The spirit of my reflections echoes what is repeated every year at the Jewish Passover meal, as the Jews recount the history of their life as a people who are called by God.  At one point in the ceremony the leader says, “Let no one say ‘God called them (in the sense of those others).’  For if you belong to this people, it is because God called you.”  A prophetic word given 50 years ago, perhaps even before some of us were born, is part of the living heritage of the Sword of the Spirit.  It is as much a call to you personally as it was to those who first heard it.

In 1969, when I was at university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, about 30 of us prayed regularly together.  We had not become a community at that point, just a loosely-knit group of Christians, mostly university students, who had been baptised in the Holy Spirit and were trying to take our faith seriously. We would meet each Monday evening in the large living room of a rented house to pray and seek the Lord. 

During a meeting early in the summer of 1969, the Lord began to speak to us about repentance, about clearing away the obstacles to God’s work, obstacles which we had created through our unacknowledged and unrepented sin. In prophecy after prophecy during that meeting, we heard of the areas that needed to change, and the Holy Spirit opened the eyes of many of us to see what he was seeing.  Mostly the sins were not big, but things that occupied a place in our life that God wanted for himself –  our career plans, our cherished possessions, our immoderate interest in food, and so forth.  This “prophetic examination of conscience” lasted several weeks and created in many of us a sense of anticipation:  what was God preparing us for?  He seemed to be addressing us as a group even as he was addressing us as individuals.  He seemed to be “doing something with us.”

Midway through that summer we found our attention drawn to many passages in Scripture about covenant. That was the beginning of a year of discovery, as we learned about the covenant love and faithfulness between God and his people and between brothers and sisters who are part of the same people.  So the Lord’s call to covenant community had begun – with a corporate call to repentance. 

God’s Way of Living
One of the most striking things about being part of the community in the early days in Ann Arbor was the strong conviction that we had been caught up in a great action of God. We saw the evidence everywhere we looked: men and women were hearing God’s word and were being changed by it. God speaking and was bringing about what he had spoken. And before our very eyes this work of God grew with astounding speed.

Those who had attended a tiny prayer meeting in Ann Arbor in December 1967 (there were perhaps 15 people present) heard a remarkable prophecy.

You will reap a harvest you did not sow. You will sow, and in years to come will see the harvest. The work you have seen begun here will spread....I will bring many to you...and I will baptize them in my Holy Spirit. I will raise up spiritual sons and daughters for my work. A shining cross of my body will be raised up among you...I will send people to you from all across the nation to receive a message they will take back [with them]....

Just as had been prophesied, many came to Ann Arbor and caught a vision for Christian community lived in the power of the Holy Spirit, returned to their homes to pursue that vision themselves. In those very early years, the seeds were being planted which later produced a harvest of Christian community life around the world.