What do hair dressers, automotive dealers, day traders, and nurses all have in common? All  over the USA regular people, not evangelists or even people with a gift or flair for evangelism, are learning how to share the gospel. And truly it is yielding new disciples in ways not seen in my 20+ years in Christendom. And it is an organic movement that is actually leading to small house fellowships popping up all over the place. 

Now before we ask the whys and hows, it’s important that we recognize that there is a plethora of peripheral issues that are crying out for our attention, which ultimately distract from the great mission of the church. No doubt, issues of social justice, biblical justice, racial tensions, political unrest, and the engineered virus are worthy of discussion. However, these issues could easily serve as distractions from the Gospel, which intrinsically has the power to heal, to unite, and to set things aright. In fact, yes, I will unapologetically go so far as to state that it, the gospel, is the only hope for humanity. I’m not deliberately minimizing the other issues of our day, but rather underscoring the importance of the only real solution to the great of human dilemma of selfishness, sickness, and why not just call it what is at its core…sin.

And yet despite these other issues as great and pertinent as they might seem, God is at work through normal people that are choosing to invest their time and efforts into reaching people with the gospel message that actually saves people from their sin. I’m talking about people just like many of you, the reader of this article. Not super evangelists or seminarians or paid clergy (those people are not excluded either) but people that have the desire to live the book of Acts and believe that victory over habitual sin is reality through the empowerment that comes by knowing Jesus Christ. People are being born again; this is God moving. Regular people are making disciples; this is God moving.

So one of the fundamental questions that one should rightly ask is what is different about these people in contrast to the rest of the church/ institutional church. Refined down to the most simplistic elements of what is happening is that people are choosing to learn the foundations of the simple gospel and live them out. Of course orthodoxy is underscored but orthodoxy and orthopraxy were never meant to be mutually exclusive apart from one and other. Yes, right understanding must be accompanied by right practice. Learn the gospel and live the gospel. No, this isn’t just going to church on Sunday and Wednesday twice a month. This is living with the understanding that we aren’t trying to get people to join our club or trying to get them to agree with our checklist of faith tenets but rather incorporating Jesus and his ongoing mission into the routine tasks of life like going to grocery store, paying for your tags at DMV, or meeting with a coworker at lunch time. 

So this letter is meant to be an encouragement to you. If you haven’t shared the gospel lately with someone or baptized someone or seen someone get filled with the Holy Spirit or seen someone become born again, maybe there is more for you waiting just around the corner. There are opportunities to see God move everywhere. And again, please understand that learning to make disciples is not the job of only a few with that “gift.” It really is the work of every single person who names Christ as Lord and Savior. You can do this. But there may be some learning and unlearning necessary. There may be some new habits that need developing. Hebrews 6:1-2 speaks about the basic foundational teachings of Christianity. What is sad is that many of those teachings aren’t even found in many or our modern day churches. Sorry not sorry, but it is time to get those foundational truths down and apply them in our daily lives, then maybe we can talk about some of the other things like double predestination, flat earth, and prophecy let alone address social/political issues rightly in our day. Therefore, if you recognize that there needs to be some adjustments made in your own life, feel free to contact me and we can talk about it. 
Always with love steering the ship,
Jarod