For Global Mission Week this year, Cairn students were challenged by keynote speaker Isabel Lee to love your God, your church, and the world around you. Leaning on these three principles that are reinforced often in Scripture, Lee explained to the students that learning to love is the vital path to effectively impact the world for Christ and make disciples of all nations.
Her three chapel sessions—Impacting Your World by Loving Your God, Impacting Your World by Loving Your Church, and Impacting Your World by Loving the World Around You—built on one another throughout the week. On Monday, Lee said that “in order to love our church and our world well, we must first experience the love of God.” Once we experience this love, we can in turn love God.
Being motivated by God’s love, we can then begin to love and care for our church body. On Wednesday, Lee stressed the importance of the local church in the role of missions. She stated that Scripture teaches that the local church is “foundational to God’s plan for His people to carry out the great commission.”
It is only after we love God well, and love our local church well, that we can effectively love the world around us well. The structure and order provided in Jesus’ command to love the Lord your God and to love your neighbor as yourself in Mark 12:30–31 allows us to love our world passionately and thoroughly.
In addition to these keynote chapel sessions, students spent the week interacting with the various mission representatives that came to campus. Missionaries who work both in the United States and around the world—such as Crossworld, World Team, Push the Rock, and Wycliffe Bible Translators—visited classrooms and were available to speak to students interested in the work that they do and the people they serve. Other activities included a viewing and discussion of the movie Human Flow, a Global Feast sampling of international food, and an additional seminar from Isabel Lee, “God is Moving in the International Refugee Crisis.”
Global Mission Week continues to be one of the most important weeks of the academic year as we educate our students to serve Christ in the church, society, and the world.
Interested in learning more about missions? Get in touch with Guy & Carolyn Eshelman, our missionaries in residence, at [email protected] and [email protected].
Isabel Lee has been in ministry since 1980. She served over 22 years with SEND International as a missionary in three church plants with various leadership roles. She has worked in evangelism and discipleship, taught in seminaries, and equipped leaders in Taiwan and China within SEND-Taiwan and beyond. She has ministered in Ukraine and Siberia; taught and trained national leaders in Korea, India, Middle East; and served Syrian refugees in Lebanon, Jordan, and Macedonia. Isabel has been a regular instructor of Perspectives on the World Christian Movement since 2013 and serves on the U.S. and International Board of Directors, International Executive Committee, and Human Resources and Member Care Committee of SEND International.
