Daniel Bourdanné to the Fellowship

Transcript from the closing session of IFES World Assembly 2007

on Wednesday 18 July (translated from French)

Brothers and sisters, colleagues, I want to say thank you on behalf of our family. This is a

time we will never, never, never forget. I am afraid I want to speak to you in French

because French is a language from my heart. This is why I decided to speak to you in

French. I could speak in Mundang, but I don’t want to test your faith because I am not sure

that you have the gift of interpretation of tongues. I prefer using people who are already

equipped to help us in translating for us.

This is a very special touching moment for us – for my family and me – at this time when we

are starting our ministry, replacing our brother Lindsay Brown, and we measure the height,

the depth, the breadth of this responsibility. We measure the difficulties that are on our

path: several people have come up to us to say, ‘You are going to be putting your feet in big

shoes, shoes that are too big for you, you will be wearing a mantle that is too big for you,

because Lindsay’s shoes and mantle are very big and heavy.’

Dear brothers and sisters, we are in the midst of you with fear and trembling, and it is with

fear and trembling that I stand here before you and I commit myself before you to do this

task that God has called us to. I am here not to put my feet in Lindsay’s shoes, not to wear

Lindsay’s mantle, but, first of all, to answer a call from God. If I am here standing before

you, it is out of obedience to God.

This God, in his grace, brought me back from the dead, literally, when I was less than five

years old. My father was carrying me on his bike through the forest, and he realised that I

was no longer breathing; I was dead. My father went into the forest, knelt down, and,

holding my corpse in his hands, he lifted his eyes to heaven and he cried to God, and I came

back to life. It is this God, who brought me physically from death to life, who has called me

and what else can I do but to answer his call, whatever the cost. This God, who has

protected me in difficult circumstances when I was near death on several occasions, this God

is the one that I want to serve and it is by serving this God that I find all my joy. This God

has not just helped my physical life, he has opened my eyes so that I have been able to

meet him, know him, to know true life and life that will never end, eternal life with him.

When you have been through this sort of situation and this God calls you, you can say

nothing else but, ‘Yes Lord, here am I, send me.’

But my presence before you is also the expression of my passion for the universities and

schools of the whole world, for the students, who I long to see transformed by the gospel of

Jesus Christ. It is also at university that I have been able to learn more, to be in a personal

relationship with God, through people, through different people that God put on my path, to

encourage me and support me. And this evening, which is such a special moment for me, I

would like to bear witness to two of these people who are here in this room. I would like to

ask my parents and friends Ann and Dkonja to stand up. They have been a great source of

encouragement and blessing for me, and this is why they really wanted to be here to

continue to support me. This is to say that I am not alone when I have agreed to serve you

and serve the Lord: I come with friends, but also, and above all, with my wife who is

everything for me and I bless the Lord who allowed me to meet her while I was serving God

at the student union. I encourage you, if you are still single in this room, to open your eyes

wide, because in the IFES movement, you can meet very good people.

Dear brothers and sisters, I would like to give homage to the great work done by my

predecessors - Stacey Woods, Chua Wee Hian and Lindsay - and all those who went before

them and worked with determination and faithfulness, sometimes behind the scenes, so that

this ministry could go forward and progress. I would like to pay homage to the sense of their

sacrifice, sometimes even the blood that they have spilt, so that the testimony among the

students can go forth.

I want particularly to say this to Lindsay: what you have planted, I will water, so that Jesus

can harvest the fruit, because the fruit does not belong to Stacey, or to Chua Wee Hian, nor

to you or to me, but to Jesus our Saviour and Lord. He alone is the owner of the harvest. I

have spent 11 of my 16 years in student ministry under your responsibility Lindsay and you

have helped to make me rich personally. You have shaped my character. In particular, you

have taught me the importance of generosity as a leader and I will never forget this value; I

won’t lose it but will use it. You have always said to me that it is very important, even on our

last trip together you said that the real mark of a true leader is generosity. I want to ask God

to bless you and your family and may he continue to use you through your own example of

generosity, your passion for the salvation of students and your extreme sense of history and

of the stories that need telling. May God bless you.

I would like to thank each one of you on the executive committee, the leaders of national

movements, the students - all of you who have prayed that God’s will would be done. I

would like to thank you all for the very warm welcome that my family and I - my wife and I -

have received from you. We want to tell you - my family wants to tell you - that it is a huge

privilege for us to serve you and to help in our modest way, in our own capacity, to wash

your feet because that is the example that the Lord has called us to follow. So in our own

modest way we want to follow the example of the Lord.

IFES is a family, an exceptional family, a family where young and old can live together and

they do live together. It is a family where poor and rich are invited to the same table. In the

image of our lord who welcomes us, it is a family where each person from the youngest to

the oldest, the poorest to the richest and the least intelligent to the most intelligent feel at

home. Dear brothers and sisters, I would like to beg you not only to be proud of this

communal life, but to work to develop it, to keep it, because the testimony that we give to

the world is a powerful testimony and we need to preserve this family feeling which is

something shown to us in the New Testament. The church is a family, the kingdom of God

as family and this fellowship, which is going to keep us together.

Dear brothers and sisters, in 60 years we have experienced very strong growth: from 10

movements in 1947 we have reached 150 today. We can thank the Lord for this growth we

have experienced. The question we ask ourselves today is, ‘What is the next step, the next

phase, what is the future? What is the direction that we should be taking?’ And, as we see it,

this is an important question because whatever the internal dynamics of a movement, if it is

not careful to keep its eye on its values, on its vision and on the fellowship among its

members and the relationships between its members, it can just become an institution and a

monument. God has not called IFES to become a monument but he has called IFES as a

movement and a movement moves. We have to move forward and face up to these

challenges. We must refuse to become fossils or become a monument. We must to do this

so that the glory of God will continue to be seen through this ministry and, if you will allow

me, I would like briefly to suggest some tracks that can help us organise our strategies, our

tactics and our techniques.

I would like to share with you my first dream. This is dream is to see IFES to continue to

grow as a biblically based evangelical movement, rooted in the Scriptures and continually

celebrating the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Our students, our graduates, our staff must be

women and men of the Bible, women and men, rooted in the Scriptures, a generation of

people like Ezra, who was well versed in the Scriptures. My dream is to see the study of the

word of God continue to take a central place in our movements as much as in our personal

life, by that I mean the personal life of each individual movement. Yet studying the Bible is

not an end in itself. Studying the Bible must be undertaken so that we can better know God

and better obey his word. Our mission, therefore, begins with these personal relationships as

individuals and as a community with God. What I long to see is IFES as a movement where

each individual member maintains a personal intimate relationship with the Lord.

The spirituality that should characterise our students and our graduates and our staff must

be a deep spirituality which is consistent, modelled by the Scriptures, informed by the

Scriptures, and fleshed out in a community context, where we can do our hermeneutics

together as a community and where we will not let individuals go out alone with the risk of

seeing them go astray. No, our movements must continue in this direction and this is why I

want to encourage each staff member, each graduate and each friend of IFES to give an

example to the younger ones and that the ongoing meditation on the word of God and

prayer, these basic elements of spirituality, would be at the very heart of our movement. My

dream is to see prayer movements raised up in our movements in IFES. My dream is to see

students get together to pray, to see gradates get together to pray, to see the staff get

together to pray. My dream is to see a renewal of the prayer life of our Fellowship. May this

be so through God’s grace and the presence and power of the Holy Spirit.

I am very grateful for the unity that characterises the IFES family and this is my second

dream. When you have just 10 members it is easy to stay united, but when you have 150

the challenges constantly increase - our very diversity increases and especially when you

have to deal with intellectuals, with some who are geniuses, people who are hyper

intelligent, people who are undertaking very creative studies, people who have great ideas -

and to get all these people working together can often be very difficult. So, despite our

differences, despite our intellectual baggage, despite our ability to think and create, dear

brothers and sisters, as a fellowship I want to call on you to preserve our unity, this unity

which allows us to experience the fellowship which stands as a testimony to God’s presence

in the midst of us.

This is in fact, a requirement of God’s word: in John 17:11 our Lord Jesus himself prayed

that his disciples might be one. Our unity and our diversity are a significant expression of our

Christian faith. But we also must be united because we must be able to mobilise together for

our mission and for building on our values. And we must be united as we work together on

the basis of our doctrinal statement, which is the reflection of our evangelical identity and

must be a foundation for us - not as a kind of banner to be brandished, but for us to be

rooted together, not around the doctrinal statement in itself, but around the person of Jesus,

because this doctrinal statement is what allows us to express in simple terms who Jesus is

and the story of our salvation in Jesus. In the context of our working together and in the

context of our fellowship, we must not go beyond this doctrinal statement that is our unity.

We are not a denomination. We are inter-denominational and we have agreed to set aside

our differences, above all, to concentrate on what is essential, that, together, we might be

able to go to non-Christian students and bring the gospel to them. This is why our

forefathers decided to adopt the doctrinal statement as a kind of summary, because this

doctrinal statement doesn’t cover all the affirmations of faith concerning all the ins and outs

of our faith. And we have chosen to do this so that together we might be witnesses in the

universities, standing united that the world might see it - and this is a real source of

enrichment that we have to preserve. Our practices in our groups must also reflect this interdenominational

character of our movement. I trust that conservative evangelicals will be

sensitive to other wings in the evangelical movement, so that we might be able to come

together around what is essential for the salvation of students. And, when these students

are saved, then each one will be able to go to a local church where they can learn other

elements that are important in our statements of faith and maybe the contribution of their

denomination.

I think it is extremely important, brothers and sisters, that we should agree on this basic

principle of collaboration that will cement our unity on the campuses. All questions and

issues need to be discussed and processed on the basis of this doctrinal statement and not

on the general framework of Christianity, because within the Christian family there are

different sensitivities. And this will be a witness to an increasingly divided world, a world

where evangelicals have lost credibility very often. We need this unity. Dear brothers and

sisters, how can we, if we are divided, bring the message of reconciliation to a country like

Rwanda, for example, or Burundi, if we ourselves are not able to agree on a minimum of

Christian statements of faith and work on that basis together. My dream is to see our

fellowship continue building on this basis for evangelical collaboration and demonstrate to

unbelievers that God’s children stand united to get the gospel into even the smallest

university.

Thirdly, what should we be doing? What is the task before us? What should be the new

phase of our movement? Our work here, our sessions in the General Committee with Dr

Mee-Yan Judge, will help us trace the limits of our strategic priorities. This will help us to

manage our Fellowship in the years to come. But I would like to suggest some of the general

guidelines for the years to come.

First of all, I would like to suggest that we go into deepening our movement. Our national

movements must be real structures that support growth. They must be better organised,

better governed, better managed. In one sense, a good preacher is not necessarily a good

General Secretary because a General Secretary... Maybe in the days and years to come, this

will be a vocation in a time when we want to enrich and deepen our movement, maybe his

role will be that of getting people to work, of encouraging people, of managing things - and

that will prepare each national movement for growth, that is going to prepare each national

movement for evangelism, which is our first calling. And so I believe we must really invest in

consolidating our national movements. We must work so that our national movements are

well governed. The work of each movement must be built around a clear vision with clear

objectives, so that each student knows in which direction the movement is going.

This can require different profiles for our leaders, new skills which we need to explore, in

which we need to invest for formation. My team and I are going to invest in this sense. We

are going to encourage formación in young movements, solid support structures; we are

going to encourage the development of local resources and, in order to do that, the

International Office wants to become a real centre of service to national movements. We

want regional offices to become real support structures, real places where we can bring real

support to the national movements, so we are going to work to increase the capacities of

these offices, so they can become real hubs for these national movements. This is the first

guideline of the way we are going to work to prepare growth and development.

This is what it is about: growth and development. What do I mean by that? Today we are

present in more than 150 countries. This is a huge expansion, as I said. I would like to invite

us to look inwards for a bit. Today we have something like 400,000 members. What does

that mean? Quite simply, it means that after expansion we need to look to growth and

development within the movement in the countries. There is something like another 20

countries still to be reached, and we will work at that, but I am sure that if we commit

ourselves to the growth and development of our national movements, because we have a

missionary vision, the movements themselves will be able, as is happening already, to take

the gospel into the other 20 countries.

So, I want us to deepen what we have in our national movements because the potential for

growth is enormous. In India, there are millions of students who need the Lord, in China too.

We need to do everything we can to mobilise the students so that they may touch their

friends. I dream that by 2020 there will be one million Christian students to continue the

work, to enlarge the space of our tent, as the prophet Isaiah said. May God help us in our

movements to commit ourselves to this dynamic deepening, so that each university in our

country, each public or private school, becomes an objective for the years to come, so that

we can increase the space of our tent in the countries in which we are already working. I

would like each national movement to commit themselves to this.

We are all following what is happening in China and in India today. We need to have the

bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other hand. This means that we need to discern

the signs of the times, the signs of our age. We need to be proactive as we discern the signs

of our time and to take appropriate measures. So I really want to encourage us to believe

that the indigenous work in China and in India is a priority. I want us all to pray for China. I

want China to be one of our priorities and may God continue to raise up men and women

from China to do the work. And, if we have something that we can bring, then may we bring

it in a relationship of learning, in a relationship of humility. So, in the years to come, may

IFES open its eyes to what is happening in China and in India, two huge countries which will

be an immense source of missionaries for the rest of the world and that is the vision we

want to see because if the Chinese - millions and millions of Chinese students - know the

Lord, that will be extraordinary. And we will have to act intentionally because it is possible

that the future of the revival in some of our countries will come from the work that is being

done in India, China, Nigeria and other countries. May the Lord open our eyes so we can see

the signs of our times.

Also, in the years to come, I would like to see the impact that we have on the world of the

university develop. And I suggest that, in order to do this, we need to improve our

relationship with the university. Since our creation, we have often - not always, but often -

not treated the universities in an organic way. We have gone into the campuses to go

fishing, as if we were fishing in a lake, without really worrying about the environment of the

lake. I would like to suggest that our mission in the university shouldn’t be done in that kind

of way, but with an organic perspective, an incarnational perspective, where we form our

people to be part of the university community and to act to transform the university itself, all

the university, for Jesus. May that approach, which is going to require adjustment, changes,

may that be the perspective that each national movement commits itself to take for the

future in our relationships with the university. For us this is about going into the university

with an integral holistic perspective. And I would like to suggest that the graduates and

Christian teachers may be able, from time to time, to express that they are being incarnated

in the university, for example, in organising themselves in their teaching to help the students

who are in difficulty, having problems in certain subjects. I would like to encourage the

doctors, the graduates from our bible groups, to think about what they can do when they

have the opportunity - maybe once a week to offer free consultations to students who are

sick, as an expression of our participation in the life of the university. I would like to suggest

that our students, from time to time, together might like to go to see the leaders of the

university and say that this week they are going to clean up the university campus, clean up

the toilets, the campus. I would like to suggest that we take part in the life of the university.

For the movements and countries that have the means, I suggest that you could, from time

to time, make a collection of books, to offer to the university libraries that are sometimes

empty because the teaching material is lacking. That would be the sort of thing that would

show transforming power, transforming by the love of Jesus, and that will commit us,

brothers and sisters, in a new relationship with our universities that we want to reach for the

Lord. Perhaps some universities, even secular ones will start to take notice of us and open

doors to us.

We also need to give back to students their place; the title ‘formación of leaders’, that IFES

practices, is formación by action and reflection. Dear brothers and sisters, it is not for

nothing that we underline in our fellowship the initiative of students because it is when they

work themselves that they learn, through their failures and their successes, to become future

leaders. We need to encourage students; we need to leave them room on the campus so

that they take initiative for their Bible studies, for their training camps. The staff should be

there to encourage them and support them, but not work in their places. I realise, dear

brothers and sisters, that the trend sometimes in some of our movements is to focus too

much on the staff. We must put our emphasis on student initiative, on the commitment of

students to the work of evangelism.

Students are capable and able to organise a conference like this one and succeed. They are

capable of organising their Bible camps and making a good job of it without us. They are

capable of doing that. We must put them to work and it is when we put them to work that

they will see their responsibilities to their brothers and their friends. Perhaps this will take

away some of the great concern we have for staff supervision which can be a weight for our

movements. So, brothers and sisters, I would like to suggest that in our national movements

we can see the students take the initiative and that we can be there beside them, behind

them, to encourage them, to push them, to support them without ourselves getting involved

in things. Because they are the ones we are training and what we do is a school. The best

way of training tomorrow’s leaders is this way. Because we don’t give them enough

challenges if we don’t let them take initiatives and let them fail. Let them use their creativity.

This is why the most appropriate model of formación for students is mentoring and in the

years to come we want to encourage the national movements to focus on mentoring and not

on classic formación, which is telling students what they should do. If the future is in

student’s hands, in the younger generation, we need to invest, and at the same time, those

of us who are staff leaders, need always to have our eyes open to identify future leaders.

The most important part of leadership is not formación, but identifying the potential leaders,

and we really need to focus on that. We need to open our eyes to see who are the young

people who are emerging and then we can invest in them, take time to train them and,

brothers and sisters, I would like us to do it intentionally with determination and with

perseverance. We need to do it with appropriate strategies and there mentoring will play a

very important part. For each staff member, each graduate, each leader, each student leader

this must become a culture, to identify right from the start one or two or three people in

whom they will invest. I would like to suggest to the national movements that this is part of

their job specifications, for all the personnel that you are going to recruit and I will do the

same for the staff I am recruiting regionally. Dear brothers and sisters, in the years to come

we are going intentionally to get to work to train up a new generation of leaders. Starting

this evening, start to think who will be your Timothy, who God has called you to train up in

the years to come.

My dream is also to see IFES as a prophetic culture in our world. My dream is to see our

fellowship play a prophetic role. We are indeed an evangelical movement, but we are

working with the elite - you have seen the specialists, the scholars, who have come to speak

to us here. A lot of them have come out of our movement. What a tremendous privilege we

have to call on that resources to be able to have a prophetic voice in the world, because it is

from our universities that we see men and women graduating who will be those with major

influence at all levels and we can contribute in a significant way to society through this. We

need to be able to express a biblical view on the issues and events of our world.

History is dynamic and is a changing history. We are constantly facing up to new realities

that require from us a biblical response. AIDS is with us today, but 50 years ago AIDS was

not around. It is a new development. What is the biblical response that we can give?

Thinking theologically, thinking through issues in a Christian way, is something that means,

for Christians, to consider each new development each new situation in the light of the

Scriptures and to be able to interpret the Scriptures in such a way that Christians and non-

Christians will be able to know what God thinks about such things. And this is the challenge

before us: how are we to react biblically if we do not take time as Christian intellectuals to

think through these issues and these new challenges? Without locking ourselves into a

ghetto, how can we face up to the new challenges of the environment which were not visibly

present in the times of Calvin nor of Tertullian and did not exist also in the time of the

theologians of the first three centuries who were essentially discussing Christology at the

time. But we cannot ignore these issues because we know that our God speaks to and

addresses each new situation. This is why we need to respond. How are we to respond to

the new ethical issues: genetic manipulation which, in a certain way, determines the future

of humanity and even the definition of what is human. This is a question that did not exist,

was not asked, in the days of Peter or Paul, but we are faced with these issues today and

our gospel will not be relevant if we can not provide a biblical answer which will help our

students and our world to know what God thinks of these situations. How are we to respond

to the issues of immigration and the problem of our young people leaving their countries in

droves and depriving their countries of their resources? If we can’t provide an answer to

these issues, how can we be effective in our evangelism in the university?

My dream is to see our fellowship assuming the responsibility of this prophetic role and we

need to do what is necessary for this to take place. We need to set up a working group

made up of resource persons with different qualifications coming from many disciplines, with

historians, theologians, philosophers, who are Christians and who can work on and around

these issues and help us regularly through lectures, conference and seminars. Dear brothers

and sisters, we must not recoil from engaging with the media for the biblical voice to be

heard in the world because Jesus said, you do not have a light to put it under the table. We

must be bold because we have the truth and this truth must be put out on the table, and we

must pray that God will raise up men and women who are credible and who are capable and

who are recognised as having a right to express a voice on these issues and are able to

proclaim in the public marketplace, so that we can proclaim the name of our Lord Jesus. My

dream is to see IFES in the coming years take up this challenge by truly adopting its

prophetic role.

I also want to underline the importance of partnership in the fulfilling of our mission, first

with local churches. IFES must seek to work closely with local churches. We must be

sufficiently modest, in a determined way, to work to develop our relations with local

churches. We have these links with local churches and it is, as I see it, an obligation on our

part to give account to these local churches of what we are doing on the campuses. We

must give account to them in one way or another and we must show creativity in the way

we do this. Each national movement is called upon to think about how they can give account

to local churches in a creative way.

In our region we have organised a day where the national movements send students and

graduates to visit the local churches and tell them the story of what God is doing through

them on the campuses and to tell this to the churches and their leaders. Sometimes we

bring the pastors together, if we have a minimum of resources, and, if there is a book that

can help them, we buy up a stock of books that we can give them to say to them, ‘We stand

with you in your ministry.’ This is a way to be accountable to the local churches. To see

sometimes, students organising in their holidays, to go and evangelise with a given church.

This is another way of establishing these links and relations with the local church, because

we are a part of the church. We are not outside of the church. We are serving our churches

in a specific field that goes by the name of university and we have to work for this by God’s

grace.

We also want to maintain partnership with all institutions who are working on our campuses.

IFES is not building up its own empire. Our desire is that our students should get to know

the Lord. That is our goal and there are other groups working on campus who are doing the

same job. We shouldn’t enter into a spirit of competition. By God’s grace, I want to try to

launch in the coming years a dialogue, at least a dialogue, with these other institutions -

with the Navigators, Campus Crusade for Christ, Scripture Union, international student

ministries - and I would like to put out an invitation that we could meet and discuss how, as

evangelicals, we can together take on the challenge to win every university for the Lord. We

have different methods, yes, but we can surely also find common ground where we can

enrich each other and work together.

We must also develop the partnership with those who support us and I want to thank those

who are supporting us, those who are giving of their money and praying for us, some who

are giving gifts in kind to support our ministry. It is God who has put us together and it is a

privilege for you, and I, for the donors and for us, to work together hand in hand in God’s

field. I am certain that they have been encouraged this week by listening to the stories that

have been told here. But, if I may, I would like to say this, the tendency of donors who give

large sums is not to commit themselves to long-term giving, it is two or three projects, and I

would like to see evangelical donors, even as we respect this outlook, to see if they can take

on a new view. It is not a question of investing just to develop one-off projects. No, it is a

question of investing in people. A national movement needs at least 15-20 years in order to

be truly rooted in a country and it is often important to be able to make a long-term

commitment and it is this that I would like to encourage our donors to take on board, donors

who increasingly have a tendency to not want a long-term commitment. We want a

commitment that is an act of faith.

Now I want briefly to address... I know that I have been long, but I want to share what is on

my heart. I will not be able to gather you all together for another four years so please

forgive me for being long. Secondly, I come from Africa and Africa and watches are two

different things!

Now I want to say a word to the students, the students that are here. You are going to have

to be brave. I want to invite you to be a generation of Daniels, Davids, Josephs: young

people who are not afraid because we do not need to be afraid. He who is in us is greater

than he who is in the world, because when young people are mobilised they are capable of

changing the world. Perhaps your elders have failed, but now it belongs to you, like Luther

and Calvin, like all these young people in the past who have influenced their times. It is now

up to you to stand up and take things in hand, to influence your age for the gospel. Go, go

to the ends of the earth and you can take up the challenge. Talk to each other - technology

now enables you to do that. I want to say to you, my dear students, that I want to make

myself available to you for a whole day, twice a year so that we can chat on chat forums - I

will tell you the date each year. I would like you to be free to ask me questions in the chat

forum because it is so easy with the internet. In that way we can talk to each other

internationally. And in the International Office we will do everything we can to make the

website your site, not a staff site, but a student site. If the staff need a website we will make

another one for them, but the IFES site will be a student site and you will design it and make

it operate so that we can talk to each other about how this can be put into practice so that

the gospel can go forward.

Now to the staff, I would like to thank you first of all for your sense of sacrifice. The work

that you do is very demanding and I want to thank each one of you on a national level,

regional level and international level for the sacrifices you have made. I would like to ask you

to forgive us for our lack of pastoral support that you have perhaps felt. This is linked to the

imperfect nature of people or sometimes to our negligence and, in the name of IFES, I really

would like to ask forgiveness from each person who has been wounded by our lack of

concern in the past. Let’s forgive each other and let’s look to the future. Let’s sit down and

talk together and see how we can do better in pastoral concern and support because our

staff are our most precious resource. We want to do our best to accompany you in your

ministry, but the best pastoral support is that which is done through teamwork. This is the

best pastoral support that there is and that is why I encourage you to develop your

teamwork: get together, decide together, choose together, share. It is in those kinds of

dynamics that supervision will become less difficult.

I would like to finish with this: this week, God has challenged us; he has reminded us of the

need to be rooted and grounded in the word of God, to be rooted and grounded in Christ, to

go into the world. The time has come now to leave this place, to go into the world of our

campuses dominated by religious pluralism, immorality, disillusionment, uncertainties. It is

time to go now into our world that is being destroyed by humanity, by injustice, by social

inequalities, terrorism, but remember that it is Jesus who is sending us because he has

already gone before us. That is why I invite us and encourage us not to be afraid, because

God is with us, because he has said - and I want you to go with this word – ‘All power has

been given to me in heaven and on earth.’ That is why he can send us, that is why he can

say to us, ‘Go.’ Let’s go to all the universities, to all the students, to all the teachers, to all

the administrators in the universities, to all the professors, teaching the word of God,

teaching them to obey the commandments until he comes again. That is the encouragement

I want to leave with you and may God bless you.