The New Frontier

Editor’s note:
This is the first installment in a series called “The New Frontier: Reflections on the Future of the Church.” View the entire series here.

Through all this upheaval, God’s message spread to new frontiers and attracted more and more people.

Acts 12:24 The Voice

328B. That is the dorm room number where my life was transformed. I arrived at university as a curious young man who had always asked too many questions. My mother, a teacher, will tell you I started asking “why” so young and so relentlessly that (even though she was an educator) it wore her out.

This curiosity led me to people I saw as great thinkers — Ayn Rand, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche. I was searching through their ideas for answers to the unanswered questions I had about life. Questions about how life should be lived. Questions about why the answers I was getting were being proved wrong in the real-world events I observed in daily life.

Every day I wondered, questioned, listened, and learned — and came away with more questions than I started with. In that dorm room, during my sophomore year, I discovered the Bible. The Holy Scriptures had answers I had never heard.

I learned that Jesus was real. He made God real. I learned they were interested in me. They had a vision, a plan, and a destiny for me. I also learned that there was a Holy Spirit that had been active in my life along with God and Jesus—directing, shaping, and inspiring me to find and live a life of purpose. What I had sensed about life began to become clear because this type of thinking introduced me to spirituality, the ability to see more deeply and clearly what life was about, who we are, why we are here.

Perhaps you know that feeling of curiosity I had. Perhaps you are reading this right now with the same unnamed longing I carried into that dorm room—a sense that something is working both inside and outside of your life to lead you somewhere, that your existence means more than the sum of its circumstances. The ancient writer of Ecclesiastes understood this thousands of years before any of us was born:

He has made everything beautiful and appropriate in its time. He has also planted eternity [a sense of divine purpose] in the human heart [a mysterious longing which nothing under the sun can satisfy, except God] — yet man cannot find out (comprehend, grasp) what God has done (His overall plan) from the beginning to the end.

Ecclesiastes 3:11 AMP

God planted that longing in you. It is not restlessness. It is not dissatisfaction. It is not coincidence. It is his presence calling you toward the purpose of your life. It is him guiding you on the path to your destiny.

In Him also we have received an inheritance [a destiny — we were claimed by God as His own], having been predestined (chosen, appointed beforehand) according to the purpose of Him who works everything in agreement with the counsel and design of His will.

Ephesians 1:11 AMP

Claimed. Chosen. According to his purpose. This is the active work of God in our lives as an expression of his love. The love of God—manifested in him choosing us—is the answer to not only our spiritual questions but also the loneliness that so many people experience. His love is what eases the pain of loneliness in a way that even our family, friends, and community cannot. His love is behind the transformative purposes of God—the reality that God is actively moving and working in every life, in every generation, to bring things into conformity with his will. His will is the best possible outcome for every person who has ever lived.

Our destiny is not fulfilled  by our performance or our compliance with a set of rules, but by our formation. It is fulfilled by allowing God to transform us from the inside out into the people he destined us to be.

John F. Kennedy understood the purposeful inspiration of this type of calling or destiny when he stood before the 1960 Democratic National Convention. He was not offering promises. He was issuing a challenge:

“We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier — a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils — a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.”

John F. Kennedy,  1960 Democratic Nomination speech

And in his inaugural address, he summoned his generation to the purpose he believed history had placed before them:

“In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility — I welcome it. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”

John F. Kennedy, 1961 Inaugural address

Kennedy had a sense of destiny and passed it to a nation, not as a form of superficial motivation, but as an inspired responsibility to change the world. We can learn from him and his generational call to purpose.

We live in 2026 in a globalized, interconnected, and yet profoundly lonely world — confusingly moving forward into an unknown future, desperate for clarity about meaning, purpose, and a vision of a better life. This is precisely what God’s church has provided when it has been at its best. Not a political message. Not a cultural institution. A transformation of lives—allowing people of every race, every background, and every country to rise to the occasion of their God-given destiny.

People transformed by God make the world a better place. We do not propose a utopian dream or a set of overly idealized possibilities. Ours is a faith based on the record of Scripture, which testifies through the lives of believers. From Old Testament Israelites to New Testament Christians, the Bible gives us countless examples of what happens when God forms a people and sends them into the world.

We have all these great people around us as examples. Their lives tell us what faith means. So we, too, should run the race that is before us and never quit. We should remove from our lives anything that would slow us down and the sin that so often makes us fall.

Hebrews 12:1 ERV

God moves. He moves through those who believe in and trust him. He moves to change the world to make it better. Therefore, God is the central focus of our message, not ourselves or our institutions. His message to us is to allow him to work and he will use us to make a better world now, which means we are not meant to simply wait for eternity. We have a purpose to fulfill while we wait.

For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope — the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.

Titus 2:11–14 NIV

We must never forget God or what he intentionally plans to do with our lives, be we believers now or considering becoming believers.

Yet after more than forty years as a Christian and in ministry, I have forgotten him countless times —and watched movements rise and forget him as well. I have seen churches filled with people and empty of God. I have sat in rooms where the Word of the Lord was rare—not because God had stopped speaking, but because the people had stopped listening. Behind it all, one thing has become clear to me: the quiet drift from God-reliance to self-reliance is the most dangerous journey a church, a Christian, or any person can take, precisely because it looks like faithfulness while it is happening.

Here at the Bay Area Christian Church, we take these lessons seriously. The loss of the church’s attractiveness to a world in need and a searching world has little to do with the aesthetics of services, the inability to adapt to cultural changes, or disillusionment with institutions—though all of these play a role. What lies behind all of them is the forgetting of God.

“We must never forget God or what he intentionally plans to do with our lives, be we believers now or considering becoming believers.”

We lose our desire to serve or do good and fail to produce inspiring lives and church services when we forget God. We fail to adapt to cultural change when we forget God. We lose the trust of the people we are trying to serve or reach when we forget God. And we forget God most reliably when we stop believing that he has a plan and purpose for our lives to make him known and to do good. We stop believing that he and those who walk with him are the timeless answer to every new frontier.

The future of the church brightens when we remember God and rely on him, but it dims when we forget him. Here at the Bay Area Christian Church, it is our choice to remember God, to be and continually become a God-reliant church.

We believe we are not alone. Just as God assured Elijah he had thousands who upheld his cause in 1 Kings 19, we believe there are individual Christians and churches all over the world seeking to walk with God in just this way—not just talking about but living the spirituality of Jesus.

I still have 7000 people in Israel who have never bowed down to Baal or kissed that idol.

1 Kings 19:18 ERV

People transformed by God make the world a better place. 

In sharing my reflections on the future of the church, I hope to provide encouragement to those who attend church or simply believe in God; those who belong to a spiritual community or are searching for one; those who might be discouraged along with those who are inspired. My hope is that we will each renew our faith in the God of Scripture, who longs to transform our lives so that, like Jesus, we become an expression of his love — transforming the lives of millions by doing good and making him known. The question before every church, every Christian, and every searching soul is not whether the frontier exists. It is whether we have the courage to meet it.

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The Great Vulnerability

“The Great Vulnerability” is the universal temptation of human nature to lose God in the midst of life, and the need for us to develop a core belief that we cannot change ourselves or this world without his help.

There is no better example of this challenge and motivation for us to overcome it than Samson, who did not know that the Lord had left him.

Then [Delilah] called, “Samson, the Philistines are upon you!” He awoke from his sleep and thought, “I’ll go out as before and shake myself free.” But he did not know that the LORD had left him.

Judges 16:20 NIV

“He did not know.” That is the most haunting phrase in the story of Samson, and it is the most honest description of the spiritual condition I am calling “The Great Vulnerability.” Samson became so preoccupied with the emotional drama of his relationship with Delilah that he lost God. He kept assuming the power he possessed was his own, that he was in control, only to learn what he did not know. He did not know everything in his life was dependent upon God. He didn’t have to see it or know it for it to be true.

Any of us—any Christian, any believer, any seeker, any church—can drift so far from God-reliance that the departure becomes imperceptible.We keep moving, unaware that the power is gone.

Such is the destiny of all who forget God; so perishes the hope of the godless. What they trust in is fragile; what they rely on is a spider’s web. They lean on the web, but it gives way; they cling to it, but it does not hold.

Job 8:13–15 NIV

Self-reliance feels like control. It feels secure. But it is a spider’s web — intricate and impressive in its construction, yet incapable of bearing the weight of a human soul. Every person and every church that has built on self-reliance rather than God-reliance has eventually discovered this. Not because they lacked talent or sincerity or effort, but because the web was never designed to hold. Only God can hold what God has made.

Does a young woman forget her jewelry, a bride her wedding ornaments? Yet my people have forgotten me, days without number.

Jeremiah 2:32 NIV

In the above verse, God expresses grief over a forgotten relationship. The most intimate thing a bride possesses—forgotten. Days without number. This is not the picture of a dramatic betrayal, a bride jilting God at the altar. It is something quieter and more devastating than that. It is apathy. The emotionally unavailable unfaithfulness of a love taken for granted—distracted by the latest excitement, bored by the security of being unconditionally loved, or too busy to reach for what was once cherished. Somewhere in the ordinary business of living, the bride stopped showing up. 

God is still there. He still wants to walk with us. The walk is still available. But when we forget him, we don’t bother to show up.

I have studied this pattern in the writing of Watchman Nee, whose framework in The Spiritual Man from 1928 remains one of the most spiritually honest I have encountered. Nee identified what he called “soul-force” —the soul operating from its own energy, talent, and willpower rather than from God’s Spirit. Soul-force can look spiritual. It appears to have no sin. It succeeds where others fail. It serves with apparent devotion. But it is human-powered, and it exhausts itself. The person running on soul-force needs results to sustain the energy, approval to confirm the direction, and visible success to feel that God is still present.

This is not only the struggle of those who lead. It is the daily spiritual condition of any person who has substituted their own effort for a walk with God—who is working hard at the Christian life without actually relying on the God who gives life (Galatians 3:1-5).

Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?

Galatians 3:3 NIV

I have felt all of this in my own life. It is at the core of every spiritual failure I have experienced. I have watched it in others as well. But spiritual failure need not be fatal.

Even Moses, one of the greatest biblical leaders, faced this spiritual failure. When his people cried out for water, Moses struck the rock (Numbers 20:11). Not once—twice. The first time, in Exodus 17, was out of obedience; God commanded him to strike it and water came. The second time was out of disobedience; Moses’s soul was wearied by decades of leading an impossible people. He struck the rock a second time in frustration rather than following God’s instruction to speak. That moment had consequences. But the consequences do not define Moses’s story or our own. God does.

And here is what God said about that story at its end:

Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face.

Deuteronomy 34:10 NIV

When Moses died, God personally buried him (Deuteronomy 34:6). Deuteronomy 34:5 literally says that Moses died “with the mouth of the Lord,” but ancient rabbis read the Hebrew as “with the kiss of the Lord.” That is not the burial of a disgraced failure. That is the honoring of a servant whose work was complete. God did not demote Moses. God graduated him. 

Moses had a purpose and fulfilled it. The wilderness required a kind of faithfulness—enduring, steadfast, holding a people together through decades of wandering—that is different from what crossing over requires. God knew when the season was complete.

This is the spiritual truth that too much of the Christianity I have known has missed. Leadership fatigue is real. Walking with God in this world is a struggle. We should not ask whether a person was flawless. We should ask whether they were obedient to the vision from heaven (Acts 26:19). We should ask whether they were pressing on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of them (Philippians 3:12). We should ask whether they wrestled with God and kept going, like Jacob at Jabbok—limping, blessed, renamed, and changed (Genesis 32:24-28). The limp is not disqualification. It is the mark of someone who has genuinely met God and survived. It is formation.

“We should not ask whether a person was flawless. We should ask whether they were obedient to the vision from heaven.”

What has gone wrong in some expressions of institutional Christianity is a sociological and theological error about human beings. When any person is placed in the position that only God can occupy—the position of never failing, always knowing, being the source of others’ spiritual life — the collapse is inevitable. There is only one who never fails us, and that is because he alone is love (1 John 4:8). When we make anyone else that center, we have created an idol. And idols always disappoint, because they were never designed to carry what only God can carry.

For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.

2 Corinthians 4:5 NIV

The condition God presents us with is not perfection. It is formation. God is with us when we are with him—allowing him to shape and grow our lives.

The Lord is with you when you are with him. If you seek him, he will be found by you, but if you forsake him, he will forsake you.

2 Chronicles 15:2 NIV

The Great Vulnerability is not losing faith in a single dramatic moment. It is the quiet, incremental, days-without-number forgetting that happens when we stop seeking the God who never stops being present. And the antidote is not a better system or a stronger discipline. It is a return.

Unless the Lord builds the house, the builders labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the guards stand watch in vain.

Psalm 127:1 NIV

We are confident that God is able to orchestrate everything to work toward something good and beautiful when we love him and accept his invitation to live according to his plan.

The failures, the struggles, the seasons of wandering, the struck rocks, the limps—God orchestrates all of it toward something good and beautiful. This is the transformative purposes of God at work in every life that stays oriented toward him, even imperfectly, even haltingly, even with a limp.

Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Psalm 73:25–26 NIV

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The Joshua Generation

Don’t leave me when I am old and my hair turns gray. Let me tell future generations about your mighty power.

Psalm 71:18 CEV

The “Joshua Generation” is a biblical idea that entered the public consciousness again with the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. He described the Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King as the “Moses Generation” and his generation as the “Joshua Generation” that must fulfill the vision of those that came before them. 

Obama was correct that in the Bible, the Joshua Generation inherited the vision of the promised land from the Moses Generation—it was their job to take the land and make the vision a reality. In this way, the Joshua Generation had to enter a new frontier.

Here in 2026, we benefit from this example of generational transition. There are many, including myself, who think of the generational handoff as being young to old, but it is important to know that Moses was 120 years old when he handed leadership off to Joshua (Deuteronomy 34:7).

By the time Joshua inherited leadership, he was no longer a young man. He was likely somewhere between 70-85 years old. For those of us in our fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties, this means that the call of the New Frontier can belong to us as well as those who are younger. The New Frontier is not a young person’s calling. It is a formed person’s calling. Formation takes time.

The Moses Generation brought Israel to the edge, but they could not enter. Not because they lacked devotion; Moses was one of the most devoted people in human history. And not because Moses failed to pass something on. Moses taught Joshua how to walk with God in the wilderness, knowing his time would pass.

Inside the Tent of Meeting, the LORD would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Afterward Moses would return to the camp, but the young man who assisted him, Joshua son of Nun, would remain behind in the Tent of Meeting.

Exodus 33:11 NLT

Joshua did not inherit an organization. He inherited a walk with God. He had watched Moses speak to God face to face as a friend—and when Moses left the tent, Joshua stayed. That is formation. That is how a walk with God passes from one generation to the next.

There is a lesson here about generational transitions. The danger is not the mistakes or imperfections of the people in the Moses Generation.. The danger is when any generation passes on organizational traditions and cultures instead of God—when what gets transferred is the structure of religion rather than the biblical substance of walking with God and building the spiritual relationships that flow from it. 

We know it is time for the transition when the Joshua Generation has developed a walk with God as deep as the one they inherited from the Moses Generation. Only then are they ready to cross over into the territory their generation was destined to reach.

After the death of Moses the servant of the Lord, the LORD said to Joshua son of Nun, Moses’ aide: “Moses my servant is dead. Now then, you and all these people, get ready to cross the Jordan River into the land I am about to give to them — to the Israelites.”

Joshua 1:1–2 NIV

The Joshua Generation crossed. Not because they were superior people, but because they had watched what happened to a generation that tried to do it in their own strength, and they chose differently. The Moses Generation had seen the promised land. They had seen God part the Red Sea, provide manna in the wilderness, and guide them by a pillar of cloud and fire. And yet when the moment came to cross over, they looked at the giants and saw their own inadequacy rather than God’s sufficiency.

Then Caleb silenced the people before Moses and said, “We should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.” But the men who had gone up with him said, “We can’t attack those people; they are stronger than we are.” And they spread among the Israelites a bad report about the land they had explored. They said, “The land we explored devours those living in it. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Numbers 13:30–33 NIV

Caleb represents the spirit of the Joshua Generation—the person who has learned from the Moses Generation’s walk with God and chooses faith over fear, God’s sufficiency over human inadequacy. The Moses Generation was not a failure. They fulfilled their destiny. They survived the wilderness. They preserved the people. They passed on a walk with God. But their season was complete and the sobering lesson they left behind was this: even a generation that has seen God move can lose sight of him as their source when the giants appear.

The Joshua Generation had to learn from both the faithfulness and the failure of those who came before. From Moses, they inherited a walk with God—the face-to-face friendship, the Tent of Meeting, and the intimacy that produces genuine formation. From the people, they inherited a warning—that it is possible to witness the miraculous and still default to self-reliance when the moment of crossing demands everything. God must be the source. Not human strength. Not organizational momentum. Not the legacy of what the previous generation built. God himself.

No one will be able to stand against you all the days of your life. As I was with Moses, so I will be with you; I will never leave you nor forsake you. Be strong and courageous, because you will lead these people to inherit the land I swore to their ancestors to give them.

Joshua 1:5–6 NIV

God’s command to Joshua was repeated three times in a single chapter: be strong and courageous. His courage should not come from himself; he should be strong and courageous because God would be with him wherever he went (Joshua 1:9). The source was God. The strength flowed from the source. The Joshua Generation’s destiny was linked to but separate from the Moses Generation’s. They were called to take what had been formed in them and cross over into territory the previous generation could not enter—not because the previous generation failed, but because their season was complete and a new frontier required a new generation ready to make God their source all over again.

I think about Jonathan’s words—many generations later—in 1 Samuel 14:6, when he was facing a Philistine garrison with only his armor-bearer beside him: “Perhaps the Lord will act in our behalf. Nothing can hinder the Lord from saving, whether by many or by few.” Whether by many or by few. That is God’s principle— quality of faith over quantity of forces. The New Frontier is not reached by accumulating enough people. It is reached by developing people formed deeply enough to trust God when the numbers say it cannot be done.

“They were called to take what had been formed in them and cross over into territory the previous generation could not enter.”

The Bay Area Christian Church can definitely be classified as a megachurch; our attendance is well over the 2,000 that defines that designation. I mention this not to boast but to be clear: what you are reading is not the repositioning of a struggling church trying to justify its decline. We are not moving the goalposts because we cannot score. We are choosing different goalposts because we have read the Scriptures and become convinced that God measures differently than the world does. Rarely on our site or in our conversations will you hear numbers. What you will hear about is lives—because lives are what God counts, and lives transformed by a genuine walk with God are what the New Frontier of the church produces. 

What we are building toward as a spiritual community is not the vision of one person but the shared conviction of a people who have read the Scriptures and chosen to build God’s way. It is a generation of people whose hearts, souls, minds, and strength— the four dimensions of the human person that Jesus named in the Great Commandment (Mark 12:30) —are being genuinely transformed by a walk with God. This is the heart of every Christian, not just those in a particular position. That is the Joshua Generation. That is what the New Frontier requires.

Our hope is that, as your faith continues to grow, our sphere of activity among you will greatly expand, so that we can preach the gospel in the regions beyond you.

2 Corinthians 10:15–16 NIV

The regions beyond. That is where God calls every Christian in every generation. Not to consolidate what the last generation built. Not to compete over what already exists. To press into territory that has never been reached — the invisible continent of the digital world, the generation that has walked away from institutional Christianity, and the people whose lives need the doing good that followers of Jesus are uniquely equipped to provide. 

Through all this upheaval, God’s message spread to new frontiers and attracted more and more people.

Acts 12:24 The Voice

God’s message is designed to spread to new frontiers. Acts 12:24 is not history. It is a present reality for every person willing to walk with God.