Session 8: Mission & the Modern World | Our Family Story: Charting Again the History of Jesus’ Church

Among the many things that I've done in my life that I never expected was that now and again I've been asked to be a volunteer chaplain on a cruise ship.

Several years ago, when I was on a chaplain on a cruise ship that went around the south end of South America, I met up with a group of people from England.

They were coming to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the start of a mission right at the southern tip of South America at a place called Ushwaya.

What happened is that this group out of England a couple of hundred years ago had begun to think about the global mission of Jesus and had said that there seemed to be so little emphasis placed on South America.

So much was placed on North and Central America, but not on South America.

And so they set up a Patagonia mission in order to have people come and enter into some of the tribal areas of South America.

Six times over, all of the missionaries were killed.

Some of the peoples who killed these missionaries were considered to be cannibalistic.

And so there was a great fear in England about sending any more missionaries.

In fact, in a prayer meeting they had, they decided that they would give one more effort to establishing, if possible, a mission somewhere in the Patagonia region, that's the southern end of South America.

One of the men who was part of the board of the mission decided that he would take his family.

Now, his family was a little interesting because not only did he and his wife have several children biologically, but they also had two adoptive sons.

And one of those adoptive sons was rather interesting in his background.

No one knew who his parents were.

The pastor had been coming across a bridge in Bristol, England one night and suddenly heard the crying of a baby.

The baby was in a basket.

The man looked around for any sign of any relatives, a mother, a father, anybody who might care about him.

There was none.

Checked with the police.

There were no incidents of lost children or anything like that.

And so he kept the baby.

He and his wife kept the baby and went through a process of first fostering and then adopting this baby.

Because the baby was found on what was then in the church calendar, St.

George's Day, uh St.

Thomas's Day, I mean, they called him Thomas.

And though he took on the family name for a while, because of his unique background and being found on a bridge, he decided for most of his life to call himself Bridges.

So he became known as Thomas Bridges.

Now, Thomas Bridges went with his adoptive family first to the Falkland Islands near just off the coast of South America.

And then when his parents decided that they had to go back to England for safety reasons, he stayed on as a 17-year-old boy.

He was very good at hearing and understanding languages, and he began to work with people from the Yagana tribe.

There were six tribes in South America that were sort of the targets or that were known about and sort of the targets for this new mission station.

And eventually he would move right to the very southern part of South America, establish a town named Ushwaya, actually a mission.

It's now a city down there.

And it became the first place that the Agana tribe and then several of the other tribes heard about Jesus and became Christians through the ministry of a guy named Thomas Bridges, who was found on a bridge in Bristol, England on St.

Thomas's Day, was adopted into a pastor's family, and became the start of a mission in South America.

This is all very fascinating.

It was very fascinating to me.

These people were now celebrating 150 years of a successful mission that eventually brought Christianity to six major tribes in South America.

But what I found even more fascinating is that this all happened just a short while after Charles Darwin became part of the expedition of the Beagle, the HMS Beagle, that went around South America about 50 to 70 years before this mission got its start.

What happened with Charles Darwin is Charles Darwin grew up in a Presbyterian home in England.

He grew up in the gospel in a kind of Anglican-Presbyan background.

And although he was at one time facing the possibility of becoming a pastor, he even took some theology courses.

He was a devout Christian, but kind of in a more cultural way.

He became fascinated by stuff in the natural world and then was asked to come along on this trip of the HMS Beagle around South America.

It was during that time that he began to develop his ideas that age for the world, age for humankind, age for civilizations was much longer and more change-prone than many had said up until that time.

It was really the development of evolutionary theory, now put down into what would become this famous book, Origin of the Species.

What Charles Darwin saw around South America was that there was very little distinction in his mind between the animal world, which was constantly changing, and the human world, which was evolved out of the animals.

And his major case in point was the Yagana people of South America, along with others in that region.

He saw them, he heard about them, he met them on the HMS Beagle on his expedition, seeing them as almost the link between the animal world and the human world, that they were clearly people who were barely human and essentially wild animals.

He even wrote a book in which he talked about that they were essentially human.

Well, what happened along the way is that after he had published these things about evolution and about the Ugana and other tribes in South America and their animalistic style and all of that, he began to hear about Thomas Bridges' work.

And he communicated for a number of years with Thomas Bridges near the end of Charles Darwin's own life.

And he was amazed at this.

He found in what Thomas Bridges had encountered with the Jagana people a correction to his ideas that the Ugana were not animal-like, but they were truly human in distinction from the animals in a way that didn't seem to support any direct links, any direct evolutionary links between the wild animals of South America and these seemingly savage people who were really far more developed culturally and intellectually and in human identity than he had ever imagined.

Charles Darwin had long ago given up any support for the Christian church or any involvement in the Christian church, even though he grew up in the Christian church and even though he was at one time going to become a pastor, or at least had that possibility in the Christian church.

He had stopped supporting, he had stopped participating in worship services, community life, the church was gone.

It was irrelevant, it had nothing to say, it didn't meet with his ideas of a modern era.

But he began to support uh Thomas Bridges' work among the Uganda people in Ushuaia and into the heartland of Patagonia.

And for the rest of his life, Charles Darwin supported a Christian mission and had a constant dialogue with Thomas Bridges.

What I think about this is something that comes into play with regard to this final session, thinking about the church's history.

Let's go back all of the way and talk about the manner in which we in our ages have looked at the past of our human race and the development of civilizations, the development of religion, and all of that.

We generally talk about human existence that we can measure and codify and think about and describe from about 6,000 BC to about 600 BC.

We call that the prehistory or the ancient world.

We talk about that as the pre-civilizations, the development of peoples, migrations of peoples, things like that.

The world population of humankind was very small at this time.

And there were developments of language and the use of equipment, mechanical devices, simple mechanical devices, the start of animal husbandry and the start of agriculture, those kinds of things.

We have some of the great civilizations that start to emerge out of the Fertile Crescent, out of Mesopotamia, the Sumerians, and then we have the Assyrians and the Babylonians, and then we have the Persians, which uh spread all the way from Asia into Europe and across northern Africa, following them, the Greeks and the Romans.

And this is sort of our classical age in which there's kingdom building.

And this is the age into which the biblical record comes.

It's in this age that we begin to see what happens out of the descendants of Abraham, who were part of the prehistorical or the ancient ancient civilizations, and moving now into this classical age in which they're one among several different groups that are beginning to sense cohesion in society and global gatherings of people that are bigger than any one location or city or even region.

So we have the kingdoms and Christianity beginning to emerge at the same time.

And we have the people of God planted in that one unique strip on the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea that forms the bridge between Africa and Asia and Europe, where the people are migrating and they're building their conquering armies and they're trading back and forth.

And there sits Israel and there begins Christianity as the kind of witness to all of the peoples.

Early on in the church's history, that group gets attached to the Roman Empire.

The Greeks sort of gave the world a sense of democracy or how do we live together and philosophy, how do we view life.

And then the Romans took over that and they added to that law and justice and expansion and military reach into distant civilizations, sort of the amalgam of the peoples coming together.

In that environment, Christianity grew up.

So we have the prehistorical times or ancient times, and then we have the classical times from about 600 BC to almost 500 AD.

It's in that world that Christianity emerges and becomes sort of a dominating influence.

It will actually be part of the next major wave, and this is what we call the medieval period, the Middle Ages, from around 500 A.D to about 1500 A.D.

What happens here is that there are two major religious movements that begin to supersede international kingdoms.

On the one hand, we have the Christian group taking over essentially the Western Roman Empire as the empire begins to disintegrate.

And so we have the time of the Holy Roman Empire and the Christianization of Europe.

Further to the Middle East and beyond is the growth of the Islamic Empire.

And these two groups are very closely attached because they use much of the same scripture.

They're both monotheistic religions.

They are considered kind of brother peoples, and yet they have slightly different approaches to all of this.

Now, at the same time, there's been develops in the classical age and into the Middle Ages, over in China with the Han dynasty, and in India with the Gupta dynasties and all of these, and down into Africa with what's happening in Ethiopia and in Egypt.

But the dominant expressions of what become historical recorded civilizations are constantly being influenced, particularly at the heartbeat of the joint positioning of these great continents.

It comes through Christianity and Islam.

And then what happens when we get to around 1500 is that the thing begins to break up rapidly.

And from about 1500 to 1700, we think about the pre-modern age, and from about 1700 to the present, we think about the modern age, maybe even into what many are calling the postmodern age.

And this is the era that I'm going to spend a little more time with today.

It reflects what's going on with Charles Darwin, and it reflects what's going on with exploration of different civilizations and different continents, and it reflects what's going on with Thomas Bridges.

All kinds of things coming together here.

What happens around the 1400s and the 1500s, particularly in Europe, but it also spills over elsewhere, was what we called the Renaissance and the Reformation and the Enlightenment.

And these were all groups and movements that were closely associated with one another.

Through the Renaissance, there was a rebirth of a sense of human identity and the ability of humankind to basically subject the world to itself.

We are in charge, we can do what we want.

We have artistic skills, we have governing skills, we have monetary skills, we have the ability to explore, we have the ability to think about new mechanical devices, all sorts of things going on in the Renaissance.

The Reformation piggybacking onto that, saying, yes, but let's not forget God.

And so the Reformation from within the heartbeat of the church said we have to return to a better way of reflecting Jesus on planet Earth.

And there were a variety of ways in which that came through, which we looked at before.

But both of these together pressed toward what we talked briefly about last time as the enlightenment.

And here there was a sense that maybe we can do the positive energy of the Renaissance and the kind of correction of the Reformation, but do so from an enlightened human perspective in which we no longer need God and we no longer need vast authorities that seem to have some kind of kingdom mind in their view.

What took place is that we humans have the capacity to think about things and to plan for things.

And yes, we need ideals and goals and visions, but they can be from this realm and not from an other realm, not religion and not divine right kings.

We can establish civilizations, we can make compacts, we can draw lines, we can go on conquest, we can do that ourselves.

That's kind of the pure pre-modern or early modern age.

And it's seen probably best in two almost competing things that happen in France at the same time, or right after one another.

One is the French Revolution.

The French Revolution became the most blatant statement: we are no longer under God and we are no longer under monarch uh monarchies.

We are self-determining and self-ruling.

In the space of about six years, from uh 1789 to about 1795, the French people systematically undermined and got rid of every public element of the Roman Catholic Church.

The Roman Catholic Church had dominated French identity since about the 600s.

Suddenly, in the space of six years, it was thrown out the window.

The buildings of churches were taken over as public buildings.

Tithing was outlawed, the clerical dress for priests and for nuns and monks was outlawed.

Monasteries were closed.

The government confiscated all of the properties of the church.

There was even a shrine built in 1794 or three or four, I believe, to the God of reason.

And we turned our attention from the God of heaven and earth to the God of reason.

We have the capacity.

Well, what happened with that French Revolution, and it vastly um affected also the development of the United States with all of the early founders of this nation-state of the United States, with a kind of deism that there might be some higher power someplace, but that God, whatever you want to call it, has kind of left the scene and given us the world to operate by ourselves.

And the United States itself, as well as France, both built their identities on this.

Now, it stayed going in the United States, but something happened in France.

And that was a huge pushback.

And the huge pushback was Napoleon coming in.

Because as fast as the French Revolution took out God and took out transcendence and took out monarchies, so rapidly did society degenerate into name-calling and factionalizations until it seemed as if France was going to collapse in itself.

It was in that environment that Napoleon could come and he could re-establish this idea of kind of a kingdom for himself and take over most of Europe.

And also revitalize the Roman Catholic Church as the singular expression of religious identity in France.

But the damage had been done.

There had been a rift between the kingdom identity and the church.

And in Europe that would never again be reunited.

There would be the periods of warfare among the various groups.

But now the quest was not which church is going to, which aspect of the church is going to dominate, but which of us are going to claim our cultural and background and historical identity as unique nation-states.

Eventually, Napoleon would be put down by the other groups of Europe, and France would kind of fall back into a relative kind of peace between church and state.

The kingship was gone.

It was a democracy of sorts, a republic of sorts, and that would influence other nations around Europe, and it would influence other nations around the world.

And in the late 1700s, same time as the French Revolution, but in the 1800s, there were the rise of at least 15 independent nations, all going through something similar.

We can talk about Poland, we can talk about the Philippines, we can talk about Uruguay and Paraguay.

We can talk about Canada.

We can talk about South Africa.

We can talk about the many countries that are developed out of the old colonial system of Africa and Asia.

There are about 15 kingdoms that came into expression, and each of them decided to have a nation state that may or may not connect directly with a religious expression.

That became secondary to the people movement.

This is the aftermath of the Enlightenment.

It's in that environment that this new form of Christianity began to emerge, something akin to what we call pietism or revivalism, where religion switches from being an expression of cultural identity under God or within the context of this divine.

Mandate to becoming a personal thing.

Pietism and the revival movements and Methodism, the emphasis, like in Calvinism and Arminianism, Arminianism, with personal choice, with the ability of the individual to choose and the privatization of Christianity.

But it's happening within Islam about maybe a couple hundred years later.

It's happening the same way with Islam into the present.

There is a privatization, there's a sense among some countries that the long reign of transcendence and kingdom and God are not the things that are going to get us into a meaningful future.

And so with Islam as well, there's a gradual erosion of those things, even though we see the fighting back in certain places, like in Iran today and in various places where there's a dynamism going on.

Are we going to keep the old ways or are we going to enter into a new era?

There's all sorts of stuff that's going on there, but it happens in Christianity too.

Now, what happens in Christianity is that Christianity becomes privatized.

It becomes a matter of individuals and of individual associations within communities.

There are times when it sort of reasserts itself trying to take over societies, but inevitably it always collapses.

Those Christianized societies have not had any traction in the modern era.

In fact, once we get into the modern era, we find Christianity retooling itself to now address new issues that arise out of the pre-modern and early modern age.

These kinds of things are industrialization and exploration, in which peoples that at one time were localized, people lived in one spot, except for the major migrations that took people in different places for a time, but then they settled down and they became residents of one place.

I think, for instance, of Normandy in France.

Why is it called Normandy?

Because during the migrations of the Vikings, the Northmen settled on this part of what had become France, and they took a separate region there and called it after themselves or were called by that.

So what we have in Normandy, France is essentially the end result of the Viking migrations that tried to take over various parts somewhat successfully of Europe, but now ended up transplanting those wandering Vikings and made them participants of a particular era.

But that happened with the European migrations to North America and Central America and South America.

It happened with the colonialization that took place to Africa and to Asia.

There were groups of people there that had indigenous cultures, but now this all began to spread.

And in that spread, Protestant Christianity, particularly during the 19th century, during the 1800s, became the foreground of missions.

And two people in particular stand out in that missional enterprise.

One is William Carey, and the other is David Livingston.

Each of these people shaped what would become the modern Christian concept of what mission is about.

First of all, there was William Carey during an age of the colonialization that was done by England.

He was part of a poor family in central northern England.

And he began to hear these stories of the need for preachers, missionaries to go to new places, now part of the expanded British Empire, and to bring the news of Jesus.

And he supported those missionaries and he heard the missionary testimonies as they came back.

And he was intrigued by one thing in particular that they always seemed to make it us doing for them and us failing miserably.

And William Carey began to develop the idea that maybe we ought to go and be respectful of other cultures.

He started a mission that became part of a region just north of Calcutta in India.

And instead of trying to simply stand over against the local societies, he began to plant a number of colonies there of people who would be willing to come, Christians who would be willing to come and establish themselves as part of the ongoing culture of the region.

They would eat the foods that were available in that region.

They would do agriculture that was done in that region.

They would build businesses that would support the economies of that region.

They would learn the languages of those regions instead of having the people learn their language in order to hear the gospel.

So it was an indigenization of mission.

And William Carey is truly the father or founder of the modern Protestant mission effort.

And soon these kinds of communities were beginning to go to places in Africa and places in Asia, China, and Japan, some with great success, some with much lesser success.

But it was the beginning of a movement to make sure that the gospel that was communicated was the gospel of Jesus and not of a Western culture.

Similarly, there was David Livingston, who was not only a missionary, but set up, you know, medical assistance and schools and lived indigenous indigenously in communities.

But he also began actively to work in the larger global mindset against slavery.

By this time, the awful deal of European Christians taking a slaving enterprise and making it a growth enterprise, robbing people from Africa and bringing them to Central and North America and some to South America, buying and selling them as commodities as sort of within this evolutionary framework, not fully human.

There would even be a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States, the Dred Scott case, that would say, well, for economic purposes, you can count your slaves as three-fifths human, but they are not fully human, so you can still own them as animals.

The Dred Scott case, decided by the U.S.

Supreme Court, validating slavery and black Africans as being not human, but commodities that also entered into the economic world.

But on the other hand, David Livingston was just as firm about what was happening with the Muslim world, because on the eastern side of Africa, the Muslim world had largely also formed a slave trade there that moved into the Asian and Pacific world and also took people back to Central Europe and all of that.

So both Muslims and Christians, in their development of vast movements, had also begun to buy into the modern slave trade.

And David Livingston was one with a great social consciousness.

William Carey moved into a community and tried to make the community grow with Christian principles.

David Livingston said, we must transform life so that Africa has its own basis for economics and for self-rule, and we must stop the slave trade.

Those would lead to the modern social movements because by this time slavery became the greatest global sin that was ever foisted upon the human race.

And it was predominantly run by Christians and Muslims.

And into that world, there was an undermining of the old Christian tie with nation states.

Christianity began to work against the nation-states and their principles and their alignment with slaving trade and all of that.

And there were basically four movements that began to arise out of this.

Within Roman Catholicism, there was a growth of something linked to the Pope's encyclical rerum nivarum, in which there was a way of positioning Christianity between capitalism and growing communism, that neither of those ways of running society was right, but there was a Christian way, something different.

Within the Protestants, there was a sense that the industrial movement and the commercialization of society and the movement of peoples off their farms into sort of working slums of cities with all of the degradation of human life that needed to be challenged.

And there was the salvation army that began to move in and meet the needs of those that were being almost enslaved by the Industrial Revolution.

In North America, there was the Knights of Labor, a kind of organization of Christians, mostly Protestant Christians, who worked within their communities to establish labor unions over against the corporations, who established days off and limits to labor, the working day, and an end to child labor, to those kinds of things.

Terrence Powderly was the key leader in that.

And there was also within growing liberal Christianity in both Europe and the United States, something called the social gospel, which said that yes, Jesus saves, but what does salvation in Jesus mean?

Whereas for a long time, particularly in the medieval world, it was getting from this life into a good afterlife.

And this was the development of the extensive sacramental system of the medieval Roman Catholic Church.

We own the keys between this world and the future world, and you have to come to us through the sacraments in order to get from here to there.

This new social gospel emerged as more Jesus.

We can't say much about the future life, but Jesus cared about people in this life.

And if we are to preach the Christian gospel, it must be anti-slavery, anti-poverty.

It must ensure health and welfare, education, and all of these things.

And there was a growth of kind of a commonly understood this world Christianity.

All of these movements were coalescing at the same time, and they would lead to eventually the abolition of the slave trade, not all at once, but in various places, and to an uneasy kind of entry of the Christian church into the modern world.

By the time of the modern world, the link between Christianity and nation states was gone.

There could not be a return to the Holy Roman Empire.

England sort of tried that with the Anglican Church, but it disintegrated along with the Anglican or the English Empire.

The United States has tried to maintain its city on the hill Christian white identity status, but that uh reached a demise too, when there was such an influx of uh immigration from other places, other countries, other civilizations, that it did not make sense anymore, although there are always people trying to revive that into our own times.

What happened basically is that nation states developed, commercialization developed, the global empire and cultural dynamos developed, and with that the church became a kind of privatized thing.

In that privatized world, evangelism became saving individual souls, building churches, and even revitalizing churches.

Think of the church growth movement, in which the old churches are made new churches and more exciting and more attractive.

And there's a parallel to the rise of the Disneyland and the Disney World and the megachurches, particularly in the United States, but now being exported to other places, especially with the health and wealth gospel, that if you participate in our community, God is good, God is good always, always God is good, and God will bless you if you do these things.

And the growth of the idea that Christianity is in part a way to success.

That has come round now to a new era.

And the new era that we're living in now is an era in which there is a continued sense that Christianity is vital.

Christianity is reflective of our creator's desire to have us live in meaningful ways, in meaningful communities, and to understand that salvation is for this world and for the world to come.

We are a splintered organization.

We have groups that have great numbers and we have groups that are dying off.

But there's a subtle sense that the old denominationalism that appeared post-Reformation and post-30 Years' World War and into the pre-modern age, that denominationalism is no longer the way to go for the future.

There are theological concepts that have lingered and they have been part of the creeds and confessions of the church, but the dominant organizations don't seem to hold people together in the same way as they used to.

And in that, the new movement of Christianity seems largely energized by house churches once again, by small groups, by peoples who are not looking to build new kingdoms out of current cultures, not looking to Christianize their current governing systems, but are looking once again to be the leavening influence similar to the manner in which things were in the first 300 years of Christianity.

We don't own the empire.

We don't own the world, but we are on the side of God and truth and we live faithfully in our communities, touching lives and reminding them that God loves them in a way that is transformative.

And so there are new ways in which missions and mission societies are operating in this age.

Local churches are being redeveloped as being places of entry for people of different cultures in the great migrations that are taking place.

Local congregations are taking on issues of urban development and urban blight.

Local groups of Christians are banding together to get justice for people in society, not in order to build a secondary kingdom next to the present kingdom, but to recover the sense that Jesus cares about people, not only snatching souls off to heaven, but enlisting people right now to transform local communities into a better reflection of the ideals that the creator has for them.

And I think about that in terms of how in this series we have looked at the development over time.

One of the things that is constantly in my purview is that anytime the church has become absorbed by or has taken over power structures in its age, it has changed its identity and become corrupted.

When the church moved meaningfully into the Roman Empire and was given space and grace to develop, not only did many people become Christians, but very quickly the church became powerful and took on the properties that were no longer inherently Christian.

We rule, we determine, we build armies, we collect money, we establish bureaucracies.

Every time the church has capitulated to the call to becoming an empire in itself, it has lost its ability to speak meaningfully to any peoples anywhere.

It becomes another one of the corrupted empires.

We see that within the Roman Catholic community in the 1950s and 60s, when particularly Central America, there were these movements towards self-determination among the many countries there, Costa Rica and Venezuela and El Salvador and others.

For the longest time, the Roman Catholic branch of Christianity had been aligned with the governing power of Spain.

That's why Spanish is the major language in those areas.

But it had become part of the stabilized system that also prohibited the peoples, the indigenous peoples, from having a say in their own welfare.

The governments existed for the sake of the sending countries out of Europe, for Spain, for robbing the riches and wealth here and taking it over there.

And then as those attachments came undone, the government still and the church were aligned with one another.

And out of that, in Roman Catholic theology, liberation theology began to emerge.

That the emphasis is not so much on how the church can rule society, but how Jesus is always on the side of the alienated and the poor and the disenfranchised and the displaced.

And so there's this tension.

And this is where Protestantism grew and continues to grow also in Latin or Central American countries, this sense of personal determination, not only in society and with economics and government and all of that, but in my own faith and my relationship with God, which does not need, first of all, to be mediated through the structures of sacramental theology or a bureaucracy that tells me where to go and what to do.

So there is a democratization of Christianity that's taken place.

Now, the downside of all of that is this kind of separation or fragmentation of the church so that we begin to see each other with somewhat suspicion in the same way that nation-states, democratic or republican nation-states, begin to see other nation states.

Our form of this privatized Christianity is better than your form of this privatized Christianity.

And there's a sense of superiority that grows within each community over against other communities.

This is the endemic power of sin within us.

We are always thinking that our way of doing things is best, that somehow God has blessed us, and that we're going to be able to show others how to do it our way, even our Christian way.

And we have this kind of hubris, this pride in ourselves that sticks with us as a human race.

And it seems to me that I'm just giving a little bit of personal testimony to all of this, that one of the most powerful things that's emerged for me in my life, watching this develop around me over time and reading about it through the ages of Christianity has been the recovery, the recovery of love.

It's hard to quantify this, but it is what Jesus said to his disciples.

If you have love for one another, the Christian church never comes to its best expression through organizational structures, through power moves in society, through trying to win.

Votes or become the dominant organization.

By the way, Islam has the same problem.

Muslims never come to their best expression, even as sisters and brothers of Christians, under the same general sense of a creator God, whenever they take over a government or a culture, they lose their ability to be effective in terms of what the tenets of Muhammad and the original declarations of Jesus and going all the way back to the covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai is all about.

In Deuteronomy, Moses says, as his last will and testament to the people of Israel, never before in the history of humanity has there been such a thing where the Creator comes and loves people in the way that he loved you.

And now, if you are to live meaningfully, love one another and love God above all.

That's the center of Jesus' teaching.

When people ask him about that, what's the greatest commandment?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, your soul, your mind, and your strength.

Love your neighbor as yourself.

In the decentralization of Christianity that's taken place since the collapse of the medieval world, in the modern era where there have been challenges that come from evolutionary theory and from industrialization and the dehumanization of individuals, and from intellectual learning that has written God and authority out of the picture.

We need to recover the glasses of a worldview that believes there is a creator, and the creator loved us into being, and love is the continued manifestation of how we do Christianity, how we do religion, how we treat one another with respect and fairness.

I'm always astounded by the way in which this has come to expression in various ways in my own life.

Some years ago, our family, when we were living in London, Ontario, Canada, we were making a summer trip over to Alberta, Canada, because that's where my wife's parents and family lived.

In order to get from London to Alberta, we needed to take two plane flights, a little hopper that went from London just over to Toronto.

In Toronto, we would get on the big plane that would take us out to Calgary and to Alberta.

When we got to the airport, having our tickets in hand, we found that the airport was shut down.

London had a very small airport, probably grown a little bit by this time.

But then they said, there's too much fog.

We can't fly planes today.

Never mind, they said.

Okay.

So here we were, the five of us, myself, my wife, and our three little daughters.

Our oldest Kristen sat next to me, our middle daughter sat between us, and our baby girl sat on my wife's lap.

And we went on this bus.

It was one of those airport buses, two of them for the flight we were supposed to have from London over to Toronto.

We sat at the back of the bus wanting to be by ourselves, kind of figuring out how we were going to manage everything going through the airport in this new and unusual way.

Well, someone else came to join us.

We wanted to be sort of on our own, but this one gentleman, he would not allow that to be the case.

He came all the way to the back of the bus and he sat across from us.

We were sitting here, he was sitting there, and he kept looking not just at us as a family, but at our three little blonde girls.

Beautiful girls.

I think they are really beautiful.

Of course I do.

But he could not take his eyes off our little girls, and it made me nervous.

And I tried to strike up a conversation with him to find out a little bit more about him and get his eyes off our girls to me.

And he talked about who he was, that he was a doctor in Australia.

It was clear from his accent that he was indeed from Australia.

He had come to North America to get a medical education when he was much younger.

He had found the person that he would marry, his wife.

They together had gone to Australia, back to Australia, had gone to medical school in Australia, getting further specialization, and he became a renowned world-class doctor.

He became a world-class surgeon and a teacher in classrooms.

His career was on the rise.

But being married fairly young, his wife had to get jobs in order to support his education.

So she was in the workforce and he was in school, and their lives were growing and they were having children, but their lives were growing apart.

By the time he was well established in his practices, he was wealthy, he was renowned, he was famous, he was loved, and he was on his own.

His wife had grown after his ability to make money into her charitable work.

She served on the board of this charity and she worked with that charity, and she was always involved in this group and that group.

And their lives had gone in separate ways until they were married legally, but they were even essentially living apart.

He had gotten an apartment close to the university hospital where he was working and teaching.

It was just too much problem for him to be gone to his suburban home.

He could better stay close to his business.

Neither of them were unfaithful in the way we think about it in marriage, but they had grown apart.

And their kids had grown up.

And she had largely taken care of the raising of the kids.

And he was off doing his thing, becoming an important person.

And then he said that every year he would go back and forth between Australia and Canada because he had a buddy who lived in London, Ontario.

And they would go one year to London, Ontario, and take turns teaching in his buddies' classes at the university in the medical school.

The next year his buddy would come down to Australia and help him out in his classes and his hospital, his teaching hospital in Australia.

This was his year to come to Canada.

Now he was on his way back.

He, like us, had to get to Toronto to take the big plane out.

But then he said something that became the heartbeat of our conversation.

He was still looking at our little girls.

And he said to them, he said to me, they make you fall in love all over again, don't they?

And I was a little nervous because I didn't want him to love our girls.

I wanted him to appreciate our girls, but I'm concerned when an older gentleman looks at my daughters in that manner.

He said it again.

She hadn't been with another man, I hadn't been with another woman, but our lives had grown apart, our children had grown up.

The last of our kids was a senior in high school.

He would be going off in his own.

There just didn't seem to be anything keeping us together any longer.

He said we had gone through the lawyers to get all of the documentation.

The only thing that remained was to sign on the dotted line, and then we would be divorced.

He said, and then it happened.

Our oldest child, our daughter, had gotten married several years before, started a life and a career and a family of her own.

She was now pregnant.

And it came time for her to give birth to her first child, our first grandchild.

I got the call.

It's ready, it's happening.

I rushed over to the hospital where she was at.

She came through labor very quickly.

I got to the door of the room where she was, now with her little child.

And I got to the room and I stood in the door, and I saw my daughter, my firstborn, in the bed, and I saw my wife, my love of my life, sitting in a chair next to the bed, holding our grandchild in her arm and clucking and cooing to our grandchild.

I saw my life come back into focus.

I took one look at my grandchild, one look at my daughter, one look at my wife, and I fell in love all over again.

He looked at our children, our little girls, and then he looked at me and he said, Don't take them for granted.

Remember, they make you fall in love all over again.

And that's what I hope this study of the Christian church, the people of God, our sisters and brothers, is all about.

Yes, we made these moves, and yes, we started this organization, yes, we missionized this people, and yes, we conquered this area, and yes, the dominant expression of religion in the world today is Christianity.

But what's it all about?

Remember what Jesus said?

Greater love has no one than this.

That a person lay down her or his life for his friends.

I have called you friends.

Greater love has no one, and people will know you are my disciples if you have love for one another.

Jesus came to express the love of our Creator and to make it possible for us to come home again.

And in this far as we are through small groups and through strategic efforts in our communities to bring meaningful life to those around us, it's not about us, it's not about kingdom building, it's not about some grand vision of the church, it's about people loving people like they have been loved by Jesus.

And then if Jesus comes back today or this week, or Jesus comes back 2,000 years from now, it'll all be the same story.

The one thing that really mattered on planet Earth was that God loved God's people and through Jesus showed that in a powerful way, and people actually recovered their ability to love one another.

I love you.

I wish you well.

Make the future happen in the name of Jesus.