26 May Profound Changes in Christianity

Monumental change is going on around you even though all feels normal. It’s like standing on a glacier. It feels solid and still, but in truth it is BIG and it is MOVING.

What God is doing right now in the world is profound and hard to see, yet epic.

Sometimes it’s easier to see what God was doing when we look back on it with the advantage of hindsight. Martin Luther would have had no idea of the depth that his actions would bring to Germany, and to the whole Church and the whole World. Bigger things were happening than anyone could have ever known.

William Carey seemed to struggle to find anyone to understand him, and he went off to India to be a missionary. Yet today we all look back on him as the Father of Modern missions, and his work profoundly changed the way mission happens. Carey however, felt none of that, just hard work and dedication combined with huge boredom, privation, the death of his wife, and plenty of mosquitos thrown in for good measure.

Hindsight shows us that God was shaking up the Church. He was moving in big ways, but not always discernable to those on location at the time. And as it turns out, that is how all believers of all times have mostly felt. Just normal. God is not doing less today than He did previously. History will show that His hand is more at work now than during the days of Patrick, or Wesley, or Booth.

And what exactly is God doing right now? He is completely reshaping the whole Church in the whole world. Transforming it from being so institutional to being very relational. The core components which hold the lives of Christians together are changing DNA. We are going from being more organisation to being more organism. What God has done in the last 50 years alone is astounding when one stops to account for it.

You ARE living in exciting times, and very much a part of what the Lord is doing. Lend your prayers and lend your heart in helping us take an apostolic message to the nations.

“As you come to Him, the living stone, rejected by men, but chosen and precious in God’s sight, you also like living stones are being built into a spiritual house…” 1 Peter 2:4-5b

Image of Glacier By Guilhem Vellut from Paris (Glacier) [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons