Some computer somewhere in America just zipped through a big list of email addresses to send this newsletter. It sent one to you. It sent one to someone right before you, and someone right after. If this email list were a movie theater, you’d be elbow to elbow with your adjacent email buddies. They share your love for Jesus and a desire to become more like him. They also, most likely, don’t share all your theological and political particularities. 

On this list are Quakers and Catholics, Presbyterians and Pentecostals, and more than a few followers of Jesus who don’t identify with any Christian tradition. 

There are people of various ethnicities, post-mid-lifers and fresh-outta-collegers, extroverts and introverts, roof-raisers and silent-praisers.

In an era marked by deep divisions among Christians, I offer this word of encouragement: This past weekend, at Renovaré’s national RēGathering conference, a cross-section of a few hundred people on this list gathered in person to worship and listen and seek renewal in Jesus together. It was a room of people who, like you, long for Christlikeness more than my-way-is-right-ness, who are open to expressions of praise that look different from their own, who are choosing as best they can to live into Jesus’ prayer, ​“that they all may be one” (John 17). Be encouraged that such rooms exist.

If you ever look at modern Christianity and feel a little out of place, not belonging to either end of the widening pendulum swing between left and right, not fitting neatly into a particular tradition or tribe, know this: you’re not alone. There is a small but growing number of Jesus-followers focused on First Things — on exalting Christ above all and learning to abide in and become like him. This is the Kingdom of God in our midst — growing slowly and quietly, like a tiny seed. ​“When it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade” (Mark 4:32).