Happy New Year: A Letter from David Horita
Happy 2025 to each of you in Fellowship Pacific!
It is great to enter into another year of service together with you, seeking tangible and meaningful Kingdom outcomes that will honor our Lord and God. It is a blessing to join with you in ministry.
However, while it is truly fulfilling to be “appointed to his service” as per Paul in 1 Timothy 1:12, we also know that there are challenges in that service. While true, I sometimes wonder whether anything in the nature of those challenges has actually changed or will change in 2025.
There is a tendency for many of us to resolutely accept that the world has gotten worse or more adversarial to the gospel that we love and preach. Sure, there are all kinds of indicators that our country is less “Christian” than it once was, but please allow me to at least question whether or not this assumption is actually true. You may well disagree with me, but it is harder for some than others to not ask questions about our assumptions! That certainly includes me. But feel free to engage the conversation in the discussion section of the Commons, our Fellowship network.
Sometimes we assume that the past was better than the present. For example, I hear people talk about past eras as if they were more moral or less sinful. It is as if we believe that if we could go back to the Victorian age that people would be more proper and filled with integrity. I remember taking many courses on English prose literature in university, and having my naivete shocked by the degree of debauchery and societal masks covering a multitude of ugly sin. It was as if ignoring it and pretending it never existed would make it go away. While I hate to hear about any similar terrible behaviours in the church today, I do value the fact that we would rather deal with it transparently rather than hide it. Is that better, or worse than the past?
Our staff recently completed a book by Nijay K. Gupta entitled Strange Religion, on how the early Christians were weird, dangerous and compelling in a debauched Roman culture driven by a devotion to a kind of polytheism that allowed for any kind of behaviour. As Gupta described the Roman world, it was impossible to avoid asking “and what has changed?” To be involved in ministry together has always been about service to God in a corrupt culture. To believe we can achieve a different world when surrounded by sinful generations may simply be further proof of the Pollyanna Principle.
All right. We will push pause for a second on this thought. I acknowledge that a country that pursues God legitimately will be a better society and have a more positive culture than a country that does not. Love for God at a broad level does have a wide effect. Perhaps I am too cynical, but I do wonder whether or not “Christian” countries have really existed. Certainly, we could have a greater number of Christian people in a country, and thus have a large impact. But a “Christian country?”
As a Fellowship, we have big cultural questions to deal with, asking how to interact with a “not-Christian” country that has certainly lost its way, as well as with not-Christian people who are far far from God.
Entering a new year together, it is good to pause and ask what we should be doing at a corporate level and at an individual level. The bottom line is that I would encourage us as churches and individuals to go back to the basics of who we are in Christ and what we are called to do. If we want a more Christian country in 2025, then we need to have more Christian people living well for Jesus in our country. Simply put, remember Acts 1:8, where Jesus reminds the disciples that “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses.” I can’t help but believe that the answers to our macro problems are found by living for Jesus in the micro moments.
At the Fellowship National convention in November 2024, I told the delegates about an event that occurred to me in late October.
I was in Edmonton, returning from mediating at some meetings that reminded me that there is always a danger of becoming religious at the cost of the mission. At the airport, I decided I had earned the right to a “Cookie by George” at one of the kiosks. There was a man ahead of me who was looking a little lost evaluating the range of cookies available to him. So, I offered to buy him a coffee and a couple of cookies in order to give him some samples to ease his decision making. No big deal. I got myself one as well and moved along.
Fifteen minutes later, the man slipped into the booth across from me and asked “why did you buy me a cookie?” I told him why, and he responded that he had desperately needed that to happen. He went on to tell me a terrible story about his being in the airport waiting for a flight to Kelowna, where one of his daughters had been killed in a head-on collision and the other daughter was in critical condition.
The conversation went on for 30 minutes or so until they called for him to board his plane. Weeping, the man told me that he hadn’t been able to tell anybody about this because it made it too real. He usually went to a Sikh temple, but hadn’t felt able to tell people there before he left. After we talked of Jesus’ love and praying for him, the man stood up, said “I don’t know why you are here, but this was an appointment your God made.”
It reminded me again, powerfully, that whether the world is better or worse in the current era, our lives for Jesus are not lived in the macros of big culture wars, but in the micros of every moment. Our God, through his Spirit is continually making divine appointments where we just need to show up. And the reality is that the divinely appointed meeting with the gentleman in the airport was for me as much as it was for him.
Obviously, we need to care about our country and its moral state. But the answer to the woes of our society are always going to be found in the gospel, lived out moment to moment.
I love our churches, and the opportunity to serve them. But the real blessing of ministry with you is hearing your stories where you let Jesus love others through your actions and attitudes, speaking the gospel into the lives of people. The mission is lived out person-by-person. Please be encouraged, because God continues to work. Nothing can stop his plan or his work through his church.
Thank you for letting me hear your stories.
David Horita,
Regional Director
