A Bottom Up Revolution
THE ELEVATION OF ELECTIONS
Every four years, the American church holds its breath.
Yard signs go up. Pundits erupt. Social media becomes a warzone of competing eschatologies dressed up as political commentary. And somewhere in every congregation in the country, there is a quiet, desperate, almost liturgical hope that this time - if we just get the right person in the right seat - things will finally change.
But, they never do.
Not because elections don't matter. They do. Not because policy is irrelevant. It isn't. But because we have confused the mechanism of change with the source of it. We have been swinging for the fences at the top of the order when the game has always been won by the bunts that put the man in scoring position at the bottom.
There is a revolution coming. But it will not arrive on Air Force One or at a state of the union. It will arrive in your living room, at your dinner table, on your knees at the foot of your bed. It will arrive the morning you open your Bible before your children wake up, the evening you lead your family in prayer before the plates are cleared, the Sunday you walk your household through the doors of a church that preaches boldly Christ without cowering to culture.
It will look, at first, like nothing at all. A string of seemingly insignificant small acts of faithfulness that when taken together will change the world.
THE LIE WE OFT BELIEVE
We have been told (and we keep telling ourselves) that transformation is a top-down enterprise. That if we elect the right leader, appoint the right judges, pass the right legislation, the culture will follow. The nation will heal. The tide will turn.
But we are a little over a year in to the latest iteration and I would simply ask us to look at the record.
Every election cycle produces its slogans. Change you can believe in. Build back better. Make America great again. The hope seems palpable. The slogans sound sincere. And yet the transformation promised never comes (at least not the deep, durable, civilizational kind we were hoping for). Because you cannot legislate a people into virtue. You cannot executive-order a culture into flourishing. You cannot confirm your way to a nation that fears God. Change does not happen that way.
Just as the book of Proverbs tells us, where there is no prophetic vision - no living word of God shaping and governing a people - they will always cast off all restraints. At the root of the issue, cultures rip apart because they refuse to honor God. The Hebrew word Proverbs employs is para, which means to break loose or to run wild. It is the exact word used when Israel threw a seditious and salacious party around a golden calf monument the moment Moses was out of sight.
But, I want you to notice what Proverbs does not say. It does not say the people came apart because they had bad governance. It does not blame cultural degeneration to stolen elections or bad judges. It says they came apart because God's revelation, His Holy Word, was absent from their communal life. The chaos is not primarily political. It is worship-shaped. And a worship problem cannot be fixed with a political solution.
The fix has to go deeper. It has to go all the way down to the marrow of the issue. Where It Actually Starts. And that is, in the home.
Not metaphorically. Literally. In your home. With your spouse. With your children. With the rhythms and rituals and daily liturgies that shape what a household loves, fears, and chases.
A father who prays with his children before they leave for school is doing something with more geopolitical consequence than he will ever be able to measure. A mother who reads Scripture over her daughter at bedtime is depositing something into that child that no school board policy can produce and no election can generate. A husband and wife who kneel together in the dark and surrender their family to the Lordship of Christ are participating in a revolution so slow and so deep and so unstoppable that the headlines will never catch it until it has already overtaken them.
This is how the world changes. Not by conquest from the top. But, by cultivation from the bottom. One home at a time, until all the homes are aimed at Christ.
But, we have to remember, the grain of wheat has to fall to the ground and die, because in dying it multiplies. That is not just a metaphor for the cross. But, it is the operating principle of the Kingdom. Small. Hidden. Ignored by power. But, utterly irresistible in the long run.
THE MODEL OF MULTIPLICATION
Here is what the revolution actually looks like when it moves:
Faithful homes produce faithful children. Children raised in households where God is feared, His Word is read, and worship is a way of life grow up with a different operating system than the culture around them. They know who they are. They know who He is. And they are not easily swept away by whatever wind and tide is currently running through culture.
Faithful children become faithful members of the church. And churches full of people who have been intentionally shaped by the fear of God at home are churches that are immediately dangerous to the society around them. Most churches are inundated, trying to disciple believers who were not discipled in their homes. At that work stunts the work of the bride of Christ. But, when homes take seriously their responsibility to make disciples, and then fills the church with courageous and mature believers, then you have all of the elements for change. Add onto that, the Gospel being boldly proclaimed from the pulpit, filled by men who are bold as lions, and who weekly feed the people with the body and blood of Christ, and then you have all of the ingredients for a full-baked reformation.
Healthy courageous churches make more committed disciples. Not consumers. Not attenders. Disciples. Because healthy families will bring more families. People who do not yet know Christ and those people will not only get saved, but will enter into an intentional process of being formed in the image of Christ, taught to order their entire lives (their money, their marriages, their work, their politics, their parenting) around Biblical ethics and the Lordship of Christ over all things. Discipleship is not a program. It is what naturally happens when the church takes seriously the work of forming people all the way down.
Committed disciples plant new churches. Families who have been formed and developed in faithful churches do not sit on the laurels. They multiply. They fill churches to the point of bursting. They identify new neighborhoods and cities to plant new churches. They mobilize, strategize, organize, and then take risks to see the Kingdom expand. And begin replicating the same DNA they received at their mother / sending church.
And planted churches disciple more families. Then the cycle continues. More homes are discipled. More leaders raised up. More people are invited. The church grows to capacity. New churches are planted. And then over and over and over until there are no unbelievers in our cities, counties, commonwealths, country, or world. And while that is a long and glorious plan that will take centuries, if not millennia, to work out, the seeds of this can be felt in our life time. Where neighborhoods begin to look different. The institutions — schools, local governments, businesses, civic organizations — begin to be populated by people whose first allegiance is not to a party or a platform but to the God who holds all things.
This is how the early church took over the Roman Empire after 400 years. Not by lobbying Caesar. By outliving and out multiplying him.
THE PATIENCE REQUIRED
Rome was not overthrown in a day. Not even in one lifetime. But over ten generations of faithful Christian witness. That tells us something. This bottom up revolution we are speaking about will require something that our moment and our modern people find nearly unbearable: patience.
We want the change now. We want the metrics now. We want to be able to point to something visible and say, look, it is working. But, the bottom-up revolution offers you almost nothing of the kind, at least not immediately. What it offers is the sluggish, irreversible compounding of slow and steady faithfulness over time. The kind that your grandchildren will benefit from in ways you will never fully understand.
Remember, the Apostle Paul was dragged out of cities by his ankles, stoned half to death, left for dead on the roadside - and his response was to get up and walk back into the city to preach again. Not because he anticipated the city would change in a day. But, by serving his sovereign God, Paul knew that Christ would one day rule over all the nations (Psalm 2 & 110) and that Jesus would eventually put all enemies under His feet (1 Corinthians 15:25). He was not serving outcomes and metrics but a King whose Kingdom cannot fail.
And that is the posture this bottom-up revolution. Not naivety. Not passivity. Not haste. But, fierce, joyful, daily, almost boring acts of hidden faithfulness that happen in your home, in your church, and in your neighborhood with the long-horizon confidence that the grains of history are on our side, because they bend the knew to Christ.
So remember, God is not losing. He has never lost. And the gates of hell do not prevail against a church made up of households that fear Him and have the confidence to advance. We just have to have the gumption to get up and do it.
WHAT CAN YOU DO TODAY
First, it is likely that we all need to repent for thinking change can happen in microwavable moments instead of over centuries. We cannot fix Washington in a day. We probably cannot fix our cities in this decade. We may not even be able to fix our churches before we meet our Lord. But we can lead our families in worship tonight, and tomorrow, and do the work of multiplying in the small corners of this world we can control.
We can open the Bible before dinner. We can pray out loud in front of our children so they hear what a man or woman sounds like when they actually talk to God. We can confess our sin to our spouse and model what repentance looks like when it is real. We can walk through the doors of a church that preaches the whole counsel of God and commit ourselves to the slow, unglamorous, world-altering work of being formed there.
We can do the small, seemingly insignificant things that no one will ever see or applaud or retweet and trust that the God who sees in secret will not let them be wasted.
The revolution is already underway. It is happening in homes you will never hear about, in prayers that will never be recorded, in children being shaped by faithful parents who had no idea that they were actually changing the world.
Your job is to join it.
Not with a yard sign. But on your knees and with your Bible open and your family gathered around you.
That is where it starts. That is where it has always started.
And that is where we win today, tomorrow, and forever..
