Futurist Tom Sine writes what we’re all feeling and have scratched our heads over for the last decade or two … namely, we’re a small craft tossed and turned by “turbulent times.” He’s talking about the church. He’s talking about what it means to be Christian. He’s talking about people of faith who have moved out from the shadow of a sympathetic culture that has come to ignore those of us who move and have our being in what is known as the traditional church. We first heard from Tom Sine, a Seattle-based thinker and researcher in the 1980’s when he published The Mustard Seed Conspiracy (1981). It’s not that Sine was paranoid and saw a conspiratorial anti-Christian culture developing like so many fundamentalists who think the world is cocked against them. It’s that Sine recognized what his eyes and ears and analytical brain was telling him: The days of Christianity as the dominant driving force in the world have ended.So Sine did what many would not have done … he went small. He recognized that God’s movement in the world was what Robert Capon described as God’s love of those who are least, lost, last and little. God is often most active in the small and not as the brassy power of the dominant world. Sine understood that God is not into signs of power as in the thunder and the lightning but instead often sensed best falling on us in the form of a gentle rain, often unnoticed and unrecognized by us. God is in the tiniest mustard seed working quietly -seeding the ground with those things that will eventually bless the world.
So Sine wrote an epistle to the church encouraging us to be at work in the world doing just as much in our little ways. Being faithful. Laboring quietly like the farmer, dropping seeds into the ground that God waters with grace blessing the world around us knowing that God will produce a crop in another season.
Likewise, we’re to pay attention to the little acts of kindness. We’re to faithfully attend to the little habits of being. We’re to be as we’re called, “little Christs” in the world doing what Christ did as demonstrated by the humility of his sacrificial death.
Sine’s newest book is titled The New Conspirators and falls into the form of his earliest theme of mustard seeds and God’s affinity with small but significant faith. In his introduction titled, “Traveling Into Turbulent Times,” he draws a quote from Alan Roxburgh: “We are all in the early stages of a massive transition … We cannot return to the past like some nostalgic That 70’s Show, nor can we jump over to the present to go bravely where none have gone before, like some kind of Star Trek series. We are more like the strange, motley crew of creatures struggling to make sense of their situation on board the space station Babylon Five.”
His big idea is that God is doing what God has always done by finding in each generation those who are welcoming of the work of the Spirit - faithfully tending to the kingdom of God in their own creative “little” ways. He contends that while we can bemoan what’s happening to the form of the traditional church and can translate those losses as the failure of the young to pick up the habits of the old, we cannot ignore that God is still quietly stirring in this younger generation by igniting a flame of passion we who are of the older generation have yet to demonstrate or experience.
I’m overwhelmingly impressed with the spirit of our sub-30’s. They want it real. They want their faith stripped of pretension. They want a sense of adventure. They want to be alive in God’s Spirit without the judgment of the older generations who see the world through generational eyes. Sine’s new book is a blessing on those he calls the “new conspirators” as they bring their passion and fire to the work of God in our time. He calls them conspirators not because they are conspiring with the culture for the demise of the church, but that they are conspiring with God to find the new wineskins of faith by which God’s Spirit will welcome the future.
God bless our New Conspirators! May they invade our thoughts and our tired habits of faith bringing the new wine of what God wants to unleash in our time, in our hearts, and in our community.