GlocalNet

Daniel Yang, Guest Blogger
Worship Associate / College & Young Adult Ministries

“But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”  (Jeremiah 29:4-7 ESV)

Israel was the nation chosen by God in the Old Testament to reveal his love to the rest of the world.  God was so committed to his purpose that even when his people were living in a land that wasn’t their own, he commanded them to “seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you.”  God placed an entire generation in a position of humility and vulnerability and then commissioned them to engage an unfamiliar city by investing into it the lives of the next generation.

Over the last few years this Jeremiah passage has helped me process my family story.  My father was a little older than I am now when he left his homeland to live in a refugee camp for several years.  The conditions in the camp were difficult, but he knew it was only for a season.  At the age of thirty-nine he and my family immigrated to the United States where they learned a completely new way of living and thinking.  They lived as a diaspora community seeking the welfare of the city to which they were brought and in doing so found their own welfare.

There’s something about the diaspora mentality that God wants his people to learn when they are called to engagement.  From my experience this mentality forces us to do two things 1) adapt to the situation around us with humility and openness and 2) commit to the cause of others despite our own needs.

Each year Northwood commissions several teams to serve in the inner-city, Mexico, Vietnam and other places in the world.  This Summer there will be a team of college and young adults serving and loving a country where for the first time many of them will get a glimpse into this Jeremiah passage.  This means for the first time many of them will understand what it means not to be in the majority.  They will have to rely on translators, money-changers, and taxi-drivers.  But they will also experience what it means to passionately care for a people in a country that is not their own.  They will see God at work because of their humility and vulnerability.  Through this experience they’ll understand more that God has called all his people to live out Jeremiah 29:4-7 in the context of not just the city, but the world.

Jesus embodied the essence of this passage when he left the glory of the Father’s right hand and took on the form of a servant to die a criminal’s death in order to reconcile man back to God.  Very rarely, if ever, will gospel engagement in any part of the world look different from this model.