If You Want Things to Turn Around, Face Forward

There is something alluring about “going back,” “starting over,” “returning to fundamentals,” “getting back to basics,” “re-rigging the wells,” “recovering what we lost,” “restoring past glory,” or any number of other figures of speech that call on us to look backward. People lose focus. Vision leaks. Corruption sets in. We drift off course. We can’t remember how we got here or why we started on this journey. Things rust, calcify, and oxidize. It’s all part of living in a broken world as fallible creatures with a predisposition to sin and folly. There is a force of gravity which not only pulls down on matter, but also on ideas, dreams, visions, and endeavors of all types.  God’s people are not only attacked from the outside, we constantly struggle with controversy and corruption from the inside.

When things go wrong, it is common for us to look back and ask about a better time. We want to know where we went wrong. We want to recover lost good and identify where the problems crept in. That is perfectly understandable and helpful. Scripture often calls us to do exactly this: remember who you are and what you are about. Get your story straight. Don’t abandon what God told you. 

Yet, part of what makes the Christian view of the world unique is that we are not primarily driven from behind. We are primarily drawn toward what is ahead. History is going somewhere envisioned by God. We follow our shepherd who walks ahead of us. We are not pushed by a barking sheep dog from behind. 

Don’t get me wrong, we need to remember the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We need to retain the story of the exodus and the revelation of God’s people who were called to be a priestly nation. We need to recover a connection to the old story. Most of all, we need to focus on Jesus and his finished work on the cross. His resurrection changed everything. The death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus is the core of our message. The early church is an inspiration to us, and we want to be today what they were in their day. 

But (and this is a big but) while the Christian faith is rooted in an essential past, we are moving TOWARD something. We believe there is a God who not only created and launched the world on a trajectory, but this same God is at the end of time drawing us toward a state of transcendent good news, glory, and joy that makes all of the ugly slog of history seem petty by comparison. As Christians, we are not stuck in a cause-and-effect chain of events playing out some mechanistic sequence. That may explain how the modern scientific mindset works, but we embrace a bigger story with more power and hope.

The story began in a garden, but it ends in a city. We spend a lot of time in Genesis 1-3 talking about how the story began and how it went wrong. We don’t spend enough time in Rev. 21-22 talking about what God is planning for the end and what that means for us as end-time people in the midst of a world where the future has been revealed but not been completed. 

As Lesslie Newbigin reminded us, the church is the sign, foretaste, and instrument of the coming fullness of the Kingdom of God. We point, like a sign, to a greater reality. This isn’t it. It’s over there. This world in all its corruption is not all there is. Even the church, in its human frailty and corruptibility, is not the fullness to come. We are the hors d’oeuvres that give the world a taste of what is coming when all is set to right. We are the movie trailer giving the world a glimpse of the coming attraction in all its full length 

Wherever Jesus’ people are on mission, evil is exposed, goodness shines, mercy blooms, darkness retreats before the light, justice advances, and hope draws in those who have known only disappointment. The church can’t “fix the world,” but when on mission the church creates spaces and moments where the coming restored world is glimpsed, experienced, and advances, at least in pieces and for a time. 

What does all this mean? It means that if we want the church to thrive, we need to focus more on how we live into the end of the story than how we replicate past episodes of the story. Reform and restoration movements have value, but they can pull us off focus if they keep us facing backward instead of facing forward. It is important to know where God was and what he did. It is more important to know where God is going and where he wants us to go next. We want to be a faithful continuation of the story, but we also want to make sure that we arrive where God’s story is headed. The point isn’t getting out of Egypt but getting into the promised land. We don’t want to be like the leaders of Israel when Jesus came and miss what God is doing now and keep going in the wrong direction because we didn’t understand where the story was going.  

We are not called to repeat the past, but to embody the future. Our eyes need to be on the finish line, not the starting gate. If you want to see a turnaround in your church, maybe you should turn around. Instead of obsessing about where things went wrong or trying to copy some models from an earlier part of the story, pay more attention to the vision of what God has always been seeking and working toward and live into that. It’s embedded throughout the Bible, especially among the prophets as they dream of a time when God sets all things right. It’s found in places like Romans 8 or the end of Revelation. Jesus constantly gave people glimpses of a restored world in his words and actions. Let’s move forward into this great future where God is even now working. To see a turnaround, face forward.