Revolution Page 2
None of the people living at Timothy’s Place have been sanctioned by a denomination to lead a ministry, nor have they attended a seminary or Bible college. None of the families attend a conventional church. None of the adults claim the title of pastor or elder. They do not receive any funding from a government agency or religious group of any type. Each of the residents claims to have been “called” to this work among the least desirable people of the city. The police appreciate what they do and what they represent, but the owners of the house do not get a break on their property taxes, as conventional churches do.
Despite the doubts and denials of some area residents, government officials, and religious professionals, Timothy’s Place is the Church.
The Church in the Corner of the Lunchroom
Jan and Olga, both single women in their thirties, met at their workplace two years ago. They come from radically different backgrounds. Jan grew up in a well-to-do home with loving parents. She attended an Ivy League college, went on to earn a master’s degree, and is quickly climbing the corporate ladder. Olga is an immigrant from Russia, where she grew up in an orphanage, never knew her parents, and had minimal education. She currently works in the maintenance department of the company. She speaks passable English, if you ignore how she conjugates verbs and mixes up pronouns.
The two women meet in the company lunchroom every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. They have pretty much taken over a two-person table in the far corner, where they remain oblivious to the hustle and bustle of executives and players-in-training coursing through the large, noisy room. The gossip mill has been active regarding the smiles, animated conversations, and hand-holding-with-eyes-closed that takes place during Jan and Olga’s lunchroom rendezvous. A number of executives have privately questioned why someone as sharp and aggressive as Jan would be seen in public with the lowly maintenance woman who is trying to escape her life of poverty.
Jan and Olga have remained unaffected by the whispers and derisive looks. They are aware, of course, but they simply make note of those individuals and pray together for them. In fact, the odd couple spends their entire lunch hour praying. The exception is when they share good news about answered prayer—which simply fuels their passion to pray all the more.
When the passersby in the lunchroom think of “church,” they imagine large cathedrals or megachurches with their sprawling campuses. They do not think of Olga and Jan as the Church. But they are.
The Online Gathering
Tony is a supervisor at a national trucking company. Because his trailers travel the nation’s highways 24/7, he has been assigned the graveyard shift, from 11:00 p.m. to 8:00 a.m. The building, which hosts a blur of activity during the day, is tranquil at night; only a handful of other employees work the lonely hours with Tony.
Several years ago, Tony began a practice that has changed his life. During his meal hour, he sits in front of his computer and logs on to an interactive worship site. He has daily conversations with a small group of other God-lovers from around the world who convene every day at four o’clock in the morning (in Tony’s time zone). They pray together, read the Scriptures together, share written passages from Christian books they are reading, and talk about world events and a viable Christian response to those situations.
Working the overnight shift led to Tony’s divorce a decade ago. He and his wife had been regulars at their church, but he dropped out after feeling unwanted or rejected because of his broken marriage. Although he visited a few other churches in the area, he never connected with any of them. He began a personal regimen of prayer and Bible reading but knew he wanted to be connected to a group of believers. That’s when he encountered the online gathering.
Tony’s congregation includes people who live in at least five other countries. English is the common language, with plenty of slang and online acronyms. There is no singing involved. The group does not have a common building or anyone they pay to lead them. There are no Sunday school classes or outreach events. It’s simply a small number of Christ-followers who have grown to know and love each other and who remain in their community because of their common adoration of Jesus.
Although some scholars and religious professionals are undecided as to whether a glorified chat room can be considered a church congregation, Tony’s gathering is most definitely the Church.
Welcome to the Revolution
You probably know people like Paul and Patty, Zach and Liz, Jan, Olga, and Tony—Revolutionary Christians whose lives reflect the ideals and principles that characterized the life and purpose of Jesus Christ. You might even be one of them. Although they rarely, if ever, attend weekend services at a conventional church, their gatherings and interactions with others advance the Kingdom of God. Together, they represent a different breed of disciple of Jesus Christ. Revolutionary Christians are people who are not willing to play religious games or be a part of a religious community that does not intentionally and aggressively advance God’s Kingdom. They are people who want more—much more—of God in their lives. And they are doing whatever it takes to get it.
These Revolutionary Christ-followers are committed to demonstrating the life of Christ by how they themselves live in the world. They are determined to stay in touch with the living God and His active Word, and with the heartbeat of a spiritually enriching community of faith. Revolutionary Christians don’t want to merely talk about a vibrant faith; they want to live it—though that’s not easy in our society. After all, we’re confronted by so many distractions and alternatives every day, it’s a miracle anyone even remembers God. But Revolutionary Christians desire to manifest the spiritual fruit that Jesus challenged His followers to bear. They want to become spiritual warriors who experience victory in Christ, rather than spiritual victims who can only lament the waywardness of our culture. Bottom line: they want to live their lives for the glory and purposes of God rather than for their own pleasure and advancement.
The United States is home to an increasing number of Revolutionaries—devout followers of Jesus Christ who are serious about their faith, constantly worshiping and interacting with God, and whose lives are centered on their faith in Christ. Some are aligned with a congregational type of church, but many are not. The key to understanding Revolutionaries is not what church they attend, or even if they attend: it’s their complete dedication to being thoroughly Christian, by viewing every moment of life through a spiritual lens and making every decision in light of biblical principles and their calling from God. These are individuals who are determined to glorify God each day through every thought, word, and deed.
This book is about the Christian Revolutionaries presently emerging in America—and the spiritual Revolution they are bringing with them.
Chapter Two
The Revolutionary Age
A QUIET REVOLUTION is rocking the nation. The media are oblivious to it. Scholars are clueless about it. The government caught a glimpse of it in the 2004 presidential election but has mostly misinterpreted its nature and motivations. And Christian churches are only vaguely aware that something seems different, but they have little idea what it’s all about.
Let me be the first to welcome you to the Revolutionary Age. The community of faith has instigated many ages in the past. Church history recounts such times as the Apostolic Age, the Time of the Martyrs, the era of the Desert Fathers, the Period of the Mystics, the Reformation, the Great Awakening, and the Missionary Age, to name a few.
Today, we have the Revolutionary Age. It fits our cultural context, doesn’t it? Newspapers, magazines, and television shows belch out endless stories about the information revolution, the technological revolution, the sexual revolution, the globalization revolution, the entrepreneurial revolution, the conservative revolution, and so forth. It’s amazing that most people are totally unaware of the most important renaissance of them all: the spiritual revolution that is reshaping Christianity, personal faith, corporate religious experience, and the moral contours of the nation.
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bsp; Defining Our Terms
We live in an era of hyperbole. Everything is supersized, global, mega-this, and biggest-ever-that. Even the religious community has succumbed to the world’s infatuation with size. The pinnacle of church success is to become a megachurch. The ultimate in presentations is to have a big-screen projection system. Evangelism has traded in tent revivals for stadium crusades. Televangelists have moved beyond network broadcasting to satellite feeds that reach every nation in the world. Faithful mom-and-pop Christian bookstores are closing by the hundreds because Christian publishers have placed their products in the “big box” retailers, such as Walmart, Costco, Target, and Barnes & Noble.
Revolution is one of those “big ideas” that has caught fire among marketers. In recent years they have capitalized on the word, hoping to generate the almighty street buzz by exploiting the dangerous feel of the term—often as a means of distracting consumers from the absence of an edgy product. So Chevrolet trumpets its “revolution” while selling the same old vehicles with slicker advertising and a few bells and whistles. A group of executives leave their positions at major movie studios to form an independent production company, named Revolution Studios, to develop relatively mainstream films, many of which fall far short of the distinctiveness promised by the company’s name. (Remember the universally panned film Gigli?) The Green Revolution is an uninspiring approach to eradicating world hunger through the use of high-yield agricultural techniques of dubious performance. The Nintendo Revolution is simply the marketing label attached to the latest generation of video games from the giant game maker.
Webster, not one to succumb to societal pressure to exaggerate, defines a revolution as “an overthrow or repudiation and thorough replacement of an established government or political system by the people governed.” It adds that a revolution may also be a “radical and pervasive change in society and the social structure.”
Webster is aptly describing the transformation occurring in American spirituality today. Millions of devout followers of Jesus Christ are repudiating tepid systems and practices of the Christian faith and introducing a wholesale shift in how faith is understood, integrated, and influencing the world. Because human beings become what they believe, and practicing what they believe is the swiftest and surest means of generating lasting change, this revolution of faith is the most significant transition you or I will experience during our lifetime.
Hmm, does that sound as if I’m the one who is now guilty of hyperbole? I don’t think so.
Why Now?
One of the hallmarks of this period of history is the unprecedented busyness of people’s lives. More responsibilities and distractions bombard the typical American than anyone would have imagined possible just a century ago. It is in the midst of this cultural context—a society defined by seemingly infinite opportunities and options and supported by a worldview best summarized by a single word: whatever—that this countercultural, faith-based response has emerged.
In essence, our culture’s inability to provide fulfillment has caused millions of individuals—who are serious about understanding their existence and living right—to live in a manner that never fails to raise eyebrows in a society that is notably shockproof and dispassionate. These people have chosen to live in concert with core biblical principles. That strategic choice makes them stand out as extremists in a culture that keeps pushing the boundaries of extremism. These are the true Revolutionaries.
What makes Revolutionaries so startling is that they are confidently returning to a first-century lifestyle based on faith, goodness, love, generosity, kindness, simplicity, and other values deemed “quaint” by today’s frenetic and morally untethered standards. This is not the defeatist retreat of an underachieving, low-capacity mass of people. It is an intelligent and intentional embrace of a way of life that is the only viable antidote to the untenable moral standards, dysfunctional relationships, material excess, abusive power, and unfortunate misapplication of talent and knowledge that pass for life in America these days. Many Revolutionaries have tested the alternatives and found them to be woefully inadequate. Now, like children who sheepishly realize that Mama was right all along, they have gratefully and humbly accepted the opportunity to do what is right, simply because it is right, even if it is not original or culturally hip.
The unfortunate truth is that most citizens of “the greatest nation on earth” are mired in an agonizing revolving door of trial-and-error efforts in a disheartening and unfulfilling search for truth, integrity, meaning, wholeness, connection, passion, and inner peace. Being in the presence of people who seem to have discovered the keys to achieving such lofty and desirable outcomes cannot help but cause earnest seekers to take notice—and to wonder how it is even remotely possible for Revolutionaries to succeed in our sophisticated age with such simple values and practices.
Conventional Practices Are the Cornerstones
As we journey together, I want to show you what our research has uncovered regarding a growing subnation of people, already well over twenty million strong, who are what we call Revolutionaries.
What “established systems” are they seeking to “overthrow or repudiate” and “thoroughly replace,” in Webster’s words?
They have no use for churches that play religious games, whether those games are worship services that drone on without the presence of God or ministry programs that bear no spiritual fruit. Revolutionaries eschew ministries that compromise or soft sell our sinful nature to expand organizational turf. They refuse to follow people in ministry leadership positions who cast a personal vision rather than God’s, who seek popularity rather than the proclamation of truth in their public statements, or who are more concerned about their own legacy than that of Jesus Christ. They refuse to donate one more dollar to man-made monuments that mark their own achievements and guarantee their place in history. They are unimpressed by accredited degrees and endowed chairs in Christian colleges and seminaries that produce young people incapable of defending the Bible or unwilling to devote their lives to serving others. And Revolutionaries are embarrassed by language that promises Christian love and holiness but turns out to be all sizzle and no substance.
In fact, many Revolutionaries have been active in good churches that have biblical preaching, people coming to Christ and being baptized, a full roster of interesting classes and programs, and a congregation packed with nice people. There is nothing overtly wrong with anything taking place at such churches. But Revolutionaries innately realize that it is just not enough to go with the flow. The experience provided through their church, although better than average, still seems flat. They are seeking a faith experience that is more robust and awe inspiring, a spiritual journey that prioritizes transformation at every turn, something worthy of the Creator whom their faith reflects. They are seeking the spark provided by a commitment to a true revolution in thinking, behavior, and experience, where settling for what is merely good and above average is defeat.
Revolutionaries zealously pursue an intimate relationship with God, which Jesus Christ promised we could have through Him. They recognize that there is a huge price to pay in this lifetime—but they are mindful of the eternal payoff as well. Faced with an abundance of options, Revolutionaries make their decisions with great care, knowing that each choice matters to God.
In America today, the easiest thing to get away with is going with the flow. The ride is smoother and resistance is minimized. But like the wide path that Scripture warns most people will take, it is a comfortable route that eventually and inevitably results in disaster. To the Revolutionary, there is no such thing as “going along to get along.” You either stand for Jesus or you stand for all that He died to repudiate. To the Revolutionary, yes indeed, life truly is that simple, it is that black-and-white, whether university scholars and the media ridicule that point of view or not. After all, they are not the ultimate Judge to whom we will all give account someday. And it is only that Judge’s pronouncement that matters.
Count the Cost
Revolutionaries invariably turn to God’s Word—the Bible—for their guidance. In that vein, I encourage you to take heed of Jesus’ admonition to His followers always to “count the cost” of choices you make, especially the choice to be a full-on, no-holds-barred follower of His.