Welcome to the Jesus Movement

So when [the disciples] had come together, they asked [Jesus], "Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?" He replied, "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

(Acts 1:6–8)

Ultimately, the Jesus Movement is a metaphor. Images, metaphors, and forms of symbolic speech are a way of helping you to get at more deep and complex things in accessible and memorable ways. This Jesus Movement isn't a twenty-first-century invention or a throwback to 1960s "Jesus Freaks" or a rhetorical concoction of my making. We're talking about going forward as a church by going back to our deepest roots as disciples of Jesus Christ.

New Testament scholars and others who look at early Christian origins often refer to the Christian movement in its beginnings as the "Jesus Movement." Rodney Stark, a sociologist of religion who has studied early Christian origins and the expansion and growth of Christianity, has written the suggestively titled book The Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World's Largest Religion. It's not an adaptation of Christian triumphalism but a description of the evolution of the movement Jesus inaugurated into the Church.

The Jesus Movement: We're following Jesus into loving, liberating, life-giving relationship with God, with each other, and with creation.

Stark is specific and prolific on this topic. He explains the way Christianity grew as a movement to bring new life to Judaism and to broken people:

Christianity served as a revitalization movement that arose in response to the misery, chaos, fear and brutality of life in the urban Greco-Roman world. ... To cities filled with the homeless and impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity.

So when we use the phrase the "Jesus Movement," we're actually pointing back to the earliest days of Jesus's teaching and his followers moving in his revolutionary footsteps in the power of the Spirit. Together with them, we're following Jesus and growing loving, liberating, life-giving relationship with God, with each other, and with creation.

The late Verna Dozier shares this understanding. A brilliant black lay theologian and educator, her last published book was titled, The Dream of God: A Call to Return. She would have recognized the Jesus Movement as a call to return to our deepest origins as Christians, to return to the roots of our very life, as people of the Way, as disciples of the Lord Jesus. It's a call to return so that we can truly march forward, following the way of Jesus.

God on the Move

There's no denying it: Jesus began a movement. That's why his invitations to folk who joined him are filled with so many active verbs. In John 1:39 Jesus calls disciples with the words, "Come and see." In Matthew, Mark, and Luke, he asks others to "Follow me." And at the end of the Gospels, he sent his first disciples out with the word, "Go ..." As in, "Go therefore and make disciples of all nations" (Matt. 28:19). As in, "Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation" (Mark 16:15).

In Acts 1 he uses even more movement language: "But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth" (v. 8). If you look at the Bible, listen to it, and watch how the Spirit of God unfolds in the sacred story, I think you'll notice a pattern. You cannot help but notice that there really is a movement of God in the world.

If you don't believe me, ask Abraham and Sarah. They were ready to enjoy their pension and their senior years. Then God called and said: "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation" (Gen. 12:1–2).

Beyond their own desires Abraham and Sarah found themselves a part of the movement of God. On their journey they joined up with a woman named Hagar, and Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar were a family. (It was a dysfunctional family, but a family nonetheless.) Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar are the ancestors of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. They're proof that God has a movement.

If you still don't believe me, ask Moses. According to the biblical book of Exodus, Moses was born of Hebrew slaves in Egypt. But due to mysterious circumstances, Moses was adopted by a loving Egyptian princess and nursed by his Hebrew mother. In his adulthood this dual nature caused him quite an identity crisis. He had to wonder: "Am I a slave or a slave master?"

In the midst of this crisis he was forced to flee Egypt. He eventually married a woman named Zipporah whose father Jethro was a well-off businessman. Moses ran the business and everything was cozy, until he ran into a burning bush. Of course it was God. Instead of asking Moses to enjoy the comfortable life, God challenged him to join the movement, to leave the comfort of Jethro's business and go back to Egypt, back to the land of his people, back to the Hebrew slaves and Egyptian slave owners. But now he would return as liberator to set the captives free, just like the old spiritual says ...

When Israel was in Egypt's land (Let my people go) Oppressed so hard they could not stand (Let my people go)

Go down, Moses
Way down in Egypt land
And tell old Pharaoh
Let my people go.

And Moses went, because he was part of God's movement.

You could ask Isaiah, who was in the temple when he heard the call from God. Isaiah was comfortable — he rather liked living in the capital city of Jerusalem, and residing in the temple, where there was always good, well-executed "high church" liturgy. But God called, "Who will go for us?" and Isaiah said, "Here I am; send me" (Isa. 6:8).

You could ask Queen Esther, challenged by Mordecai to risk her regal privileges and go to the king to save her people. "Who knows?" Mordecai asked her. "Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this." Her response: "I will go to the king ... and if I perish, I perish" (Esther...