God Chooses the Broken

Last week I was on a phone call with someone who had been close to the revival that took place in Mistissini.

Mistissini is not a place most Canadians could find on a map.
It is geographically remote, socially marginalized, and carries the heavy weight of generational trauma—drug addiction, sexual abuse, suicide, depression. By most modern measures, it would be considered the margins of society.

And yet, it was there that God chose to pour out His Spirit.

In a community of roughly 4,000 people, more than 2,200 gathered to worship Jesus together. People who had been contemplating suicide found healing—not through programs or strategies—but simply by stepping into a space saturated with worship.  

God has always seemed strangely drawn to places like this.

The more I reflect on the story of Indigenous peoples in Canada, the more they remind me of the people of Israel in the Bible.

A people whose land was occupied.
A people pushed to the edges by their occupiers.
A people crushed not only by external powers, but often by their own pain, their own leaders, their own coping mechanisms.

And it was to them that Jesus came.
It was for them that Jesus died.

The gospel did not arrive among the powerful first. It was entrusted to the wounded.

Much of our modern understanding of “the gospel” has been shaped by the missionary movement of the last few centuries—where Western Christianity assumed it was bringing civilization to the barbarian. In the process, we carved a long trail of damage: cultural erasure, spiritual arrogance, and deep harm done in the name of Christ.

We are more refined now.
More careful with our language.
More politically correct.

But I wonder if the posture underneath has truly changed.

Too often, we still imagine the gospel as something that flows from the privileged to the underprivileged, from the “together” to the “broken.” We forget that the gospel began as a sacred trust given to the poor, the maligned, and the vulnerable.

It is not accidental that the announcement of Jesus’ incarnation was first given to shepherds—people with no social standing, no credibility, no influence.

God entrusted His greatest news to those with nothing to protect.

The gospel moves with a particular power when it is carried by the poor.

And that reality makes the rich deeply uncomfortable.

What if, instead of trying to civilize the poor, we chose to learn from them?
What if we recognized that those who have lived closest to suffering often understand grace most clearly?
What if the margins are not the mission field—but the classroom?

Jesus once asked whether it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the Kingdom of God.

Perhaps the difficulty is not wealth itself—but the assumption that we are the ones who bring God with us, rather than the ones who need to find Him already at work.

God does not merely include the broken.
He entrusts them.

And every time He does, He reminds us where the gospel truly belongs.