May 01, 2015 by Luis Bush

In response to the great challenges of our time, God is calling his servants to act as catalysts in mobilizing the whole body of Christ to bless the nations through the transformation of people, churches and culture. That mission is being accomplished through a collaborative venture that engages the generations in transforming nations through all spheres of cultrual influence.

In his model prayer, Jesus prayed, “Your kingdom come, your will be done in earth, as it is in heaven” (Mat. 6:10). Transform World 2020 is a global collaborative initiative seeking to do his revealed will in our communities throughout the nations as a unifying converging force. 

In reference to God the Father, Jesus said to his followers: “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness” (Mat. 6:33a). Seeking the kingdom of God results in personal and cultural transformation which has emerged as a unifying vision for the mission of the Church at the beginning of the 21st century.

As Christ followers we are pursuing Missio Dei–the mission of God. God is on a mission of transformation and invites us to join him on that mission as his servant catalysts. As we look around our world, we recognize that a global transformation movement has begun. It’s God’s movement. We are servant catalysts on his mission of transformation.

We at Transform World embrace the decentralized starfish-type organization (see article beginning on page 16), fostering a groundswell of people committed to the ideals of the movement. It is a movement characterized by a commitment to personal involvement and participation in a flexible, non-bureaucratic volunteer initiative, persuading others to join.

The God-given vision for the Transform World 2020 Movement is to catalyze and connect God’s servants through focused gatherings. These gatherings include summits, consultations and conferences and are often conviened by conference calls and electronic communication. This  facilitates us all working together in our nations of residence and respective areas of God’s mision of transformation, be they spheres, mountains or domains of cultural influence (including the family, the arts, education, business, church, governance, media), and the next generation.We are trusting this will result in a transformational movement in response to the major challenges they are facing.

We have identified seven major challenges we must respond to: the ideological challenge of Islam; the family challenge, giving strength to the core of society; the orphan challenge, together for a world without orphans; the poverty challenge, giving the poorest of the poor a hand up to self-sustainability; the justice challenge, constructing societies that respect human dignity; Christ’s missional challenge, accelerating breakthrough among the unreached; and the celebration challenge, a trumpet call to all the nations.

What does that transformed community and world look like? A transformed world is a place where the power, the presence and the peace of God are experienced by all. The power of God is unleashed. The peace of God rules. Shalom-Salaam embrace. The presence of God fills the earth. “Love and faithfulness meet together; righteousness and peace kiss each other. Faithfulness springs forth from the earth, and righteousness looks down from heaven” (Psa. 85:10-11).

How does this happen in practice in a given nation or culture? For an answer to this question we are indebted to historian Arnold Toynbee, who noted that history is a vision of God’s creation on the move. He compared 26 different human civilizations, focusing upon their origins and growth and the reasons for their eventual disintegration–leading, then, to the development of a new civilization. In all cases, Toynbee believed that he could trace the reasons for such disintegration to a failure to adequately respond to some important moral or religious challenges of the day. Such a failure led, over time, to a lack of confidence among the people in the ability of the civilization to provide order and structure to their lives. 

In the Transform World 2020 movement we encourage catalysts to respond to five challenge-response factors observed by Toynbee in order to create the dynamic for spiritual-social transformation as follows:

1. Crisis exists in the culture with disintegration at the core due to a failure to adequately respond to important moral or religious challenges of the day.

2. Catalytic/kairos moment of challenge and opportunity becomes a divine appointment. Os Guinness describes kairos as “The hour which is the God-given moment of destiny not to be shrunk from but seized with decisiveness, the floodtide of opportunity and demand in which the unseen waters of the future surge down to the present.”

3. Catalyst calls for change with the clear prophetic voice of a moral leader.

4. Committed minority with creative power sparks a challenge-response initiative.

5. Convinced majority  causes initiative to become a challenge-response movement that results in culture change.

We live at a kairos moment in time for the raising up of catalysts in communities around the world. Our goal is that by 2020 we will see the emergence of a convinced majority which sustains the dynamic for spiritual-social transformation in their communities.