The student world is bigger…..
How big? Well, at the just-concluded EARC (East Asia Regional Conference) in Tokyo, Japan, 14 countries, 360 participants came together, representing only a fraction of the millions of students in East Asia.
What’s the big deal? In the course of the conference, each country’s student movement shared about their own unique circumstances. All together, it was a wonderful mix of stories ranging from persecution, to apathy, to underground victories, to resourcefulness in finding ways to worship God under watchful eyes, to ignorance towards nation and region, and history.
The call was to start rebuilding. Start rebuilding just as Nehemiah did. But it has to come with personal mourning, confession of sins, and a love for God’s kingdom.
At first glance, it doesn’t seem fair to ask a persecuted student to rebuild anything as compared to a student in a country where there is religious freedom. But all came to see that in whatever circumstances, we are called to extend beyond our little world and to use our youthfulness to rebuild our country, our region, our world.
The call to rebuild, unified students from many countries. It also opened our eyes to the fact that although we may have different ways of worshipping, different ways of living, different cultural expectations, we all served the one God. And just imagine, if ALL CHRISTIAN STUDENTS lived their whole lives, all for God, what an earthquake to the world’s society that would be.
The Christian student world in Malaysia may not be very big, the Christian student world in Thailand, Indonesia, Japan (less than 1% are Christians) may not be very big. But the world’s Christian student movement is bigger. Will we commit ourselves and our CF – the Malaysian student movement – to this bigger movement of earth-shaking potential? How does that change our perspective of our CF?
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
The STUDENT world is bigger....
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1 comment:
I think as a student who's involved with the CF, there are just so many
things to handle. First of all CFs have to deal with the lack of manpower in many areas. Thus the handful who serve always have to manage almost everything by themselves. As a result, they are too preoccupied with the
management of their own CF that they forgot about other existing CFs. This is just locally. Obviously, since they are too busy to even keep in touch with neighbouring CFs, they will certainly not think about CFs overseas as well! It's just very sad.
-flo-
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