This is a Homecoming Year!

As the hours counted down to the New Year, I had an interesting experience – a conversation with a friend that opened a window into the heart of God. It was 31 December 2023, and a friend who’s a church leader told me about a young man who’d recently started attending church, simply because he knew he needed to find God. No one had invited him. It was as if God had given this man a direct invite. I sat there on the phone, racking my brain to think why this atypical story sounded familiar. Then it dawned on me – only days earlier another friend of mine who also leads a church in a different part of the country had told me an almost identical story of a man facing some challenges in his life, who had showed up at church wanting to find God.

Now it should be the case that if someone wants to find God, church is one place that would hopefully be top of the list. In fact, in a previous post from April 2020, I wrote that church should be “the first place people would think to come when they need healing, or breakthrough, or purpose”. But we have perhaps generally not thought that Generation Z would see her that way. Yet, in each of the two stories these church leader friends told me, it was Gen Z men who were showing up searching for God. What really got my attention was that in one case, it was a 23-year-old man and in the other, a 24-year-old. Both stories were in close proximity to the change of year, with the second being told to me on New Year’s Eve – as the year was about to turn from 2023 to 2024.

23 and 24. 23 to 24. I had a familiar sense that God was speaking, tantalising my mind with a riddle like I told about in my post Shaken: Revisited. Perhaps the prayers of God’s people at the turn of the millennium were about to be fulfilled? Were those born at that time heralding a homecoming?

Since January, as I’ve met leaders of churches, from sleepy villages to fast-paced cities, I’ve felt a stirring in my heart to speak out a prayer of declaration: this is a homecoming year! And as I’ve connected with pastors this year a familiar theme has emerged – people showing up at church because they’ve realised they need God. Myself and others in our church team at St. Marks have had multiple similar conversations with young adults showing up at church because they know they need to know God, especially in the past few months.

Have you seen something similar in your context?

Whether you’ve witnessed it yet or not, I want to encourage you and stir you to pray for those who will be drawn to church this Christmas. In my 20 years of church ministry, I’ve never seen a time like the one we’re in this year: people are ready to come home! If you’re involved in Christmas services that welcome guests, get ready! Put out extra chairs! Speak over your church, “this is a homecoming year!” And be prepared to welcome and follow up newcomers who will tentatively sneak into midnight masses or cheerily show up at Christingles – especially Gen Z people, who God is on a special campaign to welcome home at this time.

Christmas is always a time of increased openness. It’s in the very nature of God’s movement to earth to make a home with people. But this year, I wonder if we could be about to experience the climax of this homecoming year in ways we’ve dreamed of – seeing many, many people come home to Father God.

He’s the One who readily welcomes home every prodigal! Let’s join Him in sealing this homecoming year and being ready for what He will do next!