I’m currently reading a church history book called Church History in Plain Language by Bruce Shelley and I found an interesting trend. It always seems that the revolutions within Christianity almost always start with a really smart, Godly man preaching to poor, lower class people. A lot of the followers of Luther were these kinds of people, who had been ignored or pushed down by the Catholic church (read vehicle for Roman power and control during that period) at that time, Wesley preached to coal miners and other low class laborers pushed down by the nobility system still in place in the early 18th century. And Methodism found many of it’s American converts in the hard living pioneers who started carving out this country just prior to the revolution. I wonder if the trend will continue, especially having been to places like Saddleback where the modern YUPie reigns in with the heaviest precedence in that church. But once while talking with a few people I heard that Vineyards tend to be more of a lower-class kind of place (besides ours) where a lot of the people who come are considered low on the socio-economic food chain. Once it was phrased as “short-bus church” where you can only come if you are average or below. I know it was a joke, but the point is that the people who are often considered low-class, stupid, or just are hard to deal with are the ones who get ignored, until something big happens. Then God grabs up a whole bunch of those people and creates a revolution that reshapes how we think of the Church and Christianity.
Just an interesting little thought for today.