Rev. Peter Suhn, Senior Pastor
The things that mark human history as unique events are the result of people who have a deep and consuming desire to see something come to pass. And if Christianity is to impact the world, it must be carried by people who have a consuming desire to see it reach the ends of the earth.
Many in Christianity today have a big brain but a very small heart. And the church's temperature has dropped. Her spirit is somewhat apathetic. The world has always been turned by the passionate people. The world changed on October 31, 1517. That was the day Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany. God took the rough yearning burning Martin Luther, and it was he that God used to turn around the course of church history. John Wesley's passion for the lost is astounding. He on foot and horseback traveled 225 thousand miles, preached 2,400 sermons and amid misrepresentation and abuse, never knowing the delights of love at home, subject to incessant attacks of the mob, the pulpit, and the press, he did not abate a jot of heart or hope until he had reached the age of 88 and ceased at once to labor and to live. Overwhelming evidence exists to show that the church and people of England in his day were dull, vapid, and soulless, and the preaching was careless, the land steeped in immorality. To Wesley was granted the task for which he was set apart by enviable consecration, the task which even an archangel might have envied him of awakening a mighty revival of religious life in those dead pulpits in the slumbering church and mori-bund society. He was the religious sincerity which not only formed the Wesley community which later became "Methodism" but working through the heart of the very church which had despised him, he flashed fire into her whitening embers. It was he who discovered that lost secret of Christianity, the compulsion of human souls. He was the voice that cried over the valley of dry bones, 'Come from the four winds, O Spirit, and breathe on the slain that they may live.' In Westminster Abbey, that great temple of silence and reconciliation, one may read three of his great sayings, one full of holy knowledge, 'I look on all the world as my parish.' Another full of triumphant confidence, 'God buries His workman, but His work goes on.' The third, his cry in an age of feebleness extreme is the best of all, 'God is with us.'" And his biographer says of him in climaxing his life, "He was out of breath pursuing souls."
In Christ,
Pastor Peter Suhn
