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I believe passionately that the church today needs to be future orientated. Leaders are needed to rise up and lead people into the future. We need to be forward thinking, open to change, adaptive, and creative. But how can we most effectively move into the future? What do we need to do to ensure that we don’t become stagnant and stuck drifting in the slow lane whilst the world passes us by? How can we be relevant to the culture without simply following what the world does?

Many people in their desire to move forward think that simply forgetting about anything from the past is the key. Why waste time looking back when you can be moving forward? Others think that living for the now is what is most important. Why dream about the future when you can do something now? Both of these positions are very understandable but neither of them, I believe, will actually help us truly change the future as God wants us to. We need to embrace a position which keeps the past, present, and future in a healthy balance. Understanding the role of each of these dimensions is crucial if we truly want to change the future and see God’s kingdom breaking in.

And I want to start by saying that looking to the past is crucial if we want to move forward into the future. I don’t see any point in ignoring what has happened before us only to repeat the same mistakes. Surely, it is plain foolish to duplicate the errors of previous generations? And yet that is the inevitable outcome of walking into the future whilst being ignorant of the past. But that is not the main point I want to make about the past. I believe that for the church of the 21st century to truly embrace what God has for her, we need to get back to her origin. Since the first century, the church has evolved in so many different ways and the danger is that much of what we understand of church today is not what God originally intended. We very easily embrace an understanding of church that is far more shaped by recent traditions than it is its original purpose.

It is because of this that I think God is leading so many people to take a fresh look at the book of Acts. We need to recapture what it is that God had in mind for the church. We need to rediscover some of the vision, passion, simplicity, and boldness of the early church. We need to go back to go to the future. It is always interesting when unchurched people read something like the book of Acts. They almost always go, “What happened? Church is nothing like that here!� And that should challenge us!

That isn’t to say that we are to do exactly what the early church did and simply try and replicate what happened then in our 21st century world. No, we live in a very different cultural context that requires that we adapt accordingly. What the book of Acts does give us a glimpse of though is what is truly important. And you immediately see that so much of what we understand of church (buildings, Sundays, endless meetings etc) is not how the 1st century Christians understood church. For them it was about doing life together; it was relational and in one another’s homes. It involved lots of eating together, praying together, sharing what they had and living generous lives. It was so much more than an event on a Sunday. And I think that if we want to move into the future and see more of God’s kingdom breaking in, it’s in returning to the simplicity of the origin of the church that will be critical.

What do you think?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 11:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.