God’s Reign in Your Midst
August 28, 2022
This series of articles was prompted by my long-standing need to think through and explain what I mean by “Gospel” and “the kingdom of God.” But the original intent was actually to give some examples of what this looks like in the wild. If the Gospel is that God reigns through Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit, then why is the reign of God not more evident?
As I was thinking about this, the August edition of The Christian Chronicle arrived. Three pictures are on the front cover—two are of people who run Christian organizations devoted to helping mothers in difficult situations get help. That article goes on to describe the ways Church of Christ organizations facilitate adoptions and provide free job training, and notes the harsh reality of our corrupt society—more people are willing to adopt Caucasian babies than non-White or biracial babies, resulting in outcomes that disproportionately affect minority communities.
The third picture is President Biden presenting the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Fred Gray, civil rights lawyer and long-time Church of Christ preacher and elder. Gray represented Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, Claudette Colvin and John Lewis. He fought for desegregation. He fought for the victims of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, a federal study where Black men weren’t treated for syphilis, or even told they had syphilis, as human experiments on the effects of syphilis.
The entire edition is a collection of articles about Christians embracing the reign of God, bringing forth justice for the widow, orphan, and oppressed, proclaiming to the powers of the world that their days of wickedness are coming to an end, an end which has already begun.
The reign of God is proclaimed and enacted by the Christians caring for Ukrainian refugees, by the mother starting a summer camp to expose kids to the diversity of cultures throughout God’s creation, by Christians discussing what is the Godly response to gun violence, and even by the scientist working on a telescope that helps us better understand God’s creation.
The reign of God is all-encompassing. It extends over all of creation, and every facet of our lives. This means there are any number of different ways to contribute. In the Old Testament, the reign of God is accompanied by things like justice filling the earth, the land being bountiful, God’s people being prosperous, joy and gladness everywhere, judgment/destruction of the wicked, and the undoing of death. We see all of these things happening in various ways in the ministry of Jesus. The Holy Spirit continues to move and empower us to do these sorts of things even today. If we have eyes to see, we will notice our brothers and sisters, moved and empowered by the Holy Spirit, doing this reign of God, new creation work. May we participate in it more and more.
—John Coffey
