Dream Small
I have a strange relationship with ambition. On the one hand, I come from the pedigree of the class clown, avoiding success just enough for deniable plausibility. I might have believed those early reports about me, that I would not amount to much. On the other hand, my life has been taken, almost totally into the embrace of the one called Jesus and his touch has upended deeper lies than that. Since meeting him, I have mostly walked with my back straight and my faith full.
When I became a Christian, in those early days, two things happened. I became very serious and very ambitious for the things of God. I put aside the clowning and started to dream kingdom dreams. Both things made me feel more real, more significant. I am thankful beyond words for those early years. I do not recant the yearnings of those days. They were less anxious days actually. When we thought we would change the whole world, with very little evidence to support such an idea.
Irony meets me these days, as the work of my life has never been more significant (we can see the world changing just a bit because of our faith and work), and yet I feel like a bit of a shrinking violet. Instead, I find myself yearning for something smaller, something more basic. I still yearn for the kingdom but more in my own heart, in the lives of my kids, in my precious but strained relationships. In the places I walk, not drive. In something the size of a family, not the size of a city.
Of course, some of these feelings could be a consequence of that hard knocks education we suffer the older we get. But I don’t think so. It is not that I am no longer ambitious, my ambition is just more focused. Without being fully conscious of it, I think I believed the great man myth about leadership and imagined that playing some spectacular part in the coming kingdom was the thing to wish for, pray for and also kind of hide. I have tried to repent of that, and I think, repentance in this matter takes the shape of the microchurch.
To imagine again the church in its smallest, purest and most beautiful form. And to simply want to be a part of that. I can see so clearly, after all these years in ministry that what happens in the living rooms and the meeting rooms, on the front porch and the park, is the best part of ministry. When mission gives birth to a baby church and the people who get to witness that miracle, know implicitly they should handle it with care. The bigger the enterprise it seems the more we feel the church is a thing to abuse, criticize and belittle. But there are those smaller days when we are happy with crawling and cooing, when we are all amazed by the small things God does, when we honestly wonder if we are doing it wrong because it seems too easy.
“It has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known…” Romans 15:20
I used to read something big into these words, but these days I see just how practically small it is. To pass Rome and go to Spain, for Paul, was to step into a place with no ministry. No big crowds of believers, no history, no expectation. It was to say yes again to starting the church. It was saying yes to the world and wonder of mission to an unreached people. It was to say yes again to the joy of seeing a few people baptized in water and the Holy Spirit and watching a new family form. I am sure he longed for the glory of Jesus to reach into all the nations, but in practical terms, that meant something pretty small.
Truth be told, this is how the church did change the world. How it still changes the world. This is the stuff of awakenings, not great preachers, in great venues, romancing the mass mind, but lots of people touched by Jesus and dreaming small. Revival in my own heart (and maybe the world) comes when we all yearn for one little patch of the world to come into the light. This is the shape of my best dreams. The future is small.
