Why not think about times to come,
And not about the things that you’ve done,
If your life was bad to you,
Just think what tomorrow will do.

Don’t stop, thinking about tomorrow,
Don’t stop, it’ll soon be here,
It’ll be, better than before,
Yesterday’s gone, yesterday’s gone.

—Lyrics by Christine McVie, sung by Fleetwood Mac

I OFTEN SAY THAT MY INTEREST IN THE FUTURE GOES WAY BACK. In 1954, I was so eager to take hold of tomorrow I was born six weeks premature! Later, in grade school, I recall eagerly skipping school to watch the Mercury space capsules being hurdled into space. By the late ’60s, I was fascinated with the wonders of science and technology and the arrival of the Year 2000, a new world then 30 years away. It was in this context I entered college and found myself face to face with a “Jesus freak.”

“If you could know God in a personal way, would you be interested?” Rusty asked? “Sure, who wouldn’t be?” I responded.

The year was 1972. It was the height of the Jesus movement. I had been at Georgia Tech for three weeks, studying to be a “helluva of an engineer.”

Growing up, I had little interest in church. At the time it seemed all too domesticated. But here was a different side of faith. Amidst the turmoil of late ‘60s, people were talking about Jesus as a true revolutionary. I felt drawn to the person of Jesus Christ, not only for what I could receive, but also because I felt that his life was the only hope for my confused generation. That day, October 3, 1972, I committed myself to Christ and accepted the invitation to “Come Help Change the World.”

My next four years as a university student were a whirlwind of activity. I shared my faith with my friends, organized discipleship groups, taught in weekly training classes, and oh yes, studied Industrial Management—my degree. As time drew near to graduation, my destiny was fixed: I would join the staff of Campus Crusade for Christ to “help fulfill the great commission in this generation.”

These were heady days for evangelicals in the United States, after the disillusionment of the Vietnam War and Watergate. It seemed we evangelicals were riding the crest of the wave. Jimmy Carter, a born-again evangelical, had been elected President, and a resurgent Israel had defeated both Jordan and Egypt, leading many to think we might be in some countdown to Armageddon.

I had set my face to the plow to be part of this spiritual revolution by winning the next student generation. I moved to Philadelphia to serve as a campus chaplain at Temple University. There I found a different dynamic, a multi-ethnic campus that was not merely indifferent, but hostile to exclusive claims of Christian truth. I also found my freedom to create, by working under Campus Crusade for Christ as a staff member, was a lot more circumscribed than being a student in their ministry.

Still, I had no dream other than fulfilling the great commission and doing that on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ. At times I would ponder about my future, especially as I got engaged to Olgy Maria Aleu, my college sweetheart. Olgy was originally from Cuba. We dreamed of how we might serve in campus ministry in Mexico or Colombia and then, after a decade, work in the third world as a church growth consultant.

• When Your World Collapses
• The Power of the Watchword
• Targeting the Year 2000
• Would we be Coaches or Cheerleaders?
• The Rise and Collapse of Year 2000 Dreams
• Seeing the Star of 2000
• Relating Faith to the Future
• Looking Backwards, Looking Forward
• Strategic Foresight
• My Vision for the Decade to Come

When Your World Collapses

But as they say, man proposes and God disposes. After getting married in May 1978, we headed off to Crusade’s Summer Institute of Biblical Studies in Colorado, intending to stay through staff training. Olgy had been accepted on staff, with the condition that she lose weight. As a newlywed, she had gladly been obliging, heading down the scale. On July 4, 1978, I got a note from the Personnel Department to see them in their office. I sat down with the Personnel Director and a national women’s director. They broke the bad news to me. In reviewing 700 applications for new staff, they had to let go of those who did not meet standards. Olgy was nine pounds shy of their ideal. I would have to leave staff and come back in six months. I was dumbfounded. I asked if that was the only issue. They assured me it was. The meeting ended, as fast as it had started.

At 2 pm I took the elevator down that multi-story building. As I reached ground floor, I felt my multi-level dreams had been flattened like a stack of pancakes. No sooner had I walked out the door, however, I felt an incredible sense of freedom. It seemed like God was saying to me that my world was just beginning. Whereas, before I had been focused on one “official future” before me, now through no action on my part, that edifice had collapsed, and before Olgy and I stood dozens of possibilities. We could go to seminary in Portland. We could go on a “short-term” ministering to Hispanics. We could help a fledging ministry in California get off the ground.

In our classes that summer, we had been sitting under the teachings of Dr. Ralph Winter, who had just launched the U.S. Center for World Mission in Pasadena, California. He had been talking about the history of the World Christian movement and the 2.5 billion “hidden people” beyond the reach of ordinary evangelism. Olgy and I met with Ralph after class. He invited us to come out to California and help them raise money for three months to buy a college campus, saving it from the grip of a syncretistic Eastern cult.

I remember telling Olgy we had nothing to lose. Here was a situation that would demand far more from us than we could ever get back. Within a week we were off to California in our 1969 gold colored Pontiac Tempest. Upon arriving at the U.S. Center for World Mission, we found about 40 volunteers, working daily to raise the next down payment on the former Nazarene College.

We immediately fell in love with Ralph Winter’s family, his daughters and sons-in-law. In 1976, Dr. Winter had left a tenured position at Fuller Theological Seminary’s ‘School of World Mission’ to launch a think-tank, offering strategy, resources and training to U.S. audiences. I pitched in and helped out where I could. Ironically, I ended up developing their personnel department and training their staff on how to raise personal financial support. We enrolled in their Institute of International Studies class that fall, and found ourselves in an advanced studies program on “fulfilling the great commission.” [Top of Page]

The Power of the Watchword

Nearly a hundred years earlier D.L. Moody and the Student Volunteer Movement had raised a banner, “The Evangelization of the World in this Generation.” That following spring Dr. Winter gathered both older and younger missionary couples at his home for an evening of prayer and a new watchword was born: “A Church for Every People by the Year 2000.”

When I heard this phrase, I still remember the excitement it created in my heart. This was the first time anyone had linked the year 2000 with the unreached peoples. I felt that God would watch over this word to see it fulfilled, like he once told Jeremiah (Jeremiah 1:7).

Immediately, this image of the “world by 2000” began to release a whole new season of grace in my life. Over the next year, we found ourselves running “Perspectives,” the first extension course of the Institute of International Studies for Penn State students. We shaped the entire study program around the cry for “A Church for Every People.” The outcomes were explosive. Frontiers, a mission agency to Muslims was born from that class, as well as the Caleb Project. We came back to California realizing we had found a model that could be multiplied. This led to both Olgy and I getting an M.A. in Education, and developing the coordinator training workshop that multiplied the Perspectives program all across the world. Whatever student ministry of mine had ended prematurely in 1978, God had given it back 100-fold. [Top of Page]

Targeting the Year 2000

By the mid-’80s, I began to reflect more on the dynamic nature of “by the Year 2000.” In 1987, following the centennial of the Student Volunteer Movement, I wrote a magazine feature entitled, “What’s the True Score?” that asked, “What’s the real chance that every individual on this planet will have a reasonable opportunity to respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ by the year 2000?”

In 1988, the Rev. Thomas Wang, international director of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization, invited me to edit their monthly magazine, “World Evangelization.” I told Thomas, I was only an average editor, but I’d be a great personal aide to him, and would work night and day as his “AD 2000” special project person.

Billy Graham had founded the Lausanne Committee in 1974 and invited seventy leaders around the world to help evangelicals intercede, theologize, communicate and strategize more effectively for world evangelization.

I immediately began working for Wang. He convened a meeting at Los Angeles Airport of senior leaders to see if the time was right to host a “Global Consultation on 2000.” With affirmation coming out of that gathering, I collected a set of articles, echoing Wang’s vision for “AD 2000.” We sent out an invitation for a subset of the Los Angeles group to gather back from around the world, this time in Richmond, Virginia to plan the consultation some eight months out.

As we gathered in Richmond, the task force felt the Spirit of God was near. We felt a clear and certain trumpet to reach the world for Christ by 2000 should be blown. Yet through wisdom, we felt the year 2000 should not be considered a prophetic date. To signify that the year 2000 was serving both as a goal and a gateway, we designated the vision as “AD 2000 & Beyond.” That evening Thomas and I took a long walk through the historic streets of Richmond. He confided, “Jay, I finally feel the real thing has begun.”

From January 5-8, 1989, 300 leaders gathered in Singapore for the “Global Consultation on World Evangelization by AD 2000 and Beyond.” Again, similar to what I had seen in launching the Perspectives program, I saw the power of God give birth to a movement, this time a Decade of Harvest. To capture the excitement of those days Olgy and I wrote a book, The Countdown Has Begun: The Story of the Global Consultation on AD 2000 in the spring of 1989. 

The “AD 2000 & Beyond” Movement indeed went on to become a catalytic movement in the 1990s for thousands of leaders from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Through paradigms like the “10/40 Window” or new methods like prayer journeys, people were stirred to be witnesses for Christ. Thousands of Christian leaders proclaimed we were riding the crest of a wave. [Top of Page]

Would we be Coaches or Cheerleaders?

I was as excited as the next person about prospects for the Decade of Harvest. But beneath the waves, I knew strong currents would shape the surface. Would this new movement reflect the role that Charismatics and Catholics were playing in world evangelization or would it be narrowed by sectarianism? Given less than 2% of all missionaries were working among the unreached, would we allow mission organizations to embrace the AD 2000 vision, without embracing systemic change in their field deployment patterns? Would we be seasoned coaches, and use all the monitoring tools we could to make fourth quarter corrections to our game plan, or would we be cheerleaders, only able to raise our voices to a frenzy as we moved past the 2-minute warning?

One of the key architects of the AD 2000 strategy had been Dr. David Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia. It was his research, released in his 1988 book, Seven Hundred Plans to Evangelize the World that had confirmed there was indeed a rising tide of action focused on the century’s end. But he soberly reminded us that calling the church to finish the task of world evangelization by the turn of the century was nothing new. He told us the history of world evangelization was littered with hundreds of well-intentioned calls and pronouncements that aroused enormous interest but came to nothing. A hundred years before, D.L. Moody had sought to rally fellow leaders reach the world for Christ by 1900. Tragically so, this “Countdown to 1900” movement arose, peaked and declined.

While outwardly the AD 2000 movement was gaining steam, inwardly Barrett and I realized the entire effort could reduce itself to mere sloganeering, well before 2000, unless we intentionally worked for systemic change.

In preparing for the 1989 Global Consultation on 2000 in Singapore, David was chairing a task force to prepare a “Global Action Plan.” He and I were assigned to develop cooperative proposals that could be implemented in the early 1990s that would overcome long-standing obstacles to evangelizing the world by the year 2000. We gathered 15 missiologists from around the world to build up a card-deck of proposals that eventually became this plan, with 104 proposed innovations. These documents didn’t prophesy that the AD 2000 goal would be met. They did, however, explore how human responsibility for the Great Commission would have to be shouldered.

One proposal was to “draw up a whole range of alternative future scenarios for AD 2000 and beyond.” Barrett and I worked through three scenarios for the year 2000. The best-case scenario, of course, would be that the church would make the 1990s a turn around decade and evangelize the world. This was not as far fetched as it sounds.

By 1989, we estimated 76% of the world had been evangelized. The “closure” scenario would mean that the remaining 24% of the world would hear the gospel in a meaningful way by 2000. The second scenario would be “moderate progress, no closure.” Evangelization would drop from 24% to 16% of the world. The worst-case scenario would maintain the status quo, “no change, no progress” with the map of the unreached world the same as 1990. [Top of Page]

The Rise and Collapse of Year 2000 Dreams

As the summer of 1989 came around, the World Future Society was planning its tri-annual general assembly in Washington, DC. Barrett invited me to join him there, and then confided, “Jay, I don’t see any hope for AD 2000 thinking, unless we can merge our ministry thinking with their future studies.” He urged me to join this professional society and enhance my skills in this vein. At that time I didn’t take his advice. Six years later I was driven into the futures field in search of more powerful levers of change.

What happened in between? I realized that the AD 2000 vision did not have the ability to transform itself by mid-decade. It could only envision the year 2000 as an evangelism deadline, not a doorway. That would have been fine if there were any indicators that our closure or even moderate progress scenarios were emerging. But by 1995 there were no quantitative signs that we were on target to reach any significant AD 2000 goals. Like previous generations, we had missed the “window of opportunity.”

That fall my ministry broke this sobering news to the press under the title, “Computer Prophet Sees Missions Beyond 2000.” The release read in part:

In this present push to reach the world for Christ by the year 2000, a growing chorus of Christian leaders advocate that world missions needs to look past 2000 to horizons that are more realistic.

Evidence of this shift in missions strategy to ‘beyond 2000’ came this past month when leading researcher, Dr. David Barrett, changed the name of his “AD 2000 Global Monitor” trend letter to “AD 2025.”

Barrett, who uses computer models to make projections, claims “AD 2000 is too close for goals related to comprehensive evangelization of the unreached.” He now sees a future of one billion unevangelized in A.D. 2000, gradually falling to 600 million in A.D. 2025. He plans to develop this “beyond 2000” scenario fully in the next edition of the “World Christian Encyclopedia” due out in 2001.

Breaking formation with many of my missiological colleagues, I began to tell the media the probability that “A Church for Every People” could be established by the year 2000 was now at “5% or less” down from “40%” at the start of the decade. While I maintained that strategic work could be launched among the unreached by 2000, this work would not bear fruit until “beyond 2000.”

Ideally, AD 2000 should have focused on the turn of the century as a horizon for global planning in ministry. Like a car approaching a horizon, once it got near that fixed point, a whole new horizon would be established.

Unfortunately, the wall we had originally raised began to erode, separating AD 2000 as a target date in world missions from being a prophetic date in a Bible prophecy countdown scheme. By 1995, I was convinced that decadal planning in world evangelization was doomed and would become another apocalyptic excursion, where evangelical leaders would “overshoot and collapse.” It would take two or three decades before any “governing metaphor” in world missions could again be taken seriously.

For more writings of mine on how the dream of reaching the world for Christ by 2000 took shape in the ‘90s, only to collapse due to misguided millennialism, see the AD 2000 archive on my personal web site. [Top of Page]

Seeing the Star of 2000

Meanwhile, by mid-decade, I had developed an alternative vision for 2000 that was Christ-centered, rather than cause-oriented. In 1994 I came out with the first inspirational book on 2000 for Christians entitled The Star of 2000. Steering clear of deterministic rhetoric in missions, I encouraged the church to think of the millennium more dynamically as a modern-day “Star of Bethlehem.” It wasn’t just the tape at the finish line, nor the times that were attracting us. The real drawing power of AD 2000 was the treasure of Christ. First and foremost, the year 2000 should witness to the 2,000th anniversary of the coming of Christ into the world.

This book launched my work into an entirely different arena. In so many words, from 1990 onward, I had felt God had said to me, “You’ve been so concerned with what the church might do, you have forgotten the who. Why not give my Son a 2,000th birthday party!” So in child-like faith, I began to organize for meal 2000, rather than mission 2000.

After my book was released, the idea of Christ’s bimillennial began to get a hearing. The L.A. Times, CNN and Washington Post featured my work as “The Millennium Doctor.” To serve the field as a “millennial consultant,” I launched a monthly “Let’s Talk 2000” trend letter for event planners and community organizers.

By 1995, the Southern Baptists began to develop a “Celebrate Jesus 2000” plan, that was later picked up by Mission America. But overall I could see the paradigm for 2000 was turning catastrophic. The Y2K computer problem surfaced publicly by 1997 and there was no way I could make serious headway on Jesus’ 2000th jubilee in the U.S.

In Europe and in the Middle East things were different. Because they have a longer sense of history, both civic and religious leaders picked up on marking the millennium as an anniversary of time and the divine. Through a foundation grant my work shifted to that arena. In 1996, I helped frame out the “Journey of the Magi” scheduled for 2001 in the Middle East, an epic pilgrimage of peace, from Iraq to Bethlehem. By 1997, I was helping the church in the Holy Land think through how to use the jubilee as a cultural peace process, hopefully culminating by 2000 in a negotiated settlement of the Mid-east conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

Nearer to home, from 1999 to 2000, I was drafted to be the lead designer of the Pikes Peak Millennial Season, or Springs 2000, Colorado Springs official program to “honor the past, celebrate the present, and imagine the future.” It became a huge movement in my area as it united some 250 community projects and special events to insure it marked our entry into the 21st century as a “millennium community.” [Top of Page]

Relating Faith to the Future

As the year 2000 came and went, “millennial neurosis” had fully gripped the church. The AD 2000 movement had failed to accelerate world evangelization by even an infinitesimal. Despite all the “missions mobilization” and “spiritual warfare,” world evangelization had not even kept pace with world population throughout the 1990s. There was not even a plausible scenario that it would do any better in the next quarter century. Added to that, there was a wholesale loss of faith in grand stories and plans, in part due to the rise of post-modernism. As Jeremiah wrote, I felt “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved” (Jeremiah 8:20).

In the course of twenty years, I had seen how both Bible prophecy and Church Growth deadlines had failed to set the direction for the 21st century church. Like the author of Hebrews saw the Old Covenant, I felt that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come” (Hebrews 13:14). Therefore, I decided that I would seek Christ outside the camp and find a new paradigm of Christian ministry. Like the Magi of old, I would join with wise men on a new journey, to find a third way to relate biblical faith to the future. By 2001, I came to the conclusion that I needed to give myself full-time to developing a field called “Christian Futures.”

I envisioned “Christian Futures” as a professional development field to help leaders track change and reinvent their ministries in light of trans-modern contexts. Rather than working grand external schemes, I would work from the internal dimensions of leadership. I turned again to futures studies for help. While various Christian futurists had inspired me throughout the 1980s, including Tom Sine and David Barrett, I now needed to grow as they had done, beyond a pop-futures orientation, into problem solving and perceptual futures.

Fortunately, since 1996 I had been speaking at the World Future Society each year on topics such as “the future of religion” or “the future of millennialism.” There had even been an ad-hoc group of “religious futurists” that met during that conference from year to year, called the “World Network of Religious Futurists.” Their chairman supported my vision to create a Christo-centric and Trinitarian expression of futures for ministry leaders.

In 1999 I held the first “Christian Futures” consultation to mark the 20th anniversary of the Watchword. I also started an email list for futurists who were practicing their trade within various denominations or ministries.

But I found I needed to develop my “future fluency” more intentionally. I needed regular conversation partners, beyond just annual conferences, that could challenge me. In 2000, I took the step to organize a local World Future Society chapter in my area. We began as a “2030” project group to study how our region was planning its future and to consider how systems thinking and scenario planning might complement these efforts. By 2001 we began reporting out to civic leaders through monthly meetings of our Futures Society.

Through this I met several professionals in our area that had gotten an M.A. degree under Peter Bishop’s “Study of the Futures” program at University of Houston-Clear Lake. Dr. Bishop took an interest in my work and began sending interns my way who wanted to learn Christian futures in the professional context of serving ministry clients.

To keep on the cutting edge of my own growth, in the spring of 2002 I joined the newly established “Association of Professional Futurists.” This group of “third generation” futurists has as its aim helping practitioners become professionals. Jennifer Jarratt is now the chair, a seasoned professional futurist who works in D.C. I found that I would learn as much by spending a half-day with these professionals as I did in three days at other futures conferences. [Top of Page]

Looking Backwards, Looking Forward

The more I explored the future, the more I began seeing it change my worldview. I am now much more self-reflective about how I construct my vision, backward, inward and forward. I call these three horizons hindsight, insight and foresight.

As people of faith we live by “hindsight.” Through interpretation or hermeneutics, we look backwards to what God has done in Christ. We also live by “insight” or the inward view. We walk in a vital relationship with God and live by our heart and heads. We also use “Foresight” by creating and maintaining a forward view about impending social and technological changes and how we should respond to them, personally or organizationally.

In reference to hindsight, I have done a great deal of reading on the historical Jesus, rethinking how he saw the future from his framework of Jewish restoration theology. I find myself coming back to seminal books such as N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus (IVP, 1999) or Richard Horsley’s Bandits, Prophets & Messiahs (Trinity Press, 1985). In regards to insight or epistemology, I have found Ken Wilber’s all quadrants/all levels framework a helpful aid to integral thinking for me. See A Theory of Everything (Shambhala, 2000). With reference to foresight, I have turned to Richard Slaughter’s The Third Millennium: enabling the forward view (Prospect, 2000) or W. Warren Wagar The Next Three Futures (Praeger, 1991).

A key dynamic I have observed is how all three horizons operate and interact with each other. In helping Christian ministries develop new mental models of ministry, I find myself analyzing both alternative pasts and alternative futures. For example, studying how Jesus approached 1st Century “romanization” might shift how we approach 21st century “globalization.” [Top of Page]

Strategic Foresight

In the fall of 2002 I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Bruce Winston, dean of Leadership Studies Program at Regent University. Bruce shared with me his desire to futurize their Doctoral program in Strategic Leadership. We began a conversation by email on how to frame out the field of Christian futures. I shared with Bruce that I felt this field could be built on three pillars.

• Eschatology—the traditional Christian doctrine of the study of Last Things.
• Millennialism—the various ways in history that people have related the kingdom of God to time, society, history or fulfillment.
• Futures—the theory and methods by which leaders create and maintain a forward view within their organization and use that in redemptive ways.

The more Bruce and I talked about curriculum renewal in the School of Leadership Studies, the more we agreed that Regent needed to highlight this third area and develop it under the rubric of “strategic foresight.”

Increasingly in the past five years, futurists have been cautious not to objectify or colonize the future for others, but to nurture the vision of leaders, organizations and community in their future. We call this “foresight,” an internalized and personalized way of relating to the future.

“Strategic Foresight” then would be a field of applied Christian leadership, created at the intersection of four fields, 1) future studies, 2) organizational development, 3) strategic planning, and 4) technological & science forecasting. Beyond strategic planning tools, it would empower leaders to define their organization’s forward pathway.

In the Spring of 2003, Dr. Winston invited me to develop an M.A. course on “Future Tools and Methods” for Regent, LMOL 616. My master degree was in this area of instructional design. Getting back into course development and teaching was second nature for me. It is like bringing forth both old and new treasures from my storehouse (Matthew 13:52).

This futures course is roughly divided into four segments.

• The first segment helps leaders think through the lens of a “foresight” process applied to their organizations’ near future.
• The second segment helps leaders set up an “early warning system” that can alert their organization to impending change on its periphery or external environment.
• The third segment helps leaders understand the futures study movement, its origins, its key practitioners and organizations, its methods and varied social theories.
• The fourth segment, related to a major project, helps leaders map out alternative or possible futures of their organization, five years out and beyond.

Throughout the course my aim is to help leaders relate foresight theory to their own faith, their own vocation and organization, and the larger Western worldview. [Top of Page]

My Vision for the Decade to Come

Across the various decades of my life, I’ve never “stopped thinking about tomorrow.” The more I take God seriously, the more I intercede for real life of generations to come, across various civilizations. This is not a play future, but a future that can really be flunked. We cannot retreat as a sectarian band, aiming to win some pyrrhic victory, as if salvation was only a salvage project of history. Instead, salvation history is embedded in time and history and extends through its duration.

Compared to my youthful days in the Lausanne movement, I am much less confident that Western society, much less that the church in America, has any guarantee it will find its way forward into an ideal future.

My focus these days, therefore, is on bringing renewal to how the church thinks about time, meaning, history, society and fulfillment. From 2003 to 2004 I hosted various “Christian Futures” consultations from explore the center and circumference of this emerging field. For more on this track, see my essay on “Exploring Christian Futures.”

In thinking through the theory and practice of “Christian Futures,” I am also developing a working theory of “biblical transformation.” This theory seeks to correlate sacred to natural theology, and use a framework called the Metamatrix® to help leaders understand change and innovation across redemptive to universal history. I welcome any feedback on the paper, “The Pattern of Biblical Transformation.” I believe the Metamatrix® can be a key tool to help leaders map the past and future of their organizations.

Assuming we continue to grow as a learning network, I hope to write a “Christian Futures” textbook at the graduate level, combining the best of theory and practice with regards to faith and foresight. So often, eschatology has been taught very narrowly as the study of last things. I turn this on its head and see theology also as “archonology”—the study of first things.

For me, being a person of faith is about living in the new creation that comes from God. It is about living in the future made present in Jesus Christ. It is about putting off the old and putting on the new. And it is about cultivating an integral biblical worldview that might renew and re-form our faith beyond the end of the modern age. It is about bringing forth a global renaissance culture.

As I once was invited to give my life to Christ. I invite you to join me as an early Christian of the 21st Century and recover the mystery, wonder and glory of knowing God and following Him in making all things new. [Top of Page]