed Jesus most deeply when she lived into the studies God called her to. Our community helped to cultivated her voice in order to connect with others in ways they could hear, discipled her to communicate grace and truth in her studies and later in her work, serving with excellence as unto Christ her Lord.
Discipleship of our Hearts
She learned how to connect with God’s deep and abiding love that freed her from fear, even before she came to faith. Sally first heard the Holy Spirit through the study of scripture. And the Holy Spirit set her heart on fire with a passion that burns to this day.
Discipleship of our Hands
She learned how to act on the Father’s invitation. Sally learned to engage and enjoy Jesus, Lord of Communications in her work. She brought her international student friends to meet her Christian community and Jesus. Sally was also the only child of prominent Communist officials. When she returned to Beijing, she shared her faith with her colleagues, her husband, and her powerful parents. Her relationship with Christ at work and at home caused her to eventually seek asylum in Canada, losing career and family due to her faith, a sacrifice she painfully, but joyfully made.
This Advent Season, God is enlarging our capacity to hold new life in the midst of a fractured and polarized world. Talk to your students and faculty about their work. Help them to look for Jesus in their studies, research, and writing, even as you shepherd their hearts, even as you invite them to take action with their faith. In doing so, we nurture the new life of God’s work in the whole person: head, heart, and hands.
This picture is brimming with new life: Anna, 9 months pregnant, and Sally, at Sally’s baptism.
**Your Mind’s Mission by Greg Jao is a handy and accessible resource to cultivate new life of the mind.
