The basis of everything is a person. It’s as simple and complicated as that.

Here’s another extract from my upcoming book.. I’m still working it over so any feedback would be much appreciated.

The young Anglican priest boarded the boat home from America to England in a cloud of depression. Everything he had learned in theological college had failed him. The career path that once seemed so sure, now was surely a dead end.

The young man described his faith this way:

“I was strongly convinced that the cause of that uneasiness was unbelief, and that the gaining a true, living faith was the one thing needful for me. But still I fixt not this faith on its right object: I meant only faith in God, not faith in or through Christ.”

In the middle of the Atlantic sea, the boat hit a violent storm. As if having all his dreams shattered wasn’t enough, the young man faced the very real prospect of his life coming to an end in a watery grave. As he leaned over the side of the boat vomiting for the fourth time, he heard a sound that was both strangely comforting and yet profoundly out of place in such a fear filled moment.

He heard singing. He heard people singing hymns in a way he hadn’t heard people sing before. It was if the music was coming deep from inside of them. It was as if they believed deeply every word that came out of their mouths. They were an oasis of peace in the midst of the chaos.

John Wesley was deeply impacted by what he heard and found himself attracted to this group of believers who seemed so different from him.

After arriving in London, the Moravians he had met on the boat invited him to a bible study that would change not only his life, but also the course of English history.

Wesley describes the event in his own words:

“In the evening I went very unwillingly to a society in Aldersgate Street, where one was reading Luther’s preface to the Epistle to the Romans. About a quarter before nine, while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt that I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation, and an assurance was given me, that he had taken away my sins, even MINE, and saved ME from the law of sin and death.”

So John Wesley moved from a commitment to some amorphous God who was “out there”, to a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

That simple discovery of Jesus Christ and His love for us, and then our commitment to a relationship with Him, has been at the heart of all significant movements of God’s spirit in the last 2000 years.

Alan Hirsch in his book “Forgotten Ways” says:

“I have become absolutely convinced that it is Christology, and in particular the primitive, unencumbered Christology of the NT church, that lies at the heart of the renewal of the church at all times and in every age”.

Steve Addison researched different phases of the Christian movement and came up with five common ingredients amongst all of them, the first being a “White Hot Faith”. He says

“All the great movement pioneers learned to both surrender to God in crisis and to seek his grace through the practice of spiritual disciplines. Their secret is the joy they experience as they discover that Christ is sufficient”.