It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...Oops, someone else used that line.

We do live in difficult times. However, there are opportunities everywhere you turn. Sure, more than 70 percent of Americans reject the church. But that means that the fields are white unto harvest.

Reaching into the harvest won't work using the tools of the past or pretending that our values still dominate. We need to think differently. Flexibility and adaptability within scriptural boundaries actually suggest that these might be the best of times for the church. That may seem a foreign thought to you but it is true. The church prevailed over culture and grew the fastest during times similar to these.

Those early believers had no internet, snailmail, podcasts or even bicycles yet they changed an empire from the inside out. I don't much like thinking of myself as a stranger--worse yet an alien yet that is what we are to the surrounding world. Those are also words describing us in scripture. If we embrace them we'll find some paradigms broken and programs disrupted. We'll also discover fresh wind from the Spirit and a flow of living water long bottled up in a sometimes burdensome program-based approach to our great task.

This podcast is taken from a course called Doing Church In a Post-Christian Era at ralphmoore.net. It's also available to those enrolled in the Equippers Lab on the site.

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