Lessons from Church History

As you all likely noticed, this year’s cohort of Anglican History students joined us last weekend. For the last three years, I have had the pleasure of teaching this class to clergy, ordinands, and lay leaders from the churches of our diocese and beyond. One theme that seems to leap off the page each year is worth sharing with you all, because it has been an encouragement to me.
 
You can’t read a lot of church history without realizing that there have been long seasons of stagnation in the church. The list of causes for these seasons of stagnation is long: Corrupt clergy, disinterested laity, foreign invasions, lack of engagement with the surrounding culture, too much mimicking of the surrounding culture, pagan opposition—basically, everything you might guess has been the cause of stagnation in the church, at one point or another. The church has low points, when worship, discipleship, and evangelism fade, moments when the church looks like anything but the light of the world.
 
In each and every one of those seasons, though, God has stirred up people through whom the revival of the church has arrived. That is encouraging!  But the real encouragement to me—the point I want to share with you—has been the fact that, in each season, it only took one or two people to shift the direction of the entire church. In each of those moments, God didn’t use a multitude; instead, one or two people faithful to him and willing to wait on him in prayer was all that he was waiting for. Through the ministries of individuals and tiny groups, revitalization and revival spread across kingdoms and dioceses.
 
The stories of the men and women—people like St. Aidan, Alfred the Great, Theodore of Tarsus, Richard Rolle, Julian of Norwich, Elizabeth I, John Wesley, Hannah More, Edward Pusey (and many more)—whom God has used are an encouragement to me, because it reminds me how much God loves to work through tiny groups of humble people. When we are faithful to him, when we pursue him in prayer, when we seek to conform our lives to Jesus Christ, there is no limit to what God might do with us. In many of the stories, the people probably didn’t even realize how much God was doing—in hindsight, we can see it, but they were just saying “yes” to him in humility. Many of them battled fear, opposition, and false accusations. They were clergy, monarchs, professors, ordinary lay men and women—God didn’t need a particular status or background; all he was waiting for was one man or one woman faithful to him.
 
I earnestly believe that God does far more with the lives of the few who give him everything than we could ever expect. Much of it may be invisible to us, but from the standpoint of history, from God’s perspective, it is more than we might imagine.
 
In Christ,
 
Steven+