The world is my parish — foreshadowed
The global reach of the gospel by 1650
Stand at 1650 and look at where the church is.
In England, Bunyan is in Bedford jail writing his dream of a man with a burden on his back. In Scotland, the Covenanters are dying on hillsides rather than submit to bishops. In France, the Huguenots are living on borrowed time under Louis XIV. In Germany, the rubble of the Thirty Years War is still being cleared.
And everywhere else:
In China, Jesuit astronomers serve at the imperial court, and a million Christians practice their faith in secret across the provinces. In Japan, hidden Christians maintain their faith underground. In India, Jesuit scholars debate Hindu philosophers in Sanskrit. In the Philippines, local Christianity is already developing its own indigenous character. In Ethiopia, the ancient church has survived a century of Catholic and Protestant pressure with its distinctiveness intact. In Kongo, Christianity has been the state religion for a hundred and fifty years. In Mexico and Peru, indigenous Christians have created a synthesis of the gospel and their own traditions that is neither European nor what the missionaries intended.
The church that began in an upper room in Jerusalem with eleven frightened men is now a global reality — imperfect, compromised, complicit in colonialism, fractured by schism — and also present on every inhabited continent, praying in hundreds of languages, naming Jesus in forms that would be unrecognizable to each other.
John Wesley will say, in 1739: I look upon all the world as my parish.
By 1650, the statement is already true of the church, whether any individual understands it or not.
“I look upon all the world as my parish.”
— John Wesley, Journal, June 11, 1739 AD
“After these things I saw, and behold, a great multitude, which no man could number, out of every nation and of all tribes, peoples, and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, dressed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands.”
Every nation. Every tribe. Every people. Every language.
John's vision at the end of Revelation is not a future hope disconnected from the present. It is the direction of travel — the destination toward which the whole story has been moving since Acts 2 when the crowds heard the gospel in their own tongues.
By 1650 the church is already on every continent. By the twenty-first century the majority of its members live in the global south. The vision is not complete. It has never been closer.
You are part of a story that is moving toward a great multitude no one can number.
The question is not whether you will be part of it. You already are. The question is whether you know it.