By a technicality, I am a fairly large man. But one of God’s most gracious gifts to those of us in ministry is that as He gives us more opportunities we might perceive as “bigger,” He gives us perspective into how small we are. He allows me to see both that my life has unthinkable weight because He loves me and yet how inconceivably irrelevant I am under the canvas of space and time.
I am young enough that within my tradition, people occasionally tell me they see me as voice for “the future.” And while the sentiment is appreciated, I feel fairly certain I am not particularly futuristic.
The future has already arrived, and it has little to do with people like me.
In the global body of Christ, we have seen a remarkable shift in the balance of power. Those of us in the west in general and North America in particular are used to being in the seat of power and influence; we are used to being those who shape global conversation in the Church. Our sense of self-importance is innate. Drunk on the rhetoric of America as a new Israel, our Christian faith a curious syncretism of sentimental piety and manifest destiny, we send missionaries into the world. We ship our virtues and vices wholesale into all the Earth.
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I am a Pentecostal by heritage and tradition, but culturally, I am one of the bourgeois pastors whose day might seem to be coming but in many ways has already passed. The whole white male, coffee-drinking, Apple-product-using, Coldplay-listening type.
It is a very small world that we live in that feels deceitfully large. We have blogs, we write books, we talk about the most recent issue of Christianity Today. So it is easy to think we are the center of the universe.
We did not notice that the world has already moved on.
We didn’t notice that the wind of the Spirit left us and that there is a new world coming in Latin America and Africa and Asia that rendered us inconsequential. We enjoyed our time in the mainstream well enough to forget that the move of God always comes from the margins.
