I got an iPad for Christmas. It’s a lot of fun. I got the game Risk and I’ve been playing it a lot. ESPN has a nice app that lets me check the scores of my favorite teams pretty easily. I need to sync it with my email and my iCal and then I’ll be able to use it for a lot more.
I was already familiar with the interface because Erin had an iPhone that I had been playing with for a couple months already. And I noticed something interesting. Both the iPhone and the iPad have multi-page home pages. And they both use the same graphic, not surprisingly, to show which page you’re on. It’s a little row of dots, with one of the dots lit up representing the page you’re currently viewing. When you slide your finger on the screen to change pages, the dot that’s lit up changes too. What is surprising is how many other places I’ve seen this graphic. [I circled the graphic interface on the iPad screenshot below.]
Of course this interface is used on a lot of programs developed by Apple. But I’ve seen it other places too. I noticed it on the new World Race home page today. A lot of websites use it if they have a scrolling main picture. I’m assuming this little interface is an Apple creation. If so, Apple has it’s fingerprints all over the internet, and maybe even IT in general. Those few little dots are the kind of thing millions of people could become comfortable with and accustomed to, and never know where it came from. Which got me thinking.
What if the Kingdom of God was that way?
What if we started to impart to our culture ideas that actually bring life? What if a concept like “strength is found in weakness” were such a part of the culture, that people weren’t even sure where it came from?
In the last 75 years or so, a lot of Christians have wanted to do this through separation from mainstream society. So we’ve seen the creation of Christian music, and Christian movies, and Christian novels. I’m afraid that’s an ego issue. Why does it have to have our name on it? I figure, we’ve got such a great message of life that if we just present it to the world plainly, they’re going to see that it brings life and they’re going to want to choose that way of living. I don’t care if it’s called Christian. If it’s bringing life, the life of Christ, I’m for it.
This is what I think Apostolic Focus is all about. When we launch people into the world, it doesn’t have to be about starting a church or an orphanage necessarily. When our people connect with their passion in the world, we commission them to pursue it, and they do it as Kingdom people. As the principles of Kingdom penetrate the world, in sectors as varied as the passions our people, we’ll begin to see those Kingdom principles popping up all over our culture.
The Message of Life will become woven into the fabric of society. The Kingdom will advance. And nobody will know exactly where it started. Until they pick up a Bible and realize they’ve been following Jesus for quite a while already.
