The Radical Christian: Revolutionising Society
“Imagine you are a great evangelist (like Billy Graham great) and share you faith with one person every day of every year for sixteen straight years. Assuming al those people accept the message and commit their lives to Christ, you will have led 5,840 into a personal relationship with Christ. It’s simple addition. Not bad. You might say, “No, unbelievable!” Now imagine that you train or disciple two people in year one, and they train two people each in year two and so on. In year sixteen, because your training curve is multiplying geometrically rather than merely adding arithmetically, you will have infected 65,536 people. That’s unbelievable, but that’s the Jesus way. Jesus did His math and knew that multiplication would get the job done faster and better than addition.” – Kenny Luck (Risk pg 176)
Are you familiar with the term “social networking”? A social network is a map of relationships over a large number of people. Imagine I know persons A, B, and C. A in turns knows person D and E; B knows F, G, and H; and C knows persons I, J, K, and L. By virtue of friends A, B, and C I have an indirect relationship with persons D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, and L. I once heard someone estimate that each person has on average 100 acquaintances. Assuming there are no double ups, this means that by the 5th level you are “connected” to 10 billion people (the Earth’s population is currently about 6.5 Billion). What this means is that you don’t have to be Billy Graham to change the world.
The worst disasters are diseases. Malaria infects 350-500 million people and causes about 3 million deaths annually. This bug is not a major weapon, it causes no mass destruction, and it does not raise breaking news headlines. Malaria has only a very small area of effect: its victim and the people in their immediate vicinity. Christianity works the same way. Jesus was no headline. He slipped very quietly through history only truly training 11 people and leaving about 100 followers. Yet he is clearly the most influential person of the last 2000 years.
A Radical Christian contains a passion that is infectious. Whenever someone asks me how to revitalise Christianity or fix the Church they seem to expect some massive plan to launch a huge new organisation or new-breaking project. The reality is that the most effective change is far more personal and challenging. I tell them that if they want to change the world, they have to raise the bar on their walk with Christ (which we have covered) and lower their barrier with other people.
Lowering the Barrier
A while ago I had the opportunity to hear from people who used to go to the same Church as I. People come and go and this Church in particular had seen some massive changes. What became apparent from people’s reflections was that everyone in that Church had been lonely. You would never have known from the outside. It appeared like any ‘healthy’ church. People smiled, there were plenty of social outings, and people were friendly. But no one ever found the intimacy they were looking for. As a result, people remained the same year in and year out, never changing.
Christians tend to be individualistic. Our salvation is individual. Our relationship with God is individual. Our lives are separated during the week. A couple of hours on a Sunday morning and some programs during the week simply aren’t enough to build a relationship that will turn a group of people into one ‘body’. This type of relationship requires you to share your life, your insights, your fun, and even your relationship with God with other people. They require a great deal of trust, brute honesty, and intimacy.
As Christians we must reach the point where we begin to personally feed and support each other rather than relying on a small clergy on Sunday mornings to do the work. To be truly effective in building one another we must know one another. We must take the risk of removing our Church mask and revealing ourselves to one another. As we do this, we find more acceptance and assurance than ever before. We find other like minded people with similar problems to our own. We find sleeping soldiers waiting for someone to stir their passion.
If you have God in your bones then you can show someone God by showing them yourself. As you break down your mask and show people how you live out your authentic walk with God people will see that you are different and will feel challenged on their own walk. This isn’t to be done in pride (“Look at me, I read my bible”), but as simply showing what is real (“I was reading Isaiah 58 this morning and…”). Share your challenges and your triumphs. Talk about the things that are confusing you as well as your revelations into truth. Your passion and your life will rub off.
Changing the World
Diseases only affect their victim and the people around them yet change the world. As a radical Christian (the “victim”) your faith should affect the people around you and thereby change the world. As radical Christians reproduce (and they are – more and more stories from around the world are arising) they slowly take over the world. We could end poverty if everyone was a radical Christian. We could stop suicide. We could provide a shoulder for every hurting person. We can change the world. We don’t need to wait for Christ to return – we can begin changing the world now. Simply by raising the bar on our own faith, and exposing our faith to others by lowering the barriers between us.
The Radical Christian: An Overview
The Radical Christian: Being the Gospel
