Following the Thread Part 7

ARTICLE 7 OF 7

Coming Home

I want to tell you what I think is happening.

Not as a prediction, not as a theological argument. More as something I’ve been sensing, the way you sense a change in the weather before you can name what’s different. A shift in the air. Something moving.

I think we’re in the early days of a reformation.

Not a revolution. That word carries too much heat, too much tearing down and starting again. A reformation is quieter and more hopeful than that. It doesn’t destroy what’s true and beautiful. It calls it back to itself. It clears away what’s built up over time, the lean nobody planned for, the adjustments we’ve all made without quite realising, and makes the original shape visible again. The one that was always there in the foundation texts. The one that’s more liveable, more human, more like Jesus than what we’ve sometimes built on top of it.

And I think the signs of it are already here, if we know how to read them.

What the discomfort is telling us

Many of us have been feeling something for a while now. A growing unease that’s hard to name precisely. A sense that something isn’t sitting quite right, even in communities we love, even among people we trust.

I think that discomfort is a gift. The Spirit’s way of surfacing what needs to be seen, not to shame us, but because he loves us too much to leave us leaning.

We’re seeing it in the quiet conversations happening in communities all over the place, people finally naming what they’ve been carrying in silence. In the movement away from models of church that concentrated everything in one place, one person, one vision, toward something smaller, more communal, more genuinely shared. And we’re seeing it, painfully, in the public exposure of abuses in leadership and prophetic culture, the fruit of foundations that were never quite level, cracks that finally became impossible to ignore.

That last one is hard. Painful for everyone, including and especially those who love these communities deeply. But I’ve come to think the exposing is itself an act of mercy. Not punishment, not abandonment. The loving Father who wants his children free, surfacing what’s been hidden so it can finally be healed.

The discomfort isn’t the problem. It’s the diagnosis. And a good diagnosis, however uncomfortable, is the beginning of healing.

The house that can be made level

I’ve used the image of a building on a slightly wonky foundation through this series, and I want to come back to it here, because I think it’s actually an image of hope rather than despair.

A wonky foundation isn’t the end of the story.

We know something about this here. Houses get jacked up. Foundations get relevelled. It’s not a small job, and it’s not without disruption, but it’s entirely possible, and the result is a house that suddenly makes sense again. The doors hang right. The floors feel level. The cracks stop appearing. And the people inside stop unconsciously leaning to one side and can simply stand straight.

That’s what I think God’s offering us. Not demolition. Relevelling. Getting the foundation back under us properly so everything built on it can be what it was always meant to be.

The Spirit still speaks. Prophecy is still real and beautiful. Leadership still matters, community still needs structure and wisdom and gifted people willing to serve it faithfully. The apostolic vision, the prophetic voice, the pastoral heart, the teaching gift, the evangelistic fire, all of it still needed, all of it still given by Christ to his church, all of it still capable of being exactly what Ephesians 4 describes.

We just need the foundation level. The government back on his shoulders where it belongs. The gifts held as gifts, offered with open hands, received in community, weighted by love rather than the need to control or perform or protect what we’ve built.

When that’s true, the house becomes genuinely habitable. The kind of place people can actually come home to.

What love does that fear can’t

Underneath all the structural questions, all the talk of authority and prophecy and apostolic ministry and five fold gifts, there’s something more foundational still.

There’s fear, and there’s love. And they produce completely different kinds of communities.

Fear holds on. Love releases. Fear demands performance. Love welcomes the real person. Fear narrows the circle of trusted voices. Love keeps making the table longer. Fear needs the structure to hold everything together. Love trusts the Spirit to do what only the Spirit can do.

John says it plainly. Perfect love drives out fear. Not as a spiritual technique, not something we manufacture, but what happens when we genuinely encounter the love of God and let it do its work in us. Where love grows, fear contracts. Where fear contracts, control loosens, and communities start to breathe.

I think this is what the reformation looks like at its heart. Not a church with the right vocabulary about authority, but a church so formed by the love of God it doesn’t need to manage and control and assert, because it’s found the safety it was always looking for, in him.

That process begins, as all reformations do, on the inside. In leaders willing to ask honestly what they’re afraid of, and bring that fear to God rather than manage it through structure. In communities willing to create enough safety that the real questions can finally be asked. In prophetic voices willing to offer freely and hold lightly, trusting the gift to find its own way. In all of us, slowly and together, letting the love of God grow bigger than the fear.

The early church again

I keep coming back to where this series began. Those early communities, gathered round tables, finding their way together in the light of the Spirit. The Old Testament suddenly catching fire, the threads of it weaving into something more beautiful than anyone had managed to hold before. Leadership rising out of the life, recognised by the community, proven in character and faithfulness. Everyone contributing, everyone needed, the Spirit moving through the whole.

That picture still does something in me every time I return to it. Still produces that ache, that recognition. Yes. That. That’s what I’m hungry for.

I’ve come to believe that longing is the Spirit’s own longing moving through us. His desire for his church. His vision of what we can be, and what, by his grace, we’re becoming.

Not perfectly. Not all at once. Not without the ongoing mess and grace and patience and forgiveness community always requires. But genuinely, and increasingly, with a momentum I think is his rather than ours.

The reformation is already moving. I see it in the honest conversations, the quiet shifts, the communities finding their way back toward something truer. In leaders laying down weights they were never meant to carry, finding they can breathe again. In people on the edges finding their way back in, because something’s changed in the air and the belonging feels more real.

And I see it in the longing itself. In the fact that so many of us, in so many different places, are feeling the same pull toward the same thing. Toward community that’s genuinely safe. Toward authority that genuinely serves. Toward prophecy that genuinely strengthens and encourages and comforts. Toward the gifts held as gifts, offered freely, received gratefully, used for the flourishing of the whole.

Toward the house with the level foundation, where the doors hang right and the light comes in and people can finally, fully, come home.

A final thought

Revelation 19:10 has become a kind of plumbline for me through all of this. The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.

The deepest purpose of the prophetic gift, and I think of every gift, is to make Jesus more visible. More present. More known. Every gift, in its right place, points beyond itself to him.

When that’s true, when prophecy strengthens and encourages and comforts, when leadership serves and releases, when apostolic gifting plants and sends and equips, when the whole body’s functioning with every part contributing, the church is doing something extraordinary. Not because of the authority any of us carry. Because of who we’re all pointing to.

That’s the vision the New Testament’s been showing us all along. And I think it’s closer than we’ve imagined.

The thread has led us here. And here, it turns out, is home.

A thought to sit with: What would it mean for you, in your particular community and calling, to take one small step toward the level foundation? Not a revolution. Just one gentle, faithful, hopeful step in the right direction.