The global world order is changing. No amount of trying to restore a former order will succeed. In every challenge that changes order there is the opportunity to sow into the future. Europe could be left behind -and by that I am not referring particularly to trade and commerce but spiritually. If Europe can learn how to get on board then there is a major contribution to be made.
I have (and still do) hold to a two-fold movement in the NT. Jesus dies in Jerusalem stating that no prophet can die outside of that city, for religious restrictions have to be broken in order for the promises to Abraham to be released by the Spirit. Paul then travelled throughout the then known world (almost) with the implications for society. We have reduced the effect of the cross to a possible internal transaction (you can have your personal sins forgiven), reducing the overcoming of all powers in order that there might be a new creation… Paul’s message was that the Caesar reign was over (for Caesar’s imperial rule was the earthly image of the demonic realm that seeks to subjugate all humanity in that ‘kingdom’. Jesus, not Caesar, was ‘king of kings and lord of lords’ (titles accorded to Caesar) and a new era was present – an era of liberation of humanity.
A twofold movement – from Jerusalem to Rome – Jew first then Greek / Gentile:
καὶ κηρυχθήσεται τοῦτο τὸ εὐαγγέλιον τῆς βασιλείας ἐν ὅλῃ τῇ οἰκουμένῃ εἰς μαρτύριον πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν, καὶ τότε ἥξει τὸ τέλος (Matt 24:14… Greek text not to be clever but a few interesting points within it).
And this gospel of the kingdom (same word for kingdom of God and also the Empire (of Rome)) shall be proclaimed (a public message) in the whole civilised world (oikoumene – the word used to draw boundaries of what was in and out in the sense of Roman Empire) for a witness to the non-Jewish peoples (ta ethne – used to distinguish from ‘the people’ of God, in other words Gentiles) and then the end (telos not eschaton) will come.
The second element that captivated Paul with his ‘I want to get to Spain’ – the Western end of the Roman oikoumene. OK… the then known world with an all-but one world government… except for the Empires that co-existed at that time (and before and after)…
Europe – a pivotal time for something that recaptures the Pauline proclamation with a reach now beyond that world he operated in. The Far East waits. What will that look like… 2040 we will be able to look back and see how we responded. There is more at stake than global trade wars and what currency is the reserve currency. And then… yes the Middle East. The place where the prince of peace died in order that there might no longer be the divisions of Jew and Gentile (Arab – close cousins!, caucasian, Asian/ East Asian); those who control the finances and those who serve to maintain the economic inequalities; the patriarchal system… War about boundaries can hide the desire to hold things in a proper way…
Hi Martin
Thanks for your recent post and video Europe- left behind or aligning for the future
Really appreciated your perspectives.
It resonated very much where my thinking and reflections have been recently.
I have just had an article published i the current issue of Kenarchy Journal I wrote on “The Rise of Intercultural Theology and its challenge for Western and Non Western Theologies” It’s rather a broad brushed stroke approach but you may be interested to read it in the light of what you have shared. Would welcome any feedback.
Thanks again
Thanks Paul – yes saw that the article had been published – congratulations, and will get round to reading it.
All these videos are so good Martin!! Really helps me make sense of the uncomfortable feelings I get when people juxtapose worship and outreach with nationhood or basically nationalism in essence (though they would refute that). Also the ‘again’ issue which is easy to fall into needs correcting because ‘behold he is doing a new thing’!! The anti certain religious groups and people again makes me deeply uncomfortable and disturbed in my gut! The outflowing of God’s presence is so ‘for’ people, all people’s as Isaiah 25:6 declares! I would love to be one who changed my street by living here alone? Long way to go and many challenges but want to a carrier of his presence. I really feel so encouraged by what you have said and the future seems bright in that framework?
Thanks Joanna. The wonderful part of faith is we never know what effect we are making. As you have heard from me many times – the two coins of the widow and I was provactively helped by Steve Watters who helped me see that she did not even do it with foresight and knowledge. Here’s to sowing an influence – even when we don’t have a clue!
You write, ‘Paul then travelled throughout the then known world (almost) …’ With consideration that a significant part, like a gateway or a capital, may represent its related entirety, as Peter Stuhlmacher pointed out in one of his lectures, Paul arriving in Rome in Acts 28 is indeed the gospel now witnessed to ‘in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth’ as announced in Acts 1:8.
Please don’t read this as criticism of the points you have made in both your article and the youtube vid.
My guess is it will take me a bit to ponder the many implications of what you shared here and in the other place…
It was end of 1999 when I heard a brother from the US share that at the Brandenburg Gate he heard the global reserve currency being transferred ‘to Berlin’ as they got banking right in the midst of a coming crisis. At the time, I didn’t like this thought–also I couldn’t quite understand is–and asked for conceptual ressources and reserves for coming days of crisis to be found in Berlin where I engaged with gate keeping issues at the time when the German Federal government and parliament moved from Bonn to Berlin.
In 2019, I think, Marcel, a friend of mine first saw that beyond the areas of its early modern city fortifications, here in Münster, Westphalia, currently an afluent place with some 300,000 inhabitants, within a time frame of this current generation, i.e., maybe in 30 years from now. At the end of an 18 months placement as a parish worker, he confirmed this with a second impression that indicated that the newly employed woman pastor could very likely be the last one of that parish as people will no longer live around there.
At least, this is my current understanding of what was shared. For this generation, time seems to have run out. My hope and my trust is that God will honour the promise of John 12:24 that all the seed we sowed into the ground and they died–there were so many in my life’s journey, and I know others especially here in Germany who were denied their ministry and fruit in people’s lives that God had given to them in the Holy Spirit by this current generation’s church! I am kind of grateful that this current regime over the Church of restriction bringing death is finally coming to its end.
Lord, remember us and all we sowed into the land! Because if You don’t, nobody will.
Hi Dieter
Many thanks for your enriching comments. We all see in part so what you have added is valued. I am sure the future is not a straight line – not mine!! The financial aspect I take note of. I fully anticipated that by 2020 the US dollar would not be the reserve currency -well it still is hanging on by its finger tips.
Well the future is not a rerun of the past – so we buckle in for the ride!!!
Thanks Martin, for your reply. Please take into account that my memories of previous prophetic insights tend to lack precision regarding specific wordings and I tend to pull together, thereby confuse, impressions that I heard and received at different times from different places. In the fewest cases, these are my own impressions. And they tend to get remembered, understood, and further messed about through my ongoing efforts at understanding through research and listening to current developments…
For example, that American brother we knew in Berlin I meanwhile remembered said ‘the world’s bank’ would move to ‘Berlin’ and nothing about ‘reserve currency’. After that came Schäublenomics, and I have regreted since having prayed for his re-positioning in 2009, although I can see how this prepared (‘fortified’) the Euro for monetary stability in the case the Dollar would once loose it. It is since Trump recently started messing with trade and taxes and so much more, with insufficient understanding that I cannot see the USA, if it even continues to exist as a single political player with a capacity of reliably organised political decision-making (we’re considering the end of empire, right?), maintaining trust in its currency? Maybe it can, to a degree, but either way, we’re out at sea. And this is hopeful!
These last days, I was to reread Exodus 14 and to contemplate what happened between Israel and God in the dessert years, thereafter. My sense is some breakthrough was achieved, from my limited perspective, in the days of this year’s lent and Easter season up to Pentecost, and another generation is now getting underway to know Jesus anew in the midst of a catastrophy unfolding at least of the dimensions of the Thirty Years War that brought us that recent order of a European-dominated modern politics. It’s the young, the poor, and immigrants. And there may be those who in the midst of that great big mess are standing to be counted with them.
This video may be one for me to come back to for a number of years, I guess?
Is Europe to turn to the East to not be marginalised, you ask, and I wonder what to make of it. However, maybe the marignalisation of European powers wouldn’t be all that bad, if the task was to recover the spreading of the Gospel of Jesus’ lordship amongst the nations underneath a–potentially erroding and collapsing–imperial framework?
It was some 25 years ago when one of the leading charismatic pastors in Berlin at the time announced that the time of European nation states was over and politically we were to consider regions within Europe, and when in 2012 they found Richard III’s body underneath that Leicester car park, my understanding that emerged from someone else’s prophetic insight was that the British (English) political order was kind of reverting to a pre-Tudor/pre-modern situation of competing regions having to seek their common grounds within shifting political interests and potentially emerging alliances and unities. Something along these lines.
Of course, such a political situation is highly dangerous, and in 2025, this is so very clear to everybody. Still, alliances, peace, prosperity, unity, also common courses to deal with ill-intended imperial players on different ends of the borders must be found in the middle, out of one’s relational substance, or be it out of the grace that God grants us for building up a Kingdom wisdom, or be it an Exodus understanding of how to travel, initially, through the dessert as a liberated nation after having left Egyptian-imperial subjugation with God’s presence in our midst.
I am sure you have looked at any of the historical maps of the so-called ‘Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation’. Some biblical scholar pointed out that it must have been against the backdrop of the German path to modern nationhood that Martin Noth conceptualised his The History of Israel. Of course, concepts such temporally and regionally emergent political leaders, as the Spirit comes upon them uniting rural communities and tribes for war as well as the ‘fear of God’ shattering of political/military unities, functionings, and power of ruthless post-imperial war lords in control over the cities and the trading routes (the Hyksos/Canaanites of the book of Judges), also makes sense in the context of Early-Jewish, second-temple days when the challenge to the Jewish existence and religion came under the conditions of ever-changing imperial domination.
When in the early 2010s I shared only hints of such thoughts, fellow-Evangelicals, including intercessors and prophetic leaders, in the UK rejected them and opted for British-imperial ‘sovereignty’, the concept of independent self-rule that is derived from, as it secularises the classical-theological concept of divine sovereignty, and soon thereafter they opted for leaving the EU. We may therefore be brought to these more difficult, but promising to navigate places the hard way …