I Have A Dream

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. shared his dream of freedom, equality and racial reconciliation. In 1979, Pope John Paul II quietly voiced his dream of the “new evangelization,” that the Catholic Church would build a civilization of love through a new ardor, new methods and new expressions of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.[1] And in our time, right here in our midst, Pope Francis has captured the world by his dream for the lowly, the lost, and the people of God sworn to serve them.

Many have called Pope Francis’ breathtaking exhortation Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), his “I have a dream” speech. In it he shares his dream of a servant church, overflowing with the joy that comes from authentic encounters with Jesus. “I dream,” he says:

• . . . of an evangelizing community that gets involved by word and deed in people’s daily lives. . . of evangelizers that take on the ‘smell of the sheep’ and the sheep are willing to hear their voice. (24)
• . . . of a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets. (49)
• . . . of transforming everything so that the Church’s customs, ways of doing things, times and schedules, language and structures can be suitably channeled for the evangelization of today’s world. (27)

In 1970, Jim Rayburn, in his final message to Young Life staff, communicated “the big dream” – that every teenager of every class, every color, and every ethnic group around the world would know the truth about Jesus Christ and have the opportunity to make their own choice about Him. In his farewell “I have a dream” speech, Rayburn called “a group of people, bound together in the single-minded purpose that there’s no price too high to pay to see to it that young people have a chance to know the Savior.”[2]

The big dream of Young Life remains the same today. Our dream is that every kid, everywhere would have the opportunity to know Jesus Christ and follow Him. It’s not just what Young Life is about, “that’s all that Young Life’s about,” as our founder would say. Today Young Life staff and volunteers are reaching 1.4 million kids around the world, and our “Reaching a World Of Kids” initiative plans to reach 2 million kids by 2016.[3]

Young Life and the Catholic Church. It could not be any clearer to me that our hearts beat with the same passion.[4] “If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences,” Pope Francis says, “it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ.”[5] Jim Rayburn spoke with the same mind 50 years ago saying:

There are millions of them in our own nation, and they are waiting for somebody to care about them enough to take the time and trouble to pour out compassion on them, to prove their friendship, to bridge this tragic and terrible gap that exists in our culture between teenagers and adults – to emulate the example of Jesus Christ.”[6]

The time is now to bring the dreams together. It's time to realize that we are one people, called by the one Savior, bound by the same single-minded dream. It's time to seize the audacious dreams of Young Life and the Catholic Church to reach a world of kids with the gospel of Jesus Christ. In this era when roughly 5.6 billion people on our planet are estranged from a friendship with Christ, the time for dreaming big dreams is upon us.

  

“When we dream alone, we only dream.

When we dream together, reality begins.”

~Brazilian Proverb

Are you ready to dream together? Then take my hand and let the new reality begin.

---

[1] Pope John Paul II first articulated his dream of the “new evangelization” in a little-known June 1979 address in Nowa Hutta, Poland. See Scott Hahn, Evangelizing Catholics: A Mission Manual for the New Evangelization (Huntington, IN: Our Sunday Visitor, 2014), 21.

[2] Listen to Rayburn’s “The Big Dream” address at: http://vimeo.com/86046723.

[3] Learn more about Young Life’s Reaching a World Of Kids (RWOK) initiative at: http://www.younglife.org/RWOK/Pages/default.aspx.

[4] See my 2013 article, “Beating With One Heart: Young Life & the Catholic Church,” on Young Life’s staff resources or email me for a copy (mhavercamp@gmail.com).

[5] Pope Francis, Evangelii Gaudium (The Joy of the Gospel), 49.

[6] Kit Sublett (ed.), The Diaries of Jim Rayburn, Colorado Springs, CO: Morningstar Press, 2008, xviii.