IFES World Assembly from my Latin American perspective

     IFES World Assembly (WA) in México was unique experience with its own challenges and joys. Extending hospitality to the world meant different things for Compa, which range from: sleepless nights, planning, giving rides, opening homes, investing time, listening with patience, forgetting offences, and in all, opening the heart. It was a challenge but also a privileged to be a channel for God´s grace in Latin-American colors and flavors. This time I cannot remember one, two or three things I learned, in part because my job was to Emcee (with Toto from Uruguay) and help participants connect the morning sessions with one another and with the whole WA program. My thoughts and reflections are in a more general tone.  

I value being part of a global community where there is space to recognize the gifts and differences among regions and countries, and to celebrate God’s multiform grace. Being part of this diverse community implies recognizing the huge differences which separate but also encourage different ways of incarnating the Gospel of Jesus. It is a humbling practice to consider other perspectives, other struggles, and the things which people from dissimilar contexts ignore about our own realities. God used World Assembly to affirm me in his calling to student ministry, and very particularly, invited me to a continued theological reflection. In this WA I saw clearly that the way in which IFES student movements understand and try to live out the Gospel in Latin America –as part of its heritage- seeks commitment to the social context and urges an honest dialogue with the demands of our countries beaten by international abuse, violence, gangs, corruption, and repression. For us in this part of the world it is not a luxury but a need for Christians to fully grasp the Good News of Jesus, his forgiveness, life, hope and reconciliation, and to live by it and express it in all dimensions of life and society. Theological reflection is necessary and it accompanies action.

At WA I remembered and thanked God that in my life as a student leader in Compa I was taught to love God´s World, to study it, to teach it and live by it. It was not something theoretical; I saw it clearly in people, read stories and experienced it in certain places like the IFES WA in Poland in 2011 where it became clear to me that loving God´s Word is fundamental for all the IFES global community. However, this is only one part of the story, because as we love and meet God in his Word our natural response is to aspire to know him more and to love the World that He loves and for which Jesus gave his life. I also learned this and saw it in people from Latin America; I am grateful for those with similar concerns who walked with me in Scripture to meet a God who is committed to the whole world and has something to say to its different problems.

Our double-calling is to love God´s Word because through it we know Him, and learn to love the world He loves. We learn to do mission Jesus’ style, which is: incarnational, relevant, suffering, communal and creative. For us it means to share this Good News in the Universities, who are also affected by violence, corruption, abuse, indifference, discrimination and other world values that do not help life flourish. Engaging the University means hurting with it and doing mission there, to sing its pains and hopes, to think christianly about its problems, reflect upon them, to write and to have a prophetic voice. It also means to love our classmates, walk with them amidst their grievances and sometimes to march with those who want to produce change, and aid in the awakening of conscience, praying for God’s kingdom to come. In México, the Good News cannot just be words, nor an individualist message or a purely spiritual one; the implications have to be seen, they need to be thought of and lived with urgency so others may find Jesus in the midst of hopelessness, violence and indifference.

There were distinctive moments in WA that I specially value for its particular way of allowing me to “see” God present in our world. I remember Munther Isaac, a Palestinian Christian teaching God´s Word, talking about suffering as Christians and about being faithful to God before seeking personal safety. His words echo in my context as they defy us to not bow to the gods of might and pride, to not try to escape suffering or want to assimilate to the ways of the world, but to be willing to give up one’s life out of love. I think of conversations with my African brothers and sisters who have the challenge of living in places of religious violence and following Jesus means not utilizing violence, but loving their “enemies”. I still go through the words of Ruth Lopez who shared with humility and authority the challenge of using one’s profession and God´s unlimited resources to serve others, to serve our communities and not separate from the poor nor to ignore their needs. I do not want to forget the conversation with a Slovak sister who shared about her context, and turned out to be very similar to Mexico. I cherish the conversations with my Latin American friends about our particular heritage and our urgency to connect the Bible with the World, to understand mission as being socially committed, because in the end, we cannot understand it differently.