Watching the River Flow (BJEP019)
Watching the River Flow
The Wind Blows Where It Wishes (John 3:8)
(Prepared by Dr. Edward Edezhath, based on the article for Kairos Malayalam in 2015)
There is a passage in the forty-seventh chapter of Ezekiel that I have returned to more times than I can count.
The prophet is standing at the threshold of the temple when he notices water — just a trickle, really, no more than what a child might dam up with a handful of mud — seeping from the right side of the building and moving eastward. A man appears beside him, rod in hand, and begins walking ahead into the water. They move forward together, measuring. After a thousand cubits, the water reaches their ankles. Another thousand, and it is at the knee. Another, and it is at the waist. Then, with a fourth measured stretch, it is beyond any wading — a river deep enough to swim in, wide enough to swallow the landscape, vast enough to carry boats.
What reaches the Dead Sea, where nothing lives, turns the water fresh. Fruit trees rise along both banks. Fishermen stand at its edges. Swarms of living creatures follow wherever the river goes (Ezek. 47:1–12).
I have read that passage in many contexts and for many reasons. But when I try to understand what has happened in Jesus Youth over the past forty years — how it began, what shaped it, where it is now — Ezekiel's river is the image I keep coming back to. It is exactly this: a small trickle from a single source, measured and deepened by a faithful few taking one step at a time, until something formed that no one who stood at the beginning could have predicted.
A Trickle, Moving East
The wave of Charismatic renewal that arrived in Kerala in 1976 was not a flood. It was, in retrospect, precisely that ankle-deep trickle.
Among these, a particularly vibrant young community, of which I became a part, was formed in Kochi, nurtured by the personal care and patient accompaniment of two Spanish Carmelite priests. Their steady investment in that community — the kind of unhurried, relationship-based formation that rarely makes news but always makes disciples — ensured that what began there did not dissipate after the initial excitement passed. A faith that matures and a leadership that continues: those two things, taken together, are the indispensable foundation of any movement worth its name.
That combination — a blessed beginning and a sustained constancy in the people who carried it — was itself, I believe, the first great gift.
But it was not the whole story. Unexpected developments played their part. The first renewal leadership gathering in February 1978 brought coordination and oversight to what had been growing organically, adding structure and continuity. A few months later, in May, a letter arrived from the then-chairman of the national service committee. "There is already leadership among young people in Kerala," the letter said. "Therefore, the next step is to organize a youth gathering." That sentence — simple, direct, almost matter-of-fact — was the seed of what became the first Kerala youth team, widespread coordination activities, and then, that December, a youth convention of remarkable energy.
The water was now knee-deep.
By September 1981, the growing community was facing a new challenge that required a new kind of thinking: how do young people seek out and identify a spirituality and a working style that are genuinely their own, rather than simply inheriting the forms developed by the adults around them? A new committee formed around that question. Inquiry discussions followed. Two new training programs emerged from those discussions. From those programs, a "First Line" leadership committee took shape — a tier of young leaders with formation and accountability built into how they served. Step by measured step, exactly as Ezekiel's man moved through the water with his rod.
Questions from the Shore
Today, Jesus Youth has reached many countries and is present across many spheres of life. People encounter it and ask questions with genuine curiosity: How did it grow in this particular way? How did this aspect develop, or that initiative take root? What was behind the music, the formation structures, the social commitments, the approach to leadership?
These are good questions. They deserve more than a shrug or a vague gesture toward the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is real and central — but the Spirit works through real people, in real places, at real moments in history. To honor those moments only with vague generality is to shortchange both the story and the people who lived it.
Reflecting on what the Spirit of God has done and naming it as precisely as we can: that, I have come to believe, is itself a form of prayer and gratitude.
Yeats in Dublin, 1916
W. B. Yeats was shaken by the Easter Rising — the 1916 rebellion in Dublin in which a group of Irish nationalists seized key buildings across the city and held them for six days before being suppressed and executed. It was a defeat by any military measure. Yeats, watching from a distance, wrestled with what it meant. What he produced was one of the great poems in the English language: "Easter 1916."
What struck me, when I first read it, was his choice to break from convention. The elegiac tradition — poetry that mourns the loss of great figures — typically does not name names. It speaks in general terms, preserving dignity, keeping the focus on grief rather than catalog. Yeats set that convention aside. He named them, one by one. And he explained why:
"Our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild."
He names them because to leave them unnamed would be its own kind of betrayal. The dream they carried deserves to be spoken out loud. And so does the cost of it:
"We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse —
...
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born."
I am not invoking Yeats to mourn. I am invoking him to make the case for remembering — for the act of returning to specific events and naming specific developments and, sometimes, the specific people through whom the Spirit moved. Not to create a hagiography, and certainly not to build a monument to any individual. But because the river has a source, and tributaries, and channels, and none of that happens without someone deciding to take a step forward into the water.
Here, unlike in Yeats' poem, what we are doing is not mourning. It is celebrating. It is gratitude. The Lord has worked through events and initiatives and people across several decades to make something that no one planned from the beginning — something that has grown and deepened in ways that continue to surprise those of us who were there early. To look back on that, to name it carefully, to study the shapes of grace that appear when you trace the history — this is its own kind of worship.
The Purpose of This Series
The articles that follow in this series are each an attempt to trace one particular pathway of growth within the Jesus Youth movement: how a specific dimension of the movement's life developed, what gave it shape, what sustained it, and where it has arrived. Some of these articles cover things that will be familiar to longtime members. Others may surprise even those who have been part of the movement for years.
The wind of the Divine Spirit blows where it wishes. We sense its movement. But the one who knows that wind can read its direction and character with some precision — and can move with it rather than against it. That discernment requires both attention and memory.
These articles are offered as a small act of both.
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For further reflection:
1. Ezekiel's river begins as a trickle so small that a single person could dam it, and becomes something no one can cross. Is there a small beginning in your own spiritual life — a moment or encounter that seemed insignificant at the time — that you can now see was the start of something much larger?
2. The article describes two foundations that made JY's early growth possible: a blessed beginning and a sustained constancy in the people who carried it. Of those two, which do you see as more naturally present in your own community? Which needs more intentional cultivation?
3. Yeats argued that to leave the names of the fallen unspoken was a kind of betrayal. In the story of a community or movement, who are the people whose contributions risk being forgotten — not the prominent figures, but the ones who took quiet, essential steps no one else was willing to take?
4. The series is described as an act of both attention and memory. Is there a dimension of the movement's history — or of your own community's history — that deserves more careful attention than it has received? What would it take to offer that attention?
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