God Works on Another Scale
"I was brought up in French Canada. As recently as 1972, in a population of 6.5 million, there were thirty-five or thirty-six evangelical churches, none with more than forty people. Between 1972 and 1980 the churches grew from about thirty-five to just under five hundred, many of them with hundreds of members.
But in 1972, my father was a church planter through all those lean years when Baptist ministers alone spent eight years in jail for preaching the gospel. The charges were always “inciting to riot” or “disturbing the peace,” but that’s what it was. We kids would get beaten up in the 1950s because we were maudite protestant—damn Protestants. In all those years my father saw virtually no fruit. I remember many times seeing him in tears for his people. In 1972, when the turn came, he was already sixty-one years old, and the leadership passed off into other hands. In that period of growth I know he felt as if he had been largely put on the shelf. But when he died at the age of eighty-one—although he still felt that way—in fact, most of the church in Quebec viewed him as the grand old man because he had been faithful through the lean years.
There are people who went to Korea in 1900, planted churches, and saw the church grow to a quarter of the world’s evangelical population today. There are people who went to Japan about the same time—and no place on God’s green earth did the church grow more slowly than in Japan. What are you going to do? Say, “All the ones who went to Korea are spiritual—particularly loved of God?” The ones in Japan aren’t blessed of God? God works on another scale."
- D.A. Carson | 173
But in 1972, my father was a church planter through all those lean years when Baptist ministers alone spent eight years in jail for preaching the gospel. The charges were always “inciting to riot” or “disturbing the peace,” but that’s what it was. We kids would get beaten up in the 1950s because we were maudite protestant—damn Protestants. In all those years my father saw virtually no fruit. I remember many times seeing him in tears for his people. In 1972, when the turn came, he was already sixty-one years old, and the leadership passed off into other hands. In that period of growth I know he felt as if he had been largely put on the shelf. But when he died at the age of eighty-one—although he still felt that way—in fact, most of the church in Quebec viewed him as the grand old man because he had been faithful through the lean years.
There are people who went to Korea in 1900, planted churches, and saw the church grow to a quarter of the world’s evangelical population today. There are people who went to Japan about the same time—and no place on God’s green earth did the church grow more slowly than in Japan. What are you going to do? Say, “All the ones who went to Korea are spiritual—particularly loved of God?” The ones in Japan aren’t blessed of God? God works on another scale."
- D.A. Carson | 173
