Two Anniversaries
This week the United States turns 250 years old.
For Americans, that is a significant number. Parades will be held. Speeches will be given. There will be a great deal of looking back and a great deal of looking forward.
But if you have been reading this newsletter for any length of time, you know that we are not most interested in the rise and fall of nations. We are interested in the kingdom that does not end.
So let me tell you about another anniversary. This one is harder to pin to a date. It began a long time before 1776, and it will not end when nations like the United States have passed into history. This is the anniversary of every disciple who ever discipled other disciples, who handed off their faith to more disciples. Jesus started MicroGroups. We continue making disciples, a few at a time.
Generation after Generation
Can you guess how many countries are in in the world? Count how many you find in this video. What countries are missing? Where is God working now?
The Four Generations
Near the end of his life, the apostle Paul wrote to his young friend Timothy:
"The things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable people who will also be qualified to teach others." (2 Timothy 2:2)
Look at how many generations are packed into this one verse.
Paul taught Timothy. Timothy was to teach reliable people. Those people were to teach others. And those others would teach more.
This is how the gospel actually moves. Not mainly through governments. Not mainly through programs. Not even mainly through great preachers in front of great crowds. It moves the way it has always moved with one disciple at a time, pouring their life into another, who pours into another. MicroGroups of 3-4 spread the Gospel to other countries even faster and deeper although they go slower in multiplication.
If you are reading this in your own language today, it is because that chain held. Someone, somewhere, generations ago, opened a Bible and shared what they found with someone else. And here you are. Discipleship Essentials is now translated in over 30 languages.
What Nations Cannot Do
Nations can do many things. They can build roads. They can pass laws. They can send missionaries and they can hinder missionaries. They can print Bibles and they can ban them. They can rise to be the most powerful in the world, and they can fall to be a footnote in a history book.
But there is one thing no nation can do, no matter how powerful: a nation cannot make disciples.
Only followers of Jesus Christ can make disciples, working out what it means to follow Jesus this week, in this place, in this language. That is where it happens. That is where it has always happened by personal relationships, led by our lives in Him and He in us doing the work through us, submitted and surrendered to become the ones God created us to be.
This is why the kingdom of God has outlasted every empire it has ever been compared to. Rome thought it had defeated the Christians. Then Rome fell, and the Christians remained.
Where the Gospel Is Now
If you had told a believer in 1776 where the church would be strongest 250 years later, they would have been astonished.
In 1776, most of the world's Christians lived in Europe and North America. Today, most of the world's Christians live in Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
The fastest-growing churches in the world are not in the places that have been Christian for centuries. They are in places where, just one or two generations ago, Christ was unknown to almost everyone. Iranian house churches. Chinese underground fellowships. West African villages where the entire community has come to faith inside a single lifetime. Brazilian neighborhoods where the gospel is moving faster than any program could carry it.
These are not American stories. They are not European stories. They are kingdom stories. And they are happening right now, while you read this.
If you are part of that movement anywhere in the world, you are part of the only story that lasts.
What This Means for You
Every Christian, the Bible says, stands as a link between two generations. You received the gospel from someone. You are meant to pass it on to someone else.
So as one nation marks 250 years, here is the better question to ask yourself:
Who taught me to follow Jesus? Have I thanked God for them?
And who am I teaching now? Whose name could I write down today as the next link in the chain after me?
Empires rise and fall. The disciplemaking goes on. May we be found faithful in our own small section of it, pouring into the next generation what was poured into us, in the confident hope that one day, when every nation has passed away, the kingdom will still be growing.
"We proclaim Him, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, so that we may present everyone fully mature in Christ. To this end I labor, struggling with all his energy, which so powerfully works in me." (Colossians 1:28-29)
This is the work. This is the calling. This is how the wealth of the gospel is passed on.
Greg Ogden
Greg Ogden
Greg Ogden
Greg Ogden
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