Don’t Look Back!

The children of Israel lived for 40 years in the wilderness. That is a long time!

We call the journey this ancient people took from slavery in Egypt through this wilderness to the land that God promised The Exodus. A journey that should have taken only weeks, ended up taking years. Why did it take so long? The Bible tells us they were in this barren place for all this time because when the people saw the challenges ahead of them, instead of trusting God, they decided to turn back to the things they knew, to the place they had come from, and the circumstances they understood. Their response angered God, and so the generation that had tested his patience never saw his promise. It was their children who God led into the land he’d promised.

As we read on, we discover this same story of exodus repeated time and again. Times of oppression and hardship, followed by times of challenge and wilderness-experience as the people follow the way back to God’s promises of peace and plenty. Sometimes this took place within their own land, at others it involved the Israelites being taken into exile in foreign lands. The prophet Isaiah speaks into just this situation as he looks to the future, and another exodus, when God’s people would follow a way through the wilderness again, and return to God’s presence in the land he had given them.

In this place, God’s voice is heard. “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.” These words brought hope to God’s people in exile, and it is these same words that resonate with us today struggling in the wild places of these dales, facing the pressures of our contemporary culture. God’s words, recorded by Isaiah, warn us against the temptation to go back rather than to move on, remind us of His promise of new life and a new way forward, and ask us the question, “Are you aware that I am at work?”

At the end of last year, the Dales Faith Community began to meet in person, in our home in Bedale. We formed a mixed group, some I’d known for a number of years, others responded to posts on social media and messaged to make themselves known. Six months on, we continue to meet but how and when we do this is changing. When God promises something new, it is easy to see the challenge and reach for the things we know, and the places we have come from. We like to think of ourselves as open to change, but we rarely embark on something new with open minds and empty hands. We all carry our past experiences and bring our unmet expectations with us. Few of us, I sense, are truly open to “the new things” of God.

Zacchaeus climbed a tree to see Jesus. He wanted to see past the crowd, see beyond his circumstances and the limitations of his life choices. He did something different, and Jesus saw him, and through the meeting that followed, Zacchaeus found his life transformed. Jesus is at work in many places in this world, he is meeting people in small groups, in the depth of people’s relationships with each other, and in movements that seek to make disciples who make disciples. Jesus is still in the business of transforming the lives of the people he meets.  In many places today, across this and other nations, ‘church’ is often radically different from the forms of ‘church’ we inherited from our grandparents.

So, for now, we are exploring how these new movements of God, might move us. Move us on from the former ways we thought were the only way of following Jesus. We are looking for his way. His way of calling others to follow him. His way of bringing each other on as disciples who disciple others. His way of gathering his followers together, to encourage each other and spur each other on to love and good deeds.

We are grateful to Peter Dunn of Big Life, for his encouragement, and for our partnerships with Rural Ministries and the Northern Baptist Pioneer Network. We are thankful for resources like Dan Spader’s “4 Chairs Discipling” and for God’s leading, through this wilderness, towards his promise of a new life with him.  We are exploring what God is doing in other places, through ‘Simple Church’, ‘Missional Community’, and visions of ‘Small Boats and Harbours’. But more specifically we are discovering how these ways of being ‘church’, being faithful disciples of Jesus, might form us into the people God wants us to be in and around these northern Yorkshire Dales today. Where exactly he is leading us, and what will grow as a result of our following him we are not sure, but we do know and trust that if we are obedient, he will do it.

Be encouraged!