A few days ago, Hank Waterston and I met in the vast corridors of the Frankfurt airport and made our way north to a retreat center in Weilrod. What awaited us there was not merely a conference, but a sign—a small but unmistakable disclosure of what God is doing in the world.
Gathered around the table were servants of the church from many places and many histories: Albert Cook, a missionary laboring in Bucharest; Jeremy Barrier, teaching Scripture in Alabama; Patrick Boynes, shaping minds and lives in Corby, England; Matthew Stephans, preaching Christ in Dublin. Alongside them were believers from Marseille and Paris, Eindhoven and Antwerp, Cologne and Glasgow, Kyiv and Tirana, Northern Ireland and Alsace, Shiraz and the United States. Languages overlapped. Stories crossed. Prayer rose with many accents, yet with a single confession.
What arrests the heart in moments like this is not simply diversity, nor even friendship. It is the defiance of history. Almost within living memory, the lands represented in that room were killing fields. Fathers did not return home. Mothers raised children alone. Borders hardened. Flags were soaked in blood. Europe learned, at terrible cost, how easily civilization fractures when fear
and pride are enthroned.
And yet here we were—not as diplomats, not as representatives of competing interests, but as brothers and sisters at one table. This is the strange and glorious logic of the gospel. God does not reconcile the world by erasing difference, but by gathering difference into communion. The cross does not deny history; it judges it and then redeems it. In Christ, enemies are not merely restrained. They are remade.
Paul says that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, and entrusting that ministry to us. This gathering is evidence that the risen Lord continues to do what no empire, treaty, or ideology has ever achieved.
The church, at her best, is history healed in advance.
Maranatha,
Jordy
