1,300 high schoolers from around the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) — including not a few from Alabama — launched the closing keynote plenary of week three of the 2008 Montreat Youth Conferences this morning (July 11).
From there, the exuberant crowd launched into the conference theme song, “Throw Open the Doors!” penned by conference music leader Jeffrey Harper, an Alabama native now living in Nashville:
Throw open the doors
And open your eyes
To a brand new day;
Step into the world
And sing to the skies
Of the life, the light, the path,
The truth, the way.
Co–keynoters Jo Owens, associate pastor of Hudson Memorial Church in Raleigh, N.C., and Patrick Laney, associate pastor for youth and family at First Church of Tuscaloosa, Ala., recapped the week’s keynote reflections on open and closed doors, on brokenness and healing, and on Jesus’ command to love one another — with all the vulnerability, risk, and promise obedience to such a commandment means for Christians.
The doors God opens, Owens said, “lead to all kinds of possibilities and opportunities.”
Possibilities are tentative, Owens said, “they denote something that hasn’t happened yet and may or may not happen.” But opportunities are different, she insisted. “Opportunities are there waiting for us, like open doors and all we have to do is walk through. But it’s scary, because you don’t know where you might end up when you open those doors.” God has thousands of opportunities waiting for us, Owens said.
Laney told of a church member in Tuscaloosa, James Calvin, who was undaunted when he lost his job at age 50. “James understood that God is constantly opening doors of opportunity,” Laney said, “and whenever anyone he knew lost a job, he’d be there at their door, saying ‘God has another opportunity for you.’ If James was here today, he’d tell you ‘Go find the doors of opportunity God has set out for you.’”
Citing the Luke passage in which Jesus sends out his followers in pairs to proclaim the nearness of the realm of God, Laney said, “Too many Christians of my generation and older let the story stop with Jesus on the cross and they’ve abandoned the church.
“But my hope rests in Jesus Christ — not the one on the cross, but the one resurrected,” he said. “And I want all of you to stay in the church long enough to tell somebody else the whole story. Jesus Christ is sending you out to do a new thing, not as individuals but as a community created this week, with a message of hope for the world.
“Take those opportunities to throw open the doors of this church. Those like me and older than me will follow you until you show us the church the way it’s supposed to be.”
The prophet’s vision in Isaiah 33 offers the hope that this generation will do new things,” Owens said. “If we put our trust in God and feast on God’s word, this vision might be accomplished,” But only “if we carry what we’ve learned here out into the world,” Laney said to the strains of Bob Dylan’s classic “Knocking on Heaven’s Door.”
