My Lord and My God: The Only Vision Worth Having

WJ de Kock, ThD Professor of Practical Theology | Educational Consultant, Partners in Ministry

9—minute read

It is the second week of April.

The resurrection has been proclaimed. Magnificently, probably. The flowers are fading now—that particular post-Easter wilt that afflicts both lilies and preachers simultaneously. The crowds who filled your building on Easter Sunday have returned to their normal arrangements with sleep, brunch, and the deeply theological matter of whether Carlton Footy Club can hold it together this season. Your inbox has resumed its natural state of mild chaos. The chocolate is mostly gone.

And quietly, almost imperceptibly, the church has returned to normal.

Which is, if you think about it, the strangest possible response to the resurrection.

Last week, we sat in the Tuesday-after-Easter quiet — naming the depletion, tending the wound, learning from Henri Nouwen that the wound is not a disqualification but a credential. We gave ourselves permission to be in Holy Saturday a little longer than felt comfortable.

This week, the credential gets its assignment.[i]

But here is what the Gospel of John records in the very next chapter, once the initial resurrection appearances have settled, Peter announces, with the decisive energy of a man who has processed precisely nothing: "I'm going fishing."[ii]

And six disciples say: "We'll come with you."

Even the people who had seen the risen Christ went back to what they knew. The boat. The nets. The pre-dawn darkness. The familiar rhythm of labour and waiting. You almost can't blame them. When the world shifts on its axis, the instinct to grab something solid, a fishing net, a spreadsheet, a programme schedule, is deeply, recognisably human.

Jesus, for his part, showed up on the beach and cooked breakfast.

Which is not, when you examine it carefully, the behaviour of someone interested in restoring the old order. He is not managing a return to normal. He is inaugurating something so genuinely new that even his closest friends keep failing to recognise him, mistaking him for a gardener, a travelling stranger, a bloke making fish on a charcoal fire at dawn.[iii]

More than restoration, the resurrection offers transformation. These are emphatically not the same thing. Here is the question I want to put to you gently, in the spirit of genuine collegial affection:

Is your church's vision a resurrection vision—or is it a resuscitation program?

Because there is a crucial difference. Resuscitation brings something back to what it was. Resurrection brings something forward into what it has never yet been. Resuscitation is impressive. Resurrection is dangerous, disorienting, and rather difficult to manage on a budget.

Many Australian churches, good, faithful, deeply sincere Australian churches—are running elaborate resuscitation programs. The target: the 1990s. The metric: recapturing the attendance, the cultural influence, the assumed centrality that the church once enjoyed. The strategy: find the right programme, the right leadership model, the right approach to Sunday morning, and get back to what we had.

And the numbers are honest about how that project is going. Approximately 1.35 million Australians attend church weekly, a genuinely significant number, yet it still represents only 89% of 2001 attendance levels. The gap persists. The project of return has not succeeded, largely because return was never what the resurrection offered.[iv]

The National Church Life Survey found something more pointed still: "develop a vision and goals for the future" was identified as the single greatest area of role mismatch for senior church leaders in Australia. The most important leadership responsibility, and the one where leaders feel most under-resourced, most exposed, most likely to retreat to the fishing boat.[v]

Meanwhile, George Barna notes that churches tend to measure attendance, fundraising, and infrastructure , "things that have little to do with Jesus' mission."[vi] You build what you measure. If you measure restoration, you will build a very tidy museum. A well-attended, lovingly maintained, completely irrelevant museum.

And the resurrection, whatever else it is, is not a museum exhibit.

Here is the thing about the resurrection that rarely makes it into the Easter Sunday highlights reel, but can move us from seeking restoration to resurrection vision.

Nobody knew quite what to do next. The tomb was empty but the Romans were still there. The risen Christ kept appearing and disappearing without consulting the group calendar. And into that uncertainty, that strange, luminous, frightening space between what was and what is now possible, two distinct responses emerged.

The first response is Peter's. "I'm going fishing."[vii] Back to the boat. Back to the known, the competent, the measurable. There is no shame in it — it is the most human instinct in the world. When everything shifts beneath you, grab something solid. The nets. The routine. The programme schedule. The metric that tells you whether last Sunday was a success. The boat is not a bad place. Peter caught fish from it once, on Jesus' instruction, and that catch changed his life. But by the time he hauls himself back into it in John 21, the boat is no longer a place of calling. It is a place of retreat.

Many Australian churches are, right now, in the boat. Competent. Hardworking. Running good programmes. Measuring the right things, by their own reckoning. Waiting, without quite admitting it, for conditions to return to something more manageable.

The second response is Thomas's. And it is, I want to argue, the braver one by a considerable margin.

Thomas was not there when the risen Christ appeared the first time. He arrived after the locked-room encounter, to find ten disciples in various states of stunned exhilaration, and he said — with what I can only describe as magnificent theological integrity: "Unless I see the nail marks in his hands and put my finger where the nails were, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe."[viii]

Thomas is usually cast as the doubter. The laggard. The one who needed extra convincing. But read him again. Thomas is refusing something specific, he is refusing managed certainty. He is refusing the comfortable second-hand version of the resurrection. He is insisting on direct, costly, honest encounter with the actual risen Christ. Not the reassuring narrative. Not the consensus of his peers. Not the atmosphere of triumph in a locked room.

But notice what is actually happening in that locked room. 

Thomas reaches toward the wounds of Christ, and Christ reaches back. "Put your finger here. See my hands." This is not Jesus submitting to an examination. This is Jesus offering himself, completely, to be known. And the extraordinary thing — the thing the story carries quietly beneath its surface,  is that the one whose wounds Thomas is inspecting has known Thomas's wounds all along. The doubt. The absence. The magnificent, obstinate refusal to accept the secondhand version. Jesus was not surprised by any of it. He arrives in that room already acquainted with the particular shape of Thomas' scepticism, already holding it with something that looks, astonishingly, like tenderness. Thomas reaches toward the wounds of Christ. Christ has already reached toward the wounds of Thomas. The encounter is mutual. The knowing runs in both directions at once.

And from there, from the terrifying intimacy of being fully known in the very moment you are fully knowing, comes the vision. Not I believe the theological proposition of the resurrection. Not I accept the eyewitness testimony of my colleagues. But: My Lord and my God. The most personal, most direct, most complete declaration of faith in the entire Gospel. Thomas, who refused every secondhand version, produces the confession that none of the eyewitnesses managed. Because what he has encountered is not evidence. It is a person. A wounded, risen, wound-knowing person who came back to a locked room specifically to be found by the one who was not there. 

Resurrection vision does not come from information. It comes from encounter. And encounter, at this depth, changes the one it touches.

Here is what church tradition tells us about Thomas afterward: he took the resurrection further than any other disciple, all the way to India, carrying the wounds of Christ into the furthest reaches of the known world. The man who could not believe without touching became the one who could not stop going. This is what happens when you are known by the one whose wounds you have touched. You do not simply receive a vision. You are slowly, irresistibly, formed into a likeness of it. The wounds you have been willing to touch become the wounds you are willing to bear. And the love that knew you before you knew it — that found you in the locked room, that offered itself to be inspected, that refused to leave you to your secondhand certainties,  that love becomes, over time, the love you carry into the world. Not as programme. Not as strategy. As the person you are becoming, in the presence of the one you have come to know.

Thomas models what resurrection vision requires.

The question is whether we will do the same.

[i] This post is the second in a four-part series on pastoral leadership in the Australian context.

[ii] John 21:3.

[iii] John 20:15 (Mary mistakes Jesus for the gardener); Luke 24:13–16 (the Emmaus disciples fail to recognise him); John 21:4 (the disciples on the lake "did not realise it was Jesus").

[iv] National Church Life Survey, Church Pulse Check 2025: Tracking the Health of Australian Churches (Sydney: NCLS Research, 2025).

[v] NCLS Research, A Snapshot of Effective and Sustainable Leadership Issues (Sydney: NCLS Research, 2016). "Develop a vision and goals for the future" was identified as the single greatest gap between expectation and resource for senior leaders.

[vi] Australian Prayer Network, "Biggest Threats Facing the Church: 'We've Reached a Time of Christian Invisibility,'" Australian Prayer Network, June 6, 2025, 

https://ausprayernet.org.au/2025/06/06/biggest-threats-facing-the-church-weve-reached-a-time-of-christian-invisibility-2/

[vii] John 21:3.

[viii] John 20:25.