Matthew 28:7-8

“ ‘And go quickly and tell His disciples that He is risen from the dead, and indeed He is going before you into Galilee; there you will see Him…’ So they went out quickly…”

The problem we face today is that the Church is always talking about going forward and moving forward, while Jesus is saying we need to go back. Development and modernization cannot change or affect the required foundation for the Christian Faith, and you cannot digitalize this foundation. The crisis in the Church today is that many have come to belong to the community of God’s people without having had a Galilee experience. So, Jesus cannot take them “back to Galilee” because Galilee does not exist for them. They were born into the Jerusalem system, and even their “rebirth” was in Jerusalem, so they never saw the face of Jesus or enjoyed the childlike encounters of seeing the real Jesus – in Galilee.

Jesus must create a fresh encounter of Galilee for these Jerusalem disciples by forcing them out of Jerusalem into a new experience in Galilee. The only way this “ice-cream generation” of Jerusalem disciples can be relevant to God is by the crisis of leaving Jerusalem altogether. There is no hope for the future Church if today’s leaders and the leaders of tomorrow do not have the foundational encounters from Galilee. The Church without the Galilee experience is shallow, hollow, empty, loud, self-centered, man-focused, pleasure-seeking and without a tangible transforming encounter with Jesus. If God does not break the Jerusalem Church system, then the Church of tomorrow will have no traces whatsoever of the Church that Jesus died to birth.

“Oh Father, bring the current Church into labor pains. For the hungry soul who knows there’s more, let the pains multiply until they tear themselves away from the empty customs of the modern Church. Take us to Galilee and create the Galilee experience for us. This I pray, in Jesus’ name. Amen.“