The trouble with all this talk of progress—the Enlightenment and all its children—is that it doesn’t quite know where it’s going. The “revolution” just keeps moving, always chasing after the next big fix, the next grand idea, the latest theory. It throws off the past like an old coat and marches ahead into the blizzard, proud and restless. But the horizon keeps moving, so it never arrives. It lives like a teenager who never grows up—blindly certain, always unsettled, ever critiquing, never abiding. Ecclesiastes says it well: it’s a chasing after the wind.
But the folks who want to take us back—back to some pure, perfect past—they’re just as lost.
They dream of a church frozen in time, back when they imagine everything was right. But the
past isn’t a map, and nostalgia makes a poor god. They turn worship into a kind of historical re
enactment society, a performance, always anxious, always worried whether they’ve got it just like they did in the old days. But you can’t go home by rehearsing it.
Both of these paths—progressivism and conservatism, one chasing the future, the other clinging to the past—miss the real thing. Because the Kingdom of God doesn’t live in some imagined golden age or in a blueprint for what’s next. It comes in on the wind. It arrives when you weren’t looking. It breaks in like spring after a long winter.
So the church—if it’s to be worth anything—can’t be just a museum exhibit of how things used to be, nor a workshop for building how things ought to be. It must be a community rooted in God’s story, alert to His movement, open to surprise.
The truth is, the center of the church’s faith isn’t behind us in history or ahead of us in theory.
It’s among us, and above us, and within us—in Christ. He is the goal, the guide, and the gift. Not something to copy, but someone to follow. Alive. Speaking.
Maranatha,
Jordy
