Christ’s family, which he has adopted us into, is everlasting and spans continents and cultures and all the centuries past. We are bound to the living and reigning Christ with all other believers — past and present. We’re family with every saint in the Bible! It is a mystery of grace that in this big, scattered, multi-ethnic, multi-generational, fractious, and seemingly dysfunctional family, we have a bond that’s deeper than blood, stronger than death.

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been the keeper of the objects, anecdotes, and photographs of my family’s story.

We value pictures and memories of those who are special to us. Our earthly family ties — like our lives — are precious, fragile, and fleeting. But we have, by grace alone through Christ alone, another family. I have spent more than twenty years visiting my Christian family in the world’s most hostile places, traveling to more than eighty countries (from the former Iron Curtain countries to war-torn Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan), and then sharing what I have seen and heard.

This family is created by a second birth through the blood of Christ. Christ’s family, which he has adopted us into, is everlasting and spans continents and cultures and all the centuries past. We are bound to the living and reigning Christ with all other believers — past and present. We’re family with every saint in the Bible! It is a mystery of grace that in this big, scattered, multi-ethnic, multi-generational, fractious, and seemingly dysfunctional family, we have a bond that’s deeper than blood, stronger than death.

Church History, Our History

Many years ago, I was in Albania at a time when the little Balkan country was emerging from nearly fifty years under a brutal, Communist dictatorship.

Among the Iron Curtain countries, Albania was considered the “North Korea” of Eastern Europe because of the isolation, deprivation, and persecution that the people suffered for decades. When Communism collapsed in 1990, there was no known church in the entire country. But God showed great mercy to the people of Albania as the gospel was preached to even the most remote corners of the country. Within twenty years, there were Albanian congregations in every city and in most towns throughout the nation!

During those first years of freedom and gospel advance, a missionary friend invited me to teach a short series on church history to his little congregation of first-generation Christians. Night after night I walked with them through the centuries and shared the stories of faithful men and women — their brothers and sisters — who had followed Christ in their day.

It became clear to them that the gospel they had heard and believed was the same one that Paul and Polycarp and Perpetua believed and died for. Theirs was the same faith that Luther defended and that Hudson Taylor had sailed to the other side of the world to preach in Chinese. These truths were found in God’s word, the Bible — the same Scriptures that Tyndale put into English and Carey translated into Bengali which was also the book that their pastor preached from in Albanian.

Saints Below and Above

When this reality took hold, light shone in their eyes and joy filled their faces. They had been told by family and friends that they were deceived and were part of a small cult of fellow fools who had drunk the same Kool-Aid. But now they saw that the church wasn’t just the forty or fifty people gathered in an apartment sitting on fold-up chairs. Instead, they were inseparably part of something worldwide.

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