| An Epiphanic Moment Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. They stood in a close circle, younger men and women surrounding their elders. The leaders had called for cohorts at the Think Tank to bless each other, and here were the younger scholars and leaders blessing the founders group in the missional movement. They thanked those elders who had gone before, charged forward, energetic and optimistic, confident that the Church would heed their calls for renewal, for mission. They honored the tears and discouragement, the disrespect, the exclusion, the loneliness that their forefathers and mothers in the missional movement had endured over decades. Each in his or her own native tongue gave a blessing. The thought struck me and made me shiver, it’s a modern Pentecost. Here were God’s people assembled from all parts of the world for a sort of festival of weeks, bringing their stories of mission like first-fruits of the harvest, to share with others whom they mostly did not know before the conference, others who were strangers except that they worshipped the same God. Many were going about their “festival business”: some walking in and out of the room, occupied with small but immediate concerns – when they had to catch the next plane or where they were going to eat that evening. Others were browsing the book table or having side conversations about mutual work and colleagues. But in the midst of the very quotidian, I couldn’t believe it, this miracle of tongues was happening. It was, to be sure, a mirror of the first Pentecost: instead of the Holy Spirit lighting on those who spoke the same tongue and giving them multiple voices, the Holy Spirit called those who had learned the now-common language, English, to speak in the voice of their own lands. But the very ordinariness of the moment, the unspoken promise that these disciples would go forth to almost every corner of the earth, preaching and teaching the Gospel, was what made it miraculous for me. A Pentecost moment, full of terrible signs and wonders, economic uncertainty, wars, threats of global warming, was upon us. And still, the promise was literally coming true in that cordon of young, male and female, around those grayer heads:
There were not the 3,000 around to wonder at the miracle of tongues, just then. There was nobody to baptize, just then. But it seemed to me a moment when the Lord said to this gathering, there will be. There will be. |
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