I’m studying Matthew chapter ten at the moment, so you’ll get a few blogs on this topic in the next little while. What stuck me yesterday was the extraordinary effect this small group of simple country folk had on world history. Twelve very ordinary, uneducated manual workers from around a small insignificant village in Galilee eventually turned the world upside down!

There was nothing special or spectacular about them, but once infused with their mission, there was nothing stopping them from giving their lives for their cause. They would be shocked to know that their names have become the most common names for males in the Western world. How many do you know named John, Pete, Tom, Andy, Jim, Bart, or Phil?!

The twelve were just common working men. Some were married, some were single. What made them special was that Jesus, God in human form, trained them over three years into an amazing team of spiritual warriors. He then gave them the most extraordinary task imaginable, an impossible task: calling the entire planet into the liberation of the Kingdom of God. Many wonder how the 12 apostles did it, but that’s for another blog. Here I want to simply explain where they went to and how they eventually died.

The New Testament describes the fate of only two of the apostles: Judas, who betrayed Jesus and then went out and hanged himself (Matthew 27:3-5), and James the son of Zebedee and brother of John, who was executed by Herod about 44AD (Acts 12:2). To find out what happened to the other ten we have to go to church history and legend, sort out the facts from fiction, and make an educated guess. 

How Did the Apostles Die?

Once they realised that the Good News of the Kingdom was not just for the Jews, (Acts 10:1-11:18), the apostles went far and wide as ambassadors of the message of the risen Christ. They suffered greatly for their faith and in most cases met violent deaths on account of their bold witness. Here is a summary of their amazing lives:

1. Peter was executed in Rome around about 66 AD during the persecution under Emperor Nero. Peter was crucified upside down at his request since he did not feel he was worthy to die in the same manner as his Lord.

2. Andrew went to the lands that are now Russia. Christians there claim him as the first to bring the gospel to their land. He also preached in modern-day Turkey and in Greece, where he is said to have been crucified.

3. Thomas was probably most active in the area east of Syria. Tradition has him preaching as far east as the Pakistan coast and South India. The ancient Marthoma Christians of South India revere him as their founder. They claim that he died there when pierced through with the spears of four soldiers.

4. We think Philip had a powerful ministry in Carthage in North Africa and then in Turkey, where he converted the wife of a Roman proconsul. In retaliation the proconsul had Philip arrested and cruelly put to death.

5. Matthew ministered in Persia and Ethiopia. Some of the oldest reports say he was not martyred, while others say he was stabbed to death in Ethiopia.

6. Bartholomew had widespread missionary travels attributed to him to India with Thomas, back to Armenia, and also to Ethiopia and Southern Arabia. There are various accounts of how he met his death as a martyr for the gospel.

7. The second James was the son of Alpheus and is one of at least three people called James referred to in the New Testament. There is some confusion as to which is which, but this James is reckoned to have ministered in Syria. The Jewish historian Josephus reported that he was stoned and then clubbed to death.

8. Simon, so the story goes, ministered in Persia, and was killed after refusing to sacrifice to the sun god.

9. Matthias was the apostle chosen to replace Judas. Tradition sends him to Syria with Andrew and to death by burning.

10. Tradition says John was the only one of the apostles to have died a natural death from old age. He was the leader of the church in the Ephesus area and is said to have taken care of Mary the mother of Jesus in his home. He was eventually exiled to the island of Patmos. There he is credited with writing the book of Revelation.

Jesus’ main purpose, besides his death and resurrection, was to train enough workers to carry on his

global mission. If he didn’t do this then the world would never have heard of Christianity, and I would not be writing this blog 2,000 years later. So, how did he do it?

Basically, he followed the following pattern:

1. I bring heaven to earth while you watch
2. I watch while you bring heaven to earth
3. I leave and you take keep doing what you learnt from me

The Gospels tell this story at length, but the specific instructions are in Matthew 10, Mark 6, Luke 9-10, and Matthew 28:18-20. They are arguably some of the most important passages in the Gospels as relating to the future of Jesus’ mission and the global church. For hundreds of years the early underground church faithfully followed the pattern Jesus gave them.

The passages above basically say the following:

1. I give you authority to do what I did.
2. First, go first to the lost sheep of Israel
3. Heal the sick, raise the dead, tell them they can now be part of the Kingdom
4. Travel lite and don’t ask for money, give the Kingdom away freely
5. Stay with persons of peace, godly people who will open up their home and village
6. Don’t fear the opposition that will come
7. Second, go to all the world and make disciples of them too following the same pattern
8. I will be with you all the way till the end of the earth

And he didn’t just train 12 to do this. He trained another 70 in the same skills as well (Luke 10:1-1). Jesus was seriously training leaders because he wanted the whole world discipled. Using his methodology these well-trained leaders quickly turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6).

But then Christianity became so successful it went mainstream in country after country, beginning with Armenia, then Rome. Other jurisdictions followed across the Middle East and Europe. It was a spiritual disaster. Pagan cultural practices slowly began to overtake Jesus’ mission and methodology. The compromise has been with us ever since. So many pagan practices are now part of modern Western Christianity that we have forgotten both his original mission and the specific methodology Jesus gave us to achieve that mission.

Fortunately, most Christians now are no longer Western. They are not bound by our pagan church practices. They are re-examining scripture and ditching what they inherited from the West that is not in the book, while starting to do what is in the book that is missing from Western church practice. It is exciting times. This decade will see the arrival of their dynamic, Jesus-centric mission and methodology back in Western culture. It’s going nuts in developing countries and has already started to arrive in Europe and the US with amazing results.

Most people who discuss the new wine and wineskins mentioned in Jesus’ teachings (Matthew 9:14-17, Mark 2:18-22, Luke 5: 36-39) will talk about the differences between the Old Covenant and the New Covenant, between a religion of obligation and works, and a relationship of faith, the heart, and grace.

I agree. However, I think there is more to it than that.

There is a powerful point Jesus wanted us to know here that was picked up by the early church but is now completely overlooked by the modern Western church. We are missing one of this teaching’s central points.

Jesus’ three-part teaching/answer about cloth and wineskins was in response to a query by John’s disciples about the lack of fasting among Jesus’ disciples. Fasting is a religious practice and here it was symbolic of the entire Jewish religious edifice constructed over and around the Old Covenant that Jesus fought so stridently against. It represented Jewish religion with its special religious buildings, special religious days, special religious festivals, special religious leaders, special religious dress codes, special religious rules, special religious hierarchy, and special religious habits such as fasting. You get the idea.

These are the hallmarks of all religions across all cultures. Jesus was telling his listeners that this worldly, cultural system of external religious practice, as epitomized by the Pharisaic religious practices, was now obsolete. The old wineskins and the old cloth were not to be part of the future of the Kingdom of God and its new wine. It wasn’t just about the Old Covenant being the old wine replaced with the New Covenant and the new wine, but the scaly, crusty, barnacle-covered religious burden that went with it; the old wineskins.

Then he made a very interesting comment. He said No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved. There was to be a New Covenant of the heart, and grace, intimate relationship, faith, AND, there was also to be a completely new system of social and religious organization around this New Covenant relationship with God.

So, what was this new social religious system, this new wineskin?

The answer is in the Gospels, right under our nose. If you read Luke 3-10 very carefully several times you will see this new system unfolding beautifully. Jesus first consecrated his life (Luke 3-4), then launched into the harvest of souls around Capernaum and Bethsaida (Luke 4-5). He then trained up leaders from among his growing number of followers (Luke 6:12-13), sending them out on a practical to duplicate what he had been doing once trained (Luke 6-9). This was followed up with the training of 72 more leaders (Luke 10) who were told to look for even more leaders in every village in Galilee (Luke 10:1-12). This was saturation evangelism and discipleship with hundreds of trained leaders. This is how he ignited a social and spiritual revolution in Galilee! This was what he meant by the new wineskin. This is also why he was executed (John 11:47-53). The whole nation was turning!

This new wineskin was deliberately calculated to produce a massive harvest of powerful disciples who were nurtured via micro-spiritual communities inside homes, clans and villages. It was simple, viral, and easily duplicated. It rapidly produced mature practical spiritual leaders who were able to copy the ministry of Jesus. This new movement liberated people both spiritually and culturally (Luke 4:18-19). All this while these new believers enjoyed a new-found intimacy with God in a New Covenant relationship.

When Jesus was leaving earth, he told his followers to go to all the world and duplicate his new model of humble, low-key, viral family-based based and deeply spiritual community (Matthew 28:18-20). They did. They changed the world. This was the new wine and wineskin combo that proved to be such a potent force in the spread of the Gospel in those first two centuries, by which time it had reached Pakistan and India in South Asia, Afghanistan and Central Asia, all of the Middle East, North Africa and most of Europe.

But then it all slowed and eventually stopped.

Three hundred years after its launch, the growing global church reinstituted special religious buildings, special religious days, special religious festivals, special religious leaders, special religious dress codes, special religious rules, religious hierarchies ,and special religious habits…such as fasting. It now had cultural and worldly power but it fizzled out spiritually. Christendom was born.

For the next thousand years the new wine of an intimate, personal relationship with our creator was either suppressed or again stuck in the old wineskin of religion. There were some notable breakouts along the way such as the Waldensians, the  Hussites and the Lutheran’s call back to the new wine of direct relationship with God through the grace of the cross. However, the parallel issue of the old, stale, brittle wineskin of established religion was never addressed properly. To this day Western Christianity is stale and stagnant because it is essentially new wine stuck in old wineskins. That’s why we are now shrinking and culturally irrelevant.

But radical change is coming.

In the last forty years we have seen a sustained global return to the new wineskin.  The non-Western church, which is now 80% of all evangelical believers in the world, is quickly moving into the new wineskin paradigm of church. It is rapidly replacing our stale old Western religious wineskins with the new wineskins they read about in the Gospels. Some 80 million new believers are now part of this revolution that often goes by the name of Disciple Making Movements or Church Planting Movements. Numbers a tripling every decade. China, South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa are at the forefront of this revolution that is going to have a profound impact on the entire human race be the end of this century. Mass movements are popping up in the most surprising places. My summary of this movement can be found in this link.

This is what Jesus meant when he said No, they pour new wine into new wineskins, and both are preserved. It’s been 1,800 years in the making but it has finally arrived: New wine in new wineskins and the greatest flow of humans into the Kingdom of God the world will ever see!

The more I read the Gospels the more I realise a heck of a lot of Jesus’ ministry happened in and around the town of Capernaum (which means village of comfort). This was Jesus’ adopted hometown of about 1,500 people (Matthew 4:13, 9:1, Mark 2:1). His family had been regular visitors to the town (John 2:12), so it was familiar territory and a logical place to base himself after being rejected in his hometown (Luke 4).

Now imagine if you actually lived in Capernaum at the time. It would have been mind-blowing! Stories of miracles circulating daily around the market stalls and from house to house, locals like fishermen and tax collectors dropping their livelihoods to follow this new bloke. Local religious leaders caught up in the thrill as well. Children raised from the dead and local lepers suddenly back to normal. Sometimes seeing these things with your own eyes!

The list goes on and on. And that’s just what was recorded for posterity. The miracles were probably multiples of that again, most unrecorded. I grew up in a small town of 1,000 people in New South Wales, so I know that these people all knew each other. They knew all the sick people who got better. There was no faking it. The gossip mill would have been running hot every day if anything was sus.

To highlight the spiritual and social earthquake that came to town in the form of the creator of the universe in human form, Jesus, I have pulled together below a list some of the amazing things that happened in and around Capernaum. As you read just imagine you are one of the locals that lived there, and you kept hearing this snowball of history-changing news over several years. How could anyone in that village not become a follower of Jesus?

The first recorded miracle in Capernaum was a man healed from a demon in the local Synagogue (Luke 4:33-37). That didn’t happen every day. He was known to all in town. The news spread rapidly. It was just the beginning.

Jesus then went all over Galilee preaching and healing the sick (Matthew 4:23). This drew a massive crowd from as far away as Syria and the mostly non-Jewish villages on the east side of the huge lake. So, he sat them down and did some extensive teaching which is now called the Sermon on the Mount. Where did it take place? We don’t know for sure but straight after the Sermon scripture says Jesus entered Capernaum (Matthew 8:5). Capernaum was on the highway from Jerusalem to Damascus. So, a large crowd could easily have converged on the town for the lecture.

After the extended teaching Jesus came down from the hillside, and before he could even enter town, he healed a leper (Matthew 8:1-4)

He then entered Capernaum and was confronted by a high-ranking Roman soldier who begged Jesus to heal his son/servant, which he did from a great distance because of the soldier’s great faith (Matthew 8:5-13, Luke 7:1-10).

Jesus then went to Peter’s house in nearby Bethsaida and healed his mother-in-law before healing everyone in the village (Matthew 8:14-18). Bethsaida was about six kilometers from Capernaum at the northern tip of the lake. News of this astounding feat would have reached Capernaum in about 3 nanoseconds.

Back at Capernaum sometime later Jesus healed a paraplegic but sadly incurred the ire of local religious leaders for not obeying standard religious rituals and practice (Matthew 9:1-8, Mark 2:1-12). This was a sign of things to come.

He then challenged the most hated man in town, the local Capernaum tax collector, to dump his bullying, seedy lifestyle and theft to dedicate his life to the Messiah, which Matthew did (Matthew 9:9-13, Mark 2:13-17). This alone would have got tongues wagging around town!

In contrast to the grumpy religious leaders, another Capernaum religious leader named Jairus approached Jesus sometime later and asked him to heal his daughter. Jairus may have lived in a nearby village because another miracle, the healing of the woman with the issue of blood occurred on the way to Jairus’ home. Jairus’ daughter died before Jesus got there but she was still raised from the dead. This in turn raised Jesus’ reputation to a whole new level (Matthew 9:18-26).

Finally, we see Jesus performing a few nature control miracles. He went for a stroll on water while the disciples travelled by back by boat to Capernaum (John 6:16-21), after which a flotilla of boats followed him to Capernaum when they noticed he had left the eastern shore of the lake where he was ministering. Earlier he also instantly calmed a storm while sailing the other way on that trip out from Bethsaida (Matthew 8: 23-27). Then there was the miracle of the massive take of fish, a fisherman’s dream catch, not far from Capernaum (Luke 5:1-11). These three events spoke of the divine nature of the man as much more than a prophet and healer, as creator and master of all creation.

And yet, after some time the locals grew used to the supernatural and the unexpected. They would eventually and shockingly turn their back on Jesus. The power of stubborn, threatened religious leaders and the deeply entrenched local religious mindset took over from the innocence of divine visitation (Luke 6:1-11). Jesus would eventually speak harshly about the lack of faith and repentance in both Capernaum and Bethsaida (Matthew 11:20-24). He knew what he was talking about when he said that a prophet is without honour in his hometown (John 4:43-44). How true.

Miracles alone cannot convince an unbeliever. It must be faith and repentance from a contrite heart. The episode of the ten lepers demonstrates this so well (Luke 10:13-15). How many locals from Capernaum and Bethsaida are in heaven now? One day I’ll find out.

Why do we celebrate Christmas? Because it’s the pivot point when the world changed direction. When Satan lost control. When Heaven began its slow but steady invasion of earth. When souls began to populate Heaven. When God’s original plan of relationship with humanity was brought back into play. When the empires, kingdoms and narcissists of the worlds political systems lost control of the planets destiny. When God became Emmanuel, God with us. When Satan lost.

Or is it just a bunch of outdated theology, a quaint piece of cultural driftwood in the ocean of modern tech and woke Western values?

No. It’s the first one; and let me tell you a story to remind you of the power of Christmas.

It was 1993 and I was in the remote Denewa Valley in Milne Bay Province, Papua New Guinea. There I met an old man called Willy. No surname. Willy and the other locals told me the story that changed their valley forever. Denewa had been a cargo-cult valley and very resistant to the message of liberation in Christ. Only a handful of the 3,000 locals were interested. Sexual license was rife. Then, while working up the hill in his garden, Willy took very sick and died suddenly.

Now when I say dead, I mean DEAD. These people see death all the time. They know what it feels, smells, and looks like. It happens in their homes. Their kids die. Its familiar.

Immediately the word went out that Willy had died and about three hundred people rushed up the hill to his garden hut to begin the afternoons wailing and screaming before he was to be buried that evening. This is the tropics, you’ve only got four hours. The screaming was deafening. I know because I watched the same scene unfold on the Trobiand Islands the next year after visiting Denewa. It’s like listening to a jet screaming at full throttle. The older women are the professionals! It’s very physical and scary for a westerner to watch.

But among the crowd were two men I would later meet, Robin and David. David had met Jesus in Port Moresby and was the first to bring the Gospel back to the valley. Robin was my student in my small bark hut Bible college about five years later. Both were very spiritual men. They pushed their way to the body and began to pray. David saw a vision of Willy coming back down a set of stairs to earth and told Robin. They both prayed and prayed for him to come back.

About three hours after Willy died, he suddenly sad bolt upright and asked for water. Three hundred people froze on the spot. This was not in the script. Robin saw to Willy’s needs while David immediately began to explain what had happened and why. Three hundred people became followers of Jesus on the spot and the church was born. Years later when I visited the valley the church was going well and the leaders, Robin, Paulus and David were shepherding the people as best they could. My job was to encourage what God had started.

Willy told me he thought he had been dreaming when he woke up. He “dreamt” that he was in the middle of a field and two armies were careening toward him, after him. Then he woke up and asked for water.

This is why Jesus came to us. This is why we celebrate Christmas.

1. History

People came to Afghanistan very soon after the Tower of Babel. Empires then came and went in succession over several millennia as this mountainous land was a major migration and trade corridor from the Middle East to Asia. The Persians then came to dominate the region and with them came the religion of Zoroastrianism. Most Afghans can trace their demographic roots to the Persians and this is reflected in the main language, Pashtun. In between the two Persian empires, the religions and cultures of South Asian Hinduism and Buddhism gained influence. Then came the brief Greek occupation and Greek settlement under Alexander around 330BC. I was surprised to see some Greek archaeological remains recently in the New Delhi museum. During this entire era Afghanistan played a central role in the booming Silk Road trade between Europe and China. Because of the 70 year enslavement of the Jews in Babylon it was also common to see Jewish traders active on the Silk Road in Afghanistan in the millennia before Christ.

In the Christian era there came mass destruction at the hands of the Mongols, followed by the Muslim conquest. In 1282AD Ahmed Teduker assumed the Afghan throne and began the country’s switch to Islam, a situation that prevails to this day. From the late Middle Ages, Afghanistan came under the rule of the mighty Moghul emperors based in Delhi, India, but who originated in Afghanistan a few generations earlier. With the break-up of that empire, and the unsuccessful multiple attempts by the British to conquer Afghanistan, it was then ruled by a king until the 1970’s and was a reasonably stable and prosperous nation. Then it went through a bloodless coup. In 1978 the Russian Communists took advantage of this instability and invaded and the country has been unstable and suffering ever since.

With the expulsion of the Russians, Afghanistan came under the rule of radical Islamists called the Taliban. It is impossible to understand their hold on the country and the violence that has engulfed the nation since the 1970’s unless you appreciate the deep, violent and austere tribal nature of primitive Pashtun social structures. This is the largest medieval tribal nation on earth which makes it very fertile ground for radical Islam!

2. Today

With 37 million people, Afghanistan is now a desperately poor and suffering country with an average income of 1% of the USA. Almost 60% of people are under 20 years of age and life expectancy is a tragic 44 years. However, a new generation has now grown up without the repression of the Taliban and they long for freedom and opportunity. Over 4 million refugees have now returned to their homeland. With the re-conquest of the country by the Taliban we are going to see an interesting clash between this new generation and the Islamic hardliners. Only 15% of Afghanistan is connected to the internet, but 50% have mobile phones. The young are now connected to the outside world and long for freedoms undreamed of by their parents.

The form of Islam practiced here by the new Islamist government is severe and repressive, especially for women. Stiff punishments apply for anyone leaving Islam and this begins with total rejection from family. However God is moving in an unprecedented way as you will see from the list below. This is because wherever Islam has become violent and repressive in recent years there seems to be a sudden growth in those coming to Christ.

3. True Christianity

Some Silk Road Jews from what is now far western Afghanistan were probably present at the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:9). They came from the Parthian Empire, so the Gospel could have arrived in Afghanistan a few months after that momentous day. Church tradition says that both Bartholomew and Thomas went to Afghanistan to share the Good News. The historian Bardaison, writing in 196AD, speaks of Christians throughout Parthia. By 250AD there were nine city-based bishops in modern-day Afghanistan. However, with the arrival of Islam the church went into a slow decline until it was completely wiped out some centuries later by the viciousness of the Mongol warlord Timur when some 7 million Central Asian Christians were slaughtered in just two decades.

Today however there is a new dawn. The church in Afghanistan is exploding. Decades of suffering and the prayers of the saints are combining to destroy the Satanic strongholds that have chained these peoples for millennia. Satan’s iron grip on Afghanistan is slipping! Here are some of the amazing stories coming out of the country at the moment:

1. The government now warns that “Christianity has obtained a special place not only among youth, but also among various layers in society”.
2. A Farsi news service reported recently that high ranking members of society are now becoming Christians
3. House churches that know how get inside the culture are multiplying.
4. Thousands of Afghans who fled to Iran and Europe (start reading half way down this link to see what amazing things are happening in Germany) have become Christians. The Iranian church embraced the Afghans while Iranians as a whole hated their presence.
5. Last, and perhaps most importantly, Isik Abla Ministries report that they had 182,000 thousand active Facebook followers in Kabul alone at the end of 2017. That’s nearly 4% of all internet users in the country actively absorbing Christian teaching.

Something BIG is happening and there is nothing the new Taliban government can do about it. Lets join our prayers to those of thousands of others to see the harvest multiply as millions of Afghans reject the stupidity of Islamic fundamentalism for the Love and freedom of Christ.

Each of us interprets the events of our lives and our external reality through the lens of a worldview. A worldview is a philosophy of life that runs very deep into our soul. A worldview operates at the level of our subconscious thought and it teaches us early to make major assumptions about life. It is how we are taught to think as toddlers by the actions of significant people around us. Our worldview is largely locked in by the age of seven. Asking a person to describe their worldview is like asking a fish for a definition of water Its hard because its all they’ve ever known. Fish are not taught about water, they can feel it from the moment they are born. Water is the only medium through which they can sense and interpret reality. That’s how it is with your worldview. Every person carries in his or her head this subjective mental worldview framework of how external reality works. Worldviews are so well absorbed early in life that it takes a huge amount of effort, often a crisis, to change from one worldview to another when older.

A viable worldview must answer the six great questions of life. These are:

1. What or who is the ultimate first cause of everything?
2. What is the origin and nature of the universe?
3. Where did humans come from and what is our nature?
4. What is knowledge and truth, and how do we find it?
5. What is right and wrong?
6. What is the purpose of history and what is our destiny?

All the great religions, both supernatural (Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Islam), and atheistic (Communism, Humanism and Post Modernism) are worldviews. The difference between these two camps is simply the answer they give to the first question. All subsequent answers flow from a worldview’s answer to that first crucial question.

It is a difficult task for any aspiring worldview to answer these questions in a watertight fashion. Hence, the development of a new worldview is rare. Once a worldview takes root in a culture it lasts for centuries and it requires an enormous amount of intellectual and social effort for the next worldview to dislodge it. Islam is attempting just such a shift in the Western world at present. It will be an interesting fight for a long time to come. Atheism has now decisively dislodged the Judeo-Christian worldview from centre stage in the Western world and is currently developing its moral code through the lense of sexual politics and offense.

Worldview shifts are therefore always times of great physical conflict, political change, legal flux and social anxiety. To understand the current global wave of historical and spiritual events you must fully understand this concept of competing worldviews. A worldview teaches the culture who is in charge, it is all about power and authority.

The Western world has been slowly expelling the Christian worldview from its traditional position of authority for over the last 100 years. This only happened because Christianity became weak, not because Atheism was strong. Christianity was and still is stuck in an outdated institutional structure that lost touch with the surrounding culture. It confused mission with ritual.

This is now changing. The non-Western church is booming inside hostile cultures. Hundreds of millions are pouring into God’s Kingdom. It is conquering other worldviews, be they Hindu, Buddhist or Muslim. The mission hasn’t changed, this is because the methods they use are far closer to the methods Jesus taught his followers to use in their mission. These methods are non-institutional and have ditched ritual. They are now slowly seeping into the Western church too, with the same results. Outwardly the future for the church in the West looks grim, but spiritually, it is bright as we learn from our brothers and sisters who are doing what Jesus asked, making disciples of their nations, one person at a time.

This link will take you to a research article demonstrating how effectively the non-Western church is doing the Great Commission.

For Fun: Ask your friends the six big worldview questions above and you will have a very long and deep conversation!!!

The research backs up tried and true Biblical wisdom!

1. Marrying as a teenager is the highest known risk factor for divorce.

People who marry in their teens are two to three times more likely to divorce than people who marry in their twenties or older.

2. The most likely way to find a future marriage partner is through an introduction by family, friends, or acquaintances.

Despite the romantic notion that people meet and fall in love through chance or fate, the evidence suggests that social networks are important in bringing together individuals of similar interests and backgrounds, especially when it comes to selecting a marriage partner. According to a large-scale national survey of sexuality, almost sixty percent of married people were introduced by family, friends, co-workers or other acquaintances.

3. The more similar people are in their values, backgrounds and life goals, the more likely they are to have a successful marriage.

Opposites may attract but they may not live together harmoniously as married couples. People who share common backgrounds and similar social networks are better suited as marriage partners than people who are very different in their backgrounds and networks.

4. Women have a significantly better chance of marrying if they do not become single parents before marrying.

Having a child out of wedlock reduces the chances of ever marrying. Despite the growing numbers of potential marriage partners with children, one study noted, “having children is still one of the least desirable characteristics a potential marriage partner can possess.” The only partner characteristic men and women rank as even less desirable than having children is the inability to hold a steady job.

5. Both women and men who are college educated are more likely to marry, and less likely to divorce, than people with lower levels of education.

Despite occasional news stories predicting lifelong single-hood for college-educated women, these predictions have proven false. Though the first generation of college educated women (those who earned baccalaureate degrees in the 1920s) married less frequently than their less well-educated peers, the reverse is true today. College educated women’s chances of marrying are better than less well-educated women. However, the growing gender gap in college education may make it more difficult for college women to find similarly well-educated men in the future. This is already a problem for African-American female college graduates, who greatly outnumber African-American male college graduates.

6. Living together before marriage has not proved useful as a “trial marriage.”

People who have multiple cohabiting relationships before marriage are more likely to experience marital conflict, marital unhappiness and eventual divorce than people who do not cohabit before marriage. Researchers attribute some but not all of these differences to the differing characteristics of people who cohabit, the so-called “selection effect,” rather than to the experience of cohabiting itself. It has been hypothesized that the negative effects of cohabitation on future marital success may diminish as living together becomes a common experience among today’s young adults. However, according to one recent study of couples who were married between 1981 and 1997, the negative effects persist among younger cohorts, supporting the view that the cohabitation experience itself contributes to problems in marriage.

7. Marriage helps people to generate income and wealth.

Compared to those who merely live together, people who marry become economically better off. Men become more productive after marriage; they earn between ten and forty percent more than do single men with similar education and job histories. Marital social norms that encourage healthy, productive behavior and wealth accumulation play a role. Some of the greater wealth of married couples results from their more efficient specialization and pooling of resources, and because they save more. Married people also receive more money from family members than the unmarried (including cohabiting couples), probably because families consider marriage more permanent and more binding than a living-together union.

8. People who are married are more likely to have emotionally and physically satisfying sex lives than single people or those who just live together.

Contrary to the popular belief that married sex is boring and infrequent, married people report higher levels of sexual satisfaction than both sexually active singles and cohabiting couples, according to the most comprehensive and recent survey of sexuality. Forty-two percent of wives said that they found sex extremely emotionally and physically satisfying, compared to just 31 percent of single women who had a sex partner. And 48 percent of husbands said sex was extremely satisfying emotionally, compared to just 37 percent of cohabiting men. The higher level of commitment in marriage is probably the reason for the high level of reported sexual satisfaction; marital commitment contributes to a greater sense of trust and security, less drug and alcohol-infused sex, and more mutual communication between the couple.

9. People who grow up in a family broken by divorce are slightly less likely to marry, and much more likely to divorce when they do marry.

According to one study the divorce risk nearly triples if one marries someone who also comes from a broken home. The increased risk is much lower, however, if the marital partner is someone who grew up in a happy, intact family.

10. For large segments of the population, the risk of divorce is far below fifty percent.

Although the overall divorce rate in America remains close to fifty percent of all marriages, it has been dropping gradually over the past two decades. Also, the risk of divorce is far below fifty percent for educated people going into their first marriage, and lower still for people who wait to marry at least until their mid-twenties, haven’t lived with many different partners prior to marriage, or are strongly religious and marry someone of the same faith.

NTRODUCTION

(Spoiler Alert: When you get down to the first table you will find some updated figures that I gleaned from the latest 24:14 website power-point,…very exciting!)

Out of roughly 200 decades since Jesus launched the Christian faith, the decade from 2020-2030 is going to see by far the largest harvest of all. The following essay unpacks this reality with a snapshot of what is happening inside a new and fast growing branch of Christianity. Global Christianity is about to change forever, and the coming decade will be seen one day by historians as the tipping point when this change took centre stage.

After a three century burst of early church growth, for the next millennium Western Christianity was largely associated with the Catholic and Orthodox faiths. Then came the Reformation which brought us back to a Biblical theology. We are now at the beginning of the second Reformation that is bringing the global Church back to its original Biblical structure.

This “new” branch of Christianity often goes under the names of Disciple Making Movements or Church Planting Movements (DMM or CPM). These commonly used terms reflect the missional heart of this new Reformation. Most Western Christians will not have heard very much about DMM/CPM movements as they are largely outside the Western world, outside Western denomination systems, outside traditional theological training colleges, outside visible religious buildings and they lack high profile leaders. This is in part because most DMM/CPM movements have to deliberately keep a low profile. They are often found inside hostile host cultures.

DMM/CPM’s are not an entirely new phenomenon. In fact the very first DMM/CPM was initiated by Jesus himself and was copied by the early church in the Book of Acts. Sadly, Jesus’ model of kingdom growth through rapid multiplication of strong and obedient disciples and simple churches fell out of favour when Christianity settled down as another religion several hundred years after Christ’s resurrection.

If you carefully read chapter’s 3-10 of the book of Luke you can see Jesus’ own DMM/CPM being birthed, growing and then exploding over three years in the fertile hills of Galilee. Jesus first launched his ministry, evangelised and gathered followers (Luke 4). Then he called out from among those followers a small group of 12 men for intense leadership training (Luke 6). They watched and learned. Then Jesus sent them out to obediently duplicate what he had done (Luke 9). Later, they in turn trained another 70 or so others in the same skills. These second tier leaders were then asked to find even more disciples and potential leaders (persons of peace) in every village in Galilee, and to train them in the way they themselves had been trained (Luke 10). Thus a sizable movement was birthed with several hundred leaders trained up who would lay the foundation of the coming spiritual harvest after Jesus rose from the dead and gave them the Great Commission.

Only an understanding of this very first DMM/CPM explains why tens of thousands flocked to hear Jesus teach, and why there were 120 in the upper room on the day of Pentecost. Jesus had saturated Galilee with the Gospel and had trained enough leaders for the future harvest! These leaders knew exactly what the Great Commission meant, and what to do after the day the Holy Spirit was poured out. The book of Acts records DMM/CPM’s beginning to multiply around the Roman world, with Acts 13-14 being a good example of the birth of one of them. Outside the book of Acts, history also records many other DMM/CPM’s springing up all over the known world through the work of these very first church leaders.

Modern DMM/CPM’s are simply a return to the New Testament way of obeying the commands and the Great Commission of Jesus. They therefore work in any and every cultural setting. Over the last thirty years a rapidly increasing number of Christian leaders around the world have discovered Jesus’s original model in the scriptures and have begun to implement these practical methods of discipleship.

These DMM/CPM’s are not theological academic programs. They are a spiritual and social revolution based on real world obedience. The timing of the rise of this DMM/CPM revolution coincides with a radical shift in evangelical Christianity away from the Western world to the global south where we now find 4/5ths of all the world’s 600 million evangelical believers. Over the next decade the exponential increase in new and energetic DMM/CPM movements will begin to change the course of entire nations, which was the original intent of Matthew 28:19.

HOW MOVEMENTS ARE MEASURED

The International Missions Board (IMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention in the United States has taken on the responsibility for closely monitoring the growth of all existing and emerging DMM/CPM movements. Justin Long, who previously worked on the World Christian Encyclopaedia, is in charge of this task. In fact, the inspiration for this essay came from a recent IMB Missions Frontiers Magazine article titled 1% of the World: A Macro-analysis of 1,369 Movements to Christ that was written by Justin himself. The IMB coordinates with 1,600 Western and non-Western mission organisations to compile its statistics. This collaboration has spawned two training global networks called 24:14 Multiplying Movements Together and Finishing the Task or GAP4FTT. The latter is currently chaired by American mega-church leader Rick Warren.

All field data and the various reports coming into the IMB database are vetted and double checked. The data is then deliberately kept vague so it does not identify individual movements within a specific country as many governments are openly hostile to what is happening in their jurisdictions. The IMB therefore presents data regionally instead of nationally. For more detail on how DMM/CPM movements are measured please click here.

All DMM/CPM Movements are tracked according to a seven level scale. Level one represents an individual or small group just starting out on the DMM journey with one generation of new disciples or simple churches. Level two has daughter churches of the original church. At level three there shouldn’t be just a single line of three generations of daughter churches but multiple streams of third generation daughter churches. None of these first three levels are yet classified as a fully-fledged DMM/CPM movement.

Only level four is classified as a fully-fledged DMM/CPM movement as that is the point at which the movement is basically unstoppable. Think of level four as started by a fictitious church planter who trains 6 disciples who each then train 6 more disciples, who each then train 6 more disciples, who then each train 6 more disciples (6 x 6 x 6 x 6). At this point there would be four generations, roughly 1,300 disciples of Christ and approximately 100 simple churches or relational networks of disciples. Level four may take years to get to, but is often the ignition point for future rapid growth. Going deep into obedience before going wide in numbers was at the heart of Jesus’ ministry and is also the heart of all successful DMM/CPM’s.

Movements at levels five, six and seven represent DMM/CPM’s that are having regional and national influence. An example of a movement at level seven would be the Bhojpuri movement in North India, now numbering 15 million disciples, hundreds of thousands of simple churches and fostering new movements across India and other countries. Despite its enormous size, the Bhojpuri movement is still growing rapidly because all DMM/CPM movements are like trees; they grow from the tips of the branches, not the trunk. If a movement faithfully copies the methods Jesus taught us, then the spiritual DNA will be strong and there is theoretically no limit to growth.

THE DATA AS AT SEPTEMBER 2020

Justin Long points out that all the figures in the table above are deliberately conservative so as to avoid exaggeration. Below are some interesting points that elaborate on the raw data above:

1. Praise point: One percent of the world’s population is now involved in a rapidly growing DMM/CPM movement!
2. Prayer point: Out of 229 countries, 113 still have no level four movements and 74 don’t even have anyone known to be trying to start a movement. There is still a long way to go.
3. The large number of movements in Asia and Africa is a product of time. This is where the first movements started and have therefore multiplied the most. What has happened there is coming to all other regions of the world given enough time!
4. The total number of simple churches in DMM/CPM movements now exceeds the number of traditional church congregations in all other global Christian traditions.
5. These new simple churches are growing exponentially, roughly tripling every decade.
6. Most DMM movements are currently in the size range of 1,000 to 10,000 people. The very large movements in India pull the average up to the number 56,000 you saw in the table above.
7. Only a handful of movements are larger than one million. However, that will change this decade as others grow through level four toward level seven.
8. Most movements outside the Middle East are in rural areas. More and more of these rural movements are now intentionally engaging people in cities and seeing fruit.
9. Most movements in the Middle Eastern Islamic countries are in the cities.
10. Some movements are now starting to deliberately plant new movements in unreached regions and unreached people groups, and this is expected to lead to even more growth.
11. Most fast-growing movements are in countries where there are very few Christians and therefore no Western cultural baggage.
12. The future of Christianity inside the Hindu world is very exciting.
13. Likewise for Islam. Almost 500 of the 1,369 movements are inside the Muslim world or on the borderlands of the Muslim world.

REGIONAL SNAPSHOT

Asia: DMM/CPM movements are at their most advanced in India, where the oldest and largest movements are concentrated. We are beginning to witness a watershed movement of Hindus into Christianity. Respected Indian DMM/CPM leaders have been very busy training new movement leaders all over the world and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude. A single movement in Bangladesh stopped counting Muslim Background Believer baptisms after 1,000,000. However Pakistan still needs to see a breakthrough. Indonesia is another hotspot for growth. There are also a surprisingly large number of movements (224) inside Muslim West Asia. And then there is China, where evangelical Christianity has grown from 2.7 million in 1975 to over 100 million in 2020, with an unknown number in DMM/CPM movements.

Africa: The Muslim strongholds of North and West Africa are now a hotbed of new DMM/CPM movements with at least 250 being active. The far south of Africa, where traditional Christianity is strong, is yet to embrace the new paradigm to any significant degree. The Sahel borderlands between the Muslim north and the Christian south are where we are seeing many new movements being birthed. East Africa is another interface between Christianity and Islam so it is encouraging to see at least 155 movements active in this area with many more starting out.

Europe: Given its history of fossilised Christian tradition, the DMM/CPM numbers for Europe are very encouraging. However, most of Europe’s movements are among the newer immigrant people groups and the Roma peoples. Very few of these movements are large; most are a few thousand disciples. All operate very much under the radar. They total about 1/3 of one percent of Europe’s population of 742 million.

The America’s

Most of the North American movements are also very small groups among diaspora peoples. However, there are growing movements among Anglo-Saxon Americans with one mega-church in Lubbock, Texas, already having disbanded so it can focus on DMM/CPM. As a consequence, the DMM/CPM vision is now catching on with traditional church leaders. There are only six known movements in Central and South America as most of the exciting growth on that continent is currently inside established Pentecostal church structures. The Communist country of Cuba is the exception, as it has seen strong growth in both types of church structures.

LOOKING TOWARD 2030

So what can we expect to see in the next ten years? Using current trends as a guide this is what will probably happen:

1. According to Operation World, approximately 8% of the world’s people are now born again evangelical Christian believers, with 1/8 of that figure inside rapidly growing DMM/CPM movements. In the decade ahead expect to see over 10-12% of the world inside the Kingdom of God by 2030 with the bulk of that growth coming from that the DMM/CPM movements. Thus a ratio of 1/8 will shrink to at least 1/3. This growth will represent somewhere between 200-300 million new disciples.

2. We currently see churches multiplying, but whole movements are not yet multiplying. We will see the first signs of exponential growth of whole movements in the next five years as more and more existing and experienced movements start new movements in unreached areas, and many of the emerging proto-movements reach level four.

3. South Asia has 52 million people in a myriad of DMM/CPM’s. This number could easily grow to 100-150 million by 2030. Most will be in India, which should be 10-15% Christian by 2030. This would represent the largest spiritual harvest in the history of Christianity and a monumental shift in the religious landscape of this rising 21st Century superpower.

4. The number of movements inside or on the edge of Islam is a phenomenal 500 or so. This number should be 1,000-1,500 by 2030. This would represent another 50-100 million new MBB disciples of Christ and the replanting of our faith to its original heartland. The great harvest inside Islam has begun after 1,400 years of waiting.

5. Currently there is little visible activity in the Western world; the Americas, Europe and Oceania. These regions are 1-2 decades behind the rest of the world in DMM/CPM growth. The next decade should see the adoption of DMM/CPM as a viable and valuable tool in the re-evangelism of these post-Christian and now spiritually hostile regions. There is a growing hunger for change within the Western church. Those that have bravely started movements are seeing some success, however, it is still early days and there is much cultural baggage to overcome.

6. Until the turn of the century North and West Africa were seen as a graveyard for traditional missions. However, this is a deeply spiritual region where Islam sits on top of a myriad of occult practices. DMM/CPM is the perfect vehicle for penetrating this darkness and this explains the surprisingly large number of new movements popping up across the region. Expect to hear great things in the decade ahead from this region with tens of millions more coming to Christ.

7. There are some 3,200 proto-movements in the process of getting started. None of the believers in these movements are included in the numbers above! Most will progress to fully-fledged level four movements this decade and perhaps 10,000 more proto-movements will take their place in the formation stage by the end of the decade. This is the power of exponential growth.

CONCLUSION

Jesus said in Matthew 24:14 that his gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come. Again he said in Matthew 28:19 that we were to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. He expects us to get the job done. Only by using the blueprint he gave us can this task have any chance of being fulfilled in a world of nearly 8 billion people that grows by just over 80 million each year.

What we have seen so far in the growth of global DMM/CPM movements is just the beginning of the fulfilment of our master’s command. The last two decades have been stunning. The next decade will be breath-taking. We can only imagine what could happen in the six decades beyond that to the end of the century!

Lord, your Kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea 

There is a recorded message doing the rounds of the Christian internet space at the moment of an un-named Christian “pastor” who claims to have worked at a high level in Vodafone and makes an incredible series of claims about a dark political connection between the 5G rollout and the spread of coronavirus. We even heard a neighbour sprout the same message last week!

Please do not send his talk about 5G to anyone. If someone talks to you about it please send them the information listed below. The man who spoke is not named but is a prodigious crackpot who dishonours the name of Jesus at every turn in the talk. He is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, trying to profit from the ignorance of common people. The message comes from a website called brighteon.com, a fake news website and part of a whole cluster of fake news sites that are run by a major conspiracy advocate, Mike Adams.

Counterpoints to the speech in question:

1. He fundamentally doesn’t understand the physics of radio frequencies by claiming the 5G tower roll out is causing coronavirus by destroying normal people’s body cells. What a claim! Truth: As you double your distance from any radio frequency source, its power to impact your body drops by 75%. So usually the biggest source of RF exposure are mobile phones you are using and wi-fi routers in our home. Why hasn’t he told his viewers to stop using these or turn them off overnight. According to his argument, the strategy of getting rid of mobile phones should be the first line of defence to helping his listeners. I find it odd that he says he’s concerned about 5G but then doesn’t have any real tangible science-based recommendations to reduce exposure.

2. Coronaviruses are not caused by radio waves breaking down cells. Yes, radio frequencies can cause the generation of free radicals (what he unscientifically calls ‘poison’), along with increased inflammation and an inhibition of melatonin production. He’s not using any of the actual scientifically studied effects of radio frequencies on human cell cultures, and I think it’s because he has no clue what he’s talking about, because these could really strengthen his argument! There are already 400 known coronaviruses known to us. They all come from animals.

3. 5G has not even been rolled out to most of the places where the virus is spreading. Therefore on this point alone his case collapses. Also, what we currently call 5G is really just a bit higher in frequency than 4G and is largely in the same frequency bands. True 5G in the upper frequency range won’t be rolled out on a mass scale until later when more infrastructure is in place and more devices have the capability to use it. For his argument to still be accurate, this final roll out would kill us all instantly, including the 1% whom he claims is behind this conspiracy!

4. His argument that old people are most vulnerable is plain wrong, Children are more far susceptible to the effects of radiation than adults because of their softer bones, developing bodies and rapid cell duplication. That’s why we try to educate children about the dangers of mobile phones. For some strange reason the speaker thinks it’s the other way around.

5. He is selling merchandise!!! He sells VPN shields and other branded merchandise. He is also taking donations and trying to set up his own currency that he wants you to use. “Trust me. I have the answer! Buy my stuff as it will save you”. This is all very suspicious. He is just like the priests at the temple ripping people off before Jesus drove them out. He has a financial bias in this and should be treated with caution due to his obvious conflicts of interest.

6. Who is “they” he keeps referring to. This is the same old one-world government conspiracy theory flogged by Christians who don’t know how the world works and want to appear clever. It’s been going on for generations simply because gullible Christians have a flawed understanding of the Kingdom of God and the victory we were given when Jesus took authority over the earth after his victory on the cross. I find it instructive that this man says nothing about the salvation of souls.

7. Russia has actually been hiding it’s Coronavirus case numbers. Many countries have actually under-reported their numbers, especially China. Russia’s official numbers have nothing to do with their colder weather as he claims. He very conveniently left out South Korea In his broad sweeping statement of countries and infection rates. This is because they have a completely rolled out 5G system but have very low levels of the virus. Their problem was actually a Christian cult that thought they had secret knowledge and were cleverer than everyone else so they disobeyed the coronavirus warnings. This speaker is just like their leader… “the world is bad. I have the answers. I will save you.”

8. This pandemic is actually the biggest threat ever to the 5G rollout as the resulting decade-long economic depression we are entering will stall all sorts of economic activity.

9. His claim that the Spanish Flu was caused by the invention of the radio is ludicrous.
Spanish flu stayed around for nearly 90 years and became extinct in the late 20th century. It stayed around long enough to be gene sequenced. As a side note Spanish Flu died out because it devolved, not evolved. It was a great example of why the theory of evolution is also a conspiracy theory as it disobeys the iron-clad law of entropy. Everything is devolving (breaking down), including us at about 300 mutations per person per generation.

10. The claim that governments are deliberately doing this is also stupid. Between a conspiracy and a stuff up, always go for the stuff up!!!! Politicians are public servants for goodness sake, and want to get re-elected!!!! A plan for world domination this large and complex would have leaked long ago. Just ask Chuck Colson how hard it was to keep Nixon’s Watergate problem under wraps! This conspiracy is a million times larger.

11. The speaker also states that “evidence” demonstrates that vaccines are making you more susceptible to viruses. He says you can even look up the scientific studies, but then moves straight on to his next wow moment as if this is so self-evident that it doesn’t even warrant any evidence or explanation. Please explain!!!

12. He makes very a dangerous statement that getting tested for coronavirus will infect you with the virus! This is hugely irresponsible and will cause people who are stupid enough to believe him not to get tested and seek treatment when they are sick. He may well be responsible for deaths because of his ignorance.

13. Here we go again…the old micro-chip under the skin theory and mark of the beast! He hasn’t have a clue about the Book of Revelation and what it meant. Educate yourself and just read the first three verses to find out it’s purpose and timeframe for completion.

14. Finally I agree with him…yes coronavirus will usher in a global economic depression!

15. He says “they” want to take over the world’s money supply. “They” already control the worlds finance because “they” are called central banks issuing fiat currency. Sorry speaker, that takeover occurred a hundred years ago. The irony is that this coming economic disruption is so large that their precious fiat financial empire is going to collapse because of this coming depression. We will probably be back on a gold standard within a decade or two because fiat currencies are going to be printed to oblivion. God-backed money is God’s system, not mans.

16. He says the shutting of churches is part of the conspiracy because when we sing in church an electrical energy is released that somehow empowers us and the one world government hates us singing!!! Actually the shutdown of Western churches is a huge blessing. The Western system of doing church in a dedicated building was actually invented by the Greeks and Romans centuries after the Jews started Christianity with house churches. The forced move to house churches in the West means the church now goes underground and spreads to neighbours and friends far faster. House church is the reason why the church is growing much faster in the third world. Get a grip!

17. He suggests this global conspiracy is going to usher in the Antichrist. Sorry to pop his bubble but the term Antichrist is not in the Book of Revelation and has nothing to do with the present or the future. The only references are found in 1John 2:18, 2:22, 4:3 and 2John verse 7. PLEASE read them! There are no other references to the term Antichrist in all the Bible. Antichrist has nothing to do with the future, but the 1^st Century readers of John’s letters and simply referred to people who strongly opposed the spread of the Gospel. This speaker has never read these verses and if you too think the Antichrist has something to do with an evil leader lurking somewhere in the future who will take over the earth…you haven’t read the Bible either!

18. The speaker concludes with some ideas about what the Body of Christ can do. Actually it could do no better than to get rid of idiots like this nutter! Who gave this guy a platform to speak? Stop listening to him and educate yourself about our future victory (Matthew 28:18-20). All authority over this earth now belongs to Jesus, not humans. The future will see the discipling of the whole earth. Otherwise Matthew 28:18-20 is a lie! But it’s not, this guy is the lie.

19. Right through the talk this man makes claim after claim but presents not a single piece of hard evidence to back his claims, just conjecture and broad unspecific statements. He is a cult leader in the making, if not already there. He preys on ignorant people who don’t want to think for themselves. If it wasn’t so serious I would have thought it was all a James Bond plot!

20. It is embarrassing to hear this man say all these lies in the name of Jesus. This is so offensive to the Body of Christ and he will pay a price before the throne of God for his deceptions. He also repeatedly mixes New Age “energy”, warped concepts about quantum physics and “electrical” powers with the work of the Holy Spirit. More nonsense and quite disturbing.

He makes me so angry!

Kevin