To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God?

Recent conversations with a fellow youth worker have reminded me of the time I realised how huge and covert my agenda in youth work was.

We had just started a project which was looking like it was going to be a huge success. We were working on a council estate with young people between the ages of 8 and 20. We were supporting them in life issues, talking with them about relationships, housing, finance, their rights, and whenever we could we were turning the conversations to God, gently and lovingly explaining to the young people that they needed to be ‘saved’ and ‘become christians’. Our intentions were good, we wanted to save these young people from a certain ‘lost eternity’.

The shock of waking up one morning and realising that out strategy for ‘Building the Kingdom of God’ involved targeting a vulnerable group of society and telling them that we had all the answers to their lives issues, still lives with me. We were doing things with the best of motives, at the time I genuinely believed that the young people if they did not ‘become Christians’ and step over the line into the Kingdom of God were going to a real, literal and physical hell. But deep down, we were trying to build the kingdom of God by swelling the numbers in churches.

This was four years ago. My concept of the Kingdom of God has totally changed. Before we would try and encourage people to come into it, (albeit in meeting them where they were at first etc etc). We saw the growth of the Kingdom of God as young people learning to acknowledge Jesus as Lord, as young becoming christians and behaving like Christians. As my concept of the Kingdom of God has changed to seeing it as a kingdom of fairness, justice, wholeness, a kingdom of Shalom, the way I see it growing has changed. Rather than pulling people in, maybe we are called to expand the kingdom so that it covers more people.

So, to what shall I compare the Kingdom of God? As I see it, the kingdom of God is like a wave of the sea, gathering momentum, bursting it’s boundaries, soaking and gathering up those living on the parched dry land of injustice and oppression, catching them up in the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Shalom, swelling further, and spreading it’s boundaries further.