The views expressed in this article are of the author only and do not necessarily represent those of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
“The Church is the Church only when it is … not dominating, but helping and serving.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Pastor-Theologian and Martyr
Everyone wants to change the world.
For many Christians in Western cultures, especially in the US, that desire carries an added ache. It can feel as though the church is losing its voice and place in society. The instinct, then, is to look for a strategy to “get our influence back.” But Advent tells a different story: a God who comes as a child—poor, unnoticed, vulnerable.
I’ve been re-reading spiritual writer Henri Nouwen’s classic The Wounded Healer, and it’s helped me see that this isn’t just a comforting story; it’s a revolutionary one.
Nouwen writes that in Jesus, “changing the human heart and changing human society are not separate tasks, but are interconnected as the two beams of the cross.” The vertical beam is God drawing near and softening hardened hearts. The horizontal beam is those hearts being sent into the world as reconciling communities.
In other words, the Christian story holds together personal conversion and social renewal.
As a pastor, I live inside this tension. At times it seems people want me to use whatever “power” I have—my role, my preaching, my visibility on a platform or in front of a pulpit—to move the needle in a particular direction. The pressure comes from all sides: say the right things about culture and politics, endorse the right causes, name the right enemies, so that we, as the church, can “win” again and feel on the right side of history.
But I remain convinced that when Scripture talks about spiritual leadership and power, the authority it gives us is not for securing cultural victories; it is reserved for bearing witness to the story that Advent tells.
That story is that the kingdom doesn’t advance primarily through the force of a single voice on a stage, but through a whole people being slowly, deeply shaped into the likeness of Christ.
I have learned that it is easier to cheer when a pastor boldly calls out the world’s failures; it is much harder, and far more kingdom-shaped, when the people of God quietly obey Jesus in their ordinary, hidden lives (see 1 Corinthians 5:12–13; John 21:22).
Scripture tells us that the kingdom does not move forward simply because the world is confronted; it moves forward when the church is converted—again and again—into a community that actually lives what it proclaims.
This is what our world desperately needs at the moment.
Here Nouwen’s vision cuts to the heart. He describes Jesus as “a revolutionary who did not become an extremist, since he did not offer an ideology, but himself.” Jesus does not hand us a program for seizing power or winning a culture war. What he does offer is his presence—his body, his time, his attention, his wounds—and, beyond them all, his resurrection life.
In fact, the manger already hints at the cross: the One laid on wood in Bethlehem will be nailed to wood at Golgotha. God’s way of changing the world is not by overpowering his enemies, but by absorbing violence and hatred into himself and breaking their grip with self-giving love.
Cruciform Revolutionaries
So what does it mean to change the world like Jesus—especially for a church that feels its cultural power slipping, and for pastors who are asked to get that power back?
First, pastors must resist the temptation to treat the pulpit as a throne for control or cultural battles. It is not a place to defend our side or secure our standing—it is a place to point people to Christ, and Christ alone.
We must see our visibility as a stewardship, not a status. We stand where we stand so that, week after week, we can point people away from ourselves and even our own ideologies and back to the manger and the cross—back to the One who offers not an ideology to defend, but himself as the living God to be trusted, loved, and obeyed.
Secondly, for the whole church, Advent invites us to open the places in us that are afraid, defensive, or hungry for control. We are not first asked to be experts, leaders, or winners in the world, but to be people who receive Christ’s life where we feel most wounded and most ashamed. Only a heart that has been touched there can heal without needing to dominate.
From there, together we join Jesus’ revolution in small, concrete ways. We move toward the wounded rather than away from them, as Nouwen’s “wounded healer.” We refuse the lie that only big platforms and public victories count as “world-changing.”
Jesus compared his kingdom to a mustard seed—something tiny that grows into something vast. In his kingdom, a cup of cold water, a visit to someone forgotten, loving an enemy, forgiving seventy times seven—these are the seeds of new creation.
The following words, attributed to an anonymous Hasidic rabbi on his deathbed, capture something of this:
When I was young, I set out to change the world. When I grew a little older, I perceived that this was too ambitious, so I set out to change my state. This too, I realized as I grew older, was too ambitious, so I set out to change my town. When I realized I could not even do this, I tried to change my family. Now as an old man, I know that I should have started by changing myself. If I had started with myself, maybe then I would have succeeded in changing my family, the town, or even the state—and who knows, maybe even the world.
At Christmas we celebrate that God has already begun the only revolution that lasts. He has entered history, taken on flesh, and started his quiet work of making all things new.
We do not make the kingdom arrive; we live, in this Advent time and beyond, as if it already has. As Christ reshapes us, we may look weak, yet in that hidden, cross-shaped way we share in the life that changes the world.
So, this Christmas, we ought to ask ourselves: are we asking Jesus to change the world for us, or to first change the world in us?
This reflection first appeared in Andrew William’s monthly newsletter.
Andrew Ray Williams (PhD, Bangor University) serves as Lead Pastor at Church on the Hill in Fishersville, Virginia. He teaches across multiple institutions, including Portland Seminary, Life Pacific University, and Bethel Seminary, and is a member of the St. Basil Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
