Call Urbana 90 the Urbana with a beat. Gone from the platform of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s sixteenth triennial missions conference were the traditional Urbana hymnal, piano, organ, and songleader. In their place were contemporary worship choruses led by an 11-member band, which was greeted with hand-clapping enthusiasm by the 19,000 delegates whenever it picked up the tempo and turned up the volume.
“All hymns were new once,” said one staff member, responding to numerous questions, apparently from Urbana old-timers, about the new repertoire (which did include several classic hymns).
The conference, which drew students on their Christmas break from across North America and several countries to the University of Illinois at Champaign/Urbana, featured a strong heartbeat as well. Beginning with the opening sessions of the five-day gathering, speakers focused on brokenness and dysfunctionality in the lives of their young audience, and in their own. Telling of his once-troubled relationship with his missionary father, Urbana 90 director Dan Harrison urged students to seek healing from God for the hurts in their lives.
“Is there any hope for the broken, the dysfunctional?” Harrison asked. In answer, he turned to Scripture, quoting 2 Corinthians 12:18, among other passages: “My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in your weakness.”
In response to an invitation for prayer for emotional healing, 1,500 men and women came forward and lingered on the Assembly Hall floor for more than an hour after the opening morning session. Throughout the conference, speakers often referred to their own hurts and struggles, while prayer ministry seminars and intercessory prayer sessions drew standing-room-only crowds.
Confronting Reality
The distinctive new rhythms of Urbana 90 came from the input of InterVarsity staff members, explained Harrison, directing the conference for the first time. “What we’re finding in our chapters reflects the realities of the ‘twenty-something’ generation,” Harrison said. “The divorce rate—probably 50 percent of these kids here come from divorced parents—sexual abuse, other symptoms of dysfunctionality: these are things we can’t ignore.”
Yet Harrison admitted he was taking a risk in adding forthright discussion of such painful topics to Urbana’s agenda. He recalled a conversation with a mission executive prior to the conference. “He agreed that there was a rising rate of dysfunctionality. But he said, ‘We can’t afford to have less than complete people on the mission field, so we’ll just have to recruit from the people who are whole.’ ”
“I don’t believe that’s scriptural,” Harrison said. “And I know I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to serve overseas—or anywhere, for that matter—if that was the condition. God has given me a series of second chances, and that’s what I want to see for these young people.”
No Celebrities
In other ways, Urbana 90 reflected a variety of trends in missions and in the world at large. As areas once considered mission fields have become mission senders, the image of the missionary has been redrawn. That change was made evident by the list of speakers. In place of North American “celebrities,” as one veteran attender put it, workers from the “front lines” of missions—the “Two-thirds World,” the inner cities, and the campuses—addressed the receptive crowd. Women and minorities played prominent roles. For the first time, agencies based in countries as diverse as Haiti, Ghana, Brazil, and the Philippines set up recruiting exhibits at the conference.
The delegates as well reflected the changing ethnic makeup of the U.S. A contingent of some 2,000 Korean-Americans attended. Nearly 200 Native Americans were present. In all, 99 countries were represented at the conference, which provided translation in 12 languages. Overall attendance was estimated at 19,200.
Global issues, such as hunger, economic and political justice, environmental stewardship, and racial reconciliation, received special attention through a new track of workshops conducted during the conference. Led by Glandion Carney, director of InterVarsity Missions Fellowship, 440 selected students explored a Christian response to such topics, creating 56 study papers.
Urbana 90’s worship and prayer moved with expressive, charismatic flavor. Indeed, the worship band came from a Vineyard fellowship in Southern California; the team of prayer intercessors, which offered spiritual support to the conference program and personal ministry to the students, was from Saint John’s Episcopal Church, a charismatic congregation in Burbank, California.
The World Is Bigger
Mission representatives said they were impressed by the purposefulness of the students and their well-informed questions. “They’re asking, ‘How can I use my degree in missions work?’ They’re not ready to scrap their training; they want to use it,” said John Mehn, a representative of the Baptist General Conference.
Mehn attended Urbana as a student in 1973, 1976, and 1979. “There are many, many more options now for students. It used to be there were the traditional missionaries and the ‘tentmakers,’ who went into the closed countries,” he said. “The world is bigger now.”
The array of 180 seminars and more than 200 exhibits produced an information overload for some students. “I know I want to go into missions, and I came hoping the Lord would give me direction for the country and organization,” said Marlene Struss of Messiah College. Did she find answers? “No, more questions. Because now I’ve caught a broader vision. I realize there is so much more than what my thinking had been limited to.”
What was missing from this most recent Urbana, other than the hymn-book, said missions representatives and observers, was the strong Bible exposition characteristic of past gatherings. Mehn said he missed the biblical foundation for missions laid in past conferences by the likes of J. Christy Wilson, Eric Alexander, or John Stott (who did deliver a video message on the opening evening). Bob Sjogren of Frontiers, who had attended four other Urbanas, said he found the messages “very man-centered, as opposed to God-centered.”
“It has to be made known that God uses broken people,” said Sjogren, himself the adult child of an alcoholic. “But there is a fine line between seeking healing and focusing in on a problem. It needs to be addressed, but then [we should] press on. There’s a job to be done.”
Still, the conference produced another class of committed, potential missionaries. Responding to criticism of emotional appeals in the past, the challenge for a commitment to missionary service, delivered near the end of the conference, was purposely low key. Yet, 6,193 indicated they were ready to serve on a mission field some time in the future.
“Students are ready for a challenge that is beyond their grasp,” said one InterVarsity staff member. “They live in a suspicious generation, one that has been sold everything in a slick package. The gospel represents the one thing in this world that doesn’t need a fancy box. It is to them the pearl of great price,” she said. “We don’t have to sugarcoat the gospel for them.”
By Ken Sidey in Urbana, Illinois.
Looking Through the 10/40 Window
One of the new missions concepts often mentioned at Urbana 90 was the 10/40 Window, a rectangular piece of geography that holds the world’s deepest spiritual and physical needs. The term, coined by Luis Bush, president of Partners International and a keynote speaker at Urbana 90 and Lausanne II, designates a belt that extends from West Africa across Asia, between 10 degrees and 40 degrees north latitude.
Within the 10/40 Window are contained:
• 62 countries with a total population of 3.1 billion;
• 97 percent of the world’s “least evangelized” population;
• 84 percent of the people with the world’s lowest quality of life;
• only 27 percent of the missionaries in the world.
“If we are serious about providing a valid opportunity for every people and city to experience the love, truth, and saving power of Jesus Christ, we cannot ignore the reality that we must concentrate on ‘the window,’ ” says Bush.
