Conversation to Movement (2)

Will the emergent conversation someday become a movement? Perhaps, and perhaps not. Conversations rarely turn into a movement and then run their course in one generation. The great revivals and reformations that dot the history of humanity were never the work of just one person. Every movement is the sum of visionaries who have gone before, generations of uncompromised lives and non-negotiated truths. Faithful men who have led forceful lives.

A movement comes of age when one life harvests the seeds planted by the countless lives of previous generations. A movement occurs when one person, no greater or lesser than those who have gone before, lives a forceful life in the fullness of time. Never think that the great movements of Luther, Calvin, or Campbell were entirely of their own doing. They were simply forceful lives placed by God in a receptive crevice of history.

Let’s vigorously converse while living lives stirring and forceful enough to cause a movement. A true mark of the visionary is his willingness to lay down his life for those whom he’ll never see.

Will the emergent become movement in our generation? I hope so. But even if it doesn’t, even if we never see it, it will occur. And we’ll be a part of it.