This is why I don’t believe the answer to the church of the future is in the future.
I wonder if, rather than constantly trying to re-imagine the church, we should learn to look at some of the successes of the last 2,000 years of church history.
I believe this generation of youth and young adults is called to be the generation that rebuilds the church in the western world. We use Isaiah 58:12 a lot at St. Thomas Philadelphia in Sheffield, England, to help guide us as a generation attempting to build:
Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins
and will raise up the age-old foundations;
you will be called Repairer of Broken Walls,
Restorer of Streets with Dwellings.
“Your people will rebuild the ancient ruins.”
This generation of youth and young adults needs to be challenged and charged with the task of rebuilding the ruins of the church. This isn’t a challenge to build church separate in some way from other generations, but rather a call to roll up our sleeves and get into the task of recapturing the essence of what this church thing was all about in the first place. (That’s life-changing following of Jesus, in case you’re wondering.)
“And will raise up the age-old foundations.”
This is where we need to choose to learn from the past in order to build into the future. I don’t believe we’re supposed to be a generation that totally rethinks, re-imagines and remodels the church in the future from a blank slate. We are called to build something new, but we are supposed to do so by building upon the foundations of the great saints who went before us.
At the moment, I’m really struck by the lessons we can learn from the ministry of John Wesley. During his lifetime, a movement of people called the Methodists started and saw hundreds of thousands turn their lives over to Jesus at a time when the church was largely considered irrelevant to the lives of the everyday man, woman and child.
Ring a bell?
So what were the keys to the Wesleyan revival? What is the Wesleyan foundation which we can recapture as a foundation from which we can build? There are many, but I will start with one fundamental lesson we can learn: a lesson of grace and discipline.