Life

When I speak of organic church and organic ministries, I am not speaking about house churches. Instead I speak about the organic life of God Himself flowing through His body on Earth wherever His body may be. So that can be in house churches, or it can be in the professional clergy system, or it can be on the job, in school, in the family, or anywhere. In short, everywhere. [Alexander Douglas, "Organic Church", freethechurch.org]

What a wonderful quote from the Free the Church site. Soon afterwards, I went into deep thought and ended up writing my reflections below to a mutual friend.

Dear T–

You write a lot about the Kingdom of God and others write a lot about house churches. So my friend was talking about the heavy emphasis on some sites we’ve been on that have an emphasis on the church. He brought up some valid issues, I think. One of those is that neither he nor I really know what house churches are teaching. We hear a lot about the state of the I/Cs, but then when we go to these forums, we meet these people in house churches and what comes out of their keyboards is insanity. What he said is this:

On [Forum X] we only seem to hear from people who have some form of ministry themselves and from leaders like K–. I don’t recall hearing from people on the receiving end. On [Forum Y] it was a free for all and we’d hear from people who aren’t leaders but who were very sure of themselves and very vocal, and way off track. The discussions I was in on were mainly about refuting doctrinal assertions, not about maturity and spiritual reality.

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His next remarks came from something I wrote once about how “church” didn’t happen by “getting a bunch of people together”. … That is the thinking — that we have to “get a bunch of people together” or “church” isn’t really “church” — not even in house church. And so many of these groups, we suspect are meeting just to meet.

Isn’t the spiritual quality of the group or the gathering a matter of the measure of Christ that is being expressed? Doesn’t that increase less by gifting than by the cross working in an individual whereby they are permanently transformed?

This doesn’t just come about by getting people together, whether they are “centered on Jesus” or not. I’m not really sure what they mean by being centered on Jesus or in love with Jesus anyway. Being “in love”, in our vernacular, comes from feelings of strong affection and admiration for a member of the opposite sex. It’s not an expression I recall any place in the NT, nor even a sentiment expressed in other terms. There is a cultural history to the whole idea. …

So I don’t really know what they mean by it, as applied to life in Christ. Is this a perpetual feeling people have? [Frank] Viola has spoken about “A people who are consumed with God’s eternal passion, which is to make his Son preeminent, supreme, and the head over all things visible and invisible.” Is this about getting excited over the idea of this? I’m not sure at all how they say this plays out in real life or even church life. I’m not going to buy their books to find out.

What I’m not exactly hearing from these quarters is about the fact that God’s purposes come about through resurrection. It’s the resurrection life of Christ in us, which implies there has to have been a death.

Here’s something that I’m puzzling over. I’m not hearing a clarion word about Christ and the meaning of the Cross and about growing unto full stature. We hear about church planting, house church, being focused on Jesus, . . . But does this word of Christ as our life and the role of the Cross have anything to do with talking about the church? Is this the actual foundation that is being laid by those who are church planters, out from which the church is a natural and inevitable result? Or are we facing once again a de facto clergy system, in effect, where there are leaders who remain the leaders and there are followers who remain followers of the leaders?

One thing I seem to see this morning is that one attains leader status by writing books. If you don’t write a book then, no matter what you have to say or how much light you may have, you can’t get a word in with the leaders who write books and their groups. Whether they are humble about it or otherwise, the leaders are the authorities and if you come in with a different emphasis that what they are teaching they will basically dismiss you.

This reminds me that I heard a church planter say that in America there are four or five streams of house church and he fears they are becoming house church denominations. I hear a lot of good from their vocal leaders, but then hear so much junk coming from the practitioners of this method of meeting. It’s like they have a floating foundation — just like everything else in the world these days.

Meanwhile, my friend and I have been talking just between ourselves, lifting things up to God…and lo and behold, there is no confusion, backbiting, dissension, vying for leadership… We think that two or three also constitutes a “church” of some sort since Jesus is in the midst of even two or three. Neither of us had been led into a “house church” as yet. …

Anyway, I haven’t answered my friend appropriately yet because I was so struck by what he said that I needed to mull it over more. But then shortly after this I started thinking about the questions we seem to have most difficulty getting answered and how Jesus, as a man walking this earth, didn’t seem to struggle with this stuff. He pulled up the most amazing answers to things out of the blue. It was then that I wrote a post on my blog called “The Mind of Jesus“, which cracked open an entire new realm of understanding for me.

I began to understand a little more about how Jesus could pull up the answers to difficult questions that He did. After I finished writing “The Mind of Jesus“, I was driving home musing on it all, and realized that a person could see everything in the world different if they could only apprehend how Jesus derived His thoughts. It was only a glimmer then, but after I got home I realized that something had been cracked open to me about the culture wars and our role in society out of all this. I wound up writing “Fishing for the Answer” immediately after. Suddenly, everything began to make sense. I don’t have all answers to everything yet, but I see that there is a better way to approach all questions of life than in the debates.

The result for me at the moment is that I have many questions now that I want to understand through the mind of Christ. In past, I would simply raise questions to God and wait and raise them again and again. I wonder now if part of my lack of discernment may have been that I didn’t fully understand what it meant to have the mind of Christ. Nobody teaches you what that’s like. They just assume you have it.

So far, I seem to be on the right track and I trust that God will keep me there. A lot of what I thought and believed two years ago, I’ve throw overboard. Hard to believe so much could change in a short space.

See you later,
Kathryn

I’ve had to halt work on the book I was writing again. That seems to happen to me a lot. Stop and start. The Lord opens up one thing to me and I think I “get it”. Then He opens up another and that rearranges everything. Perhaps the last U.S. presidential campaign slogan, “Everything must change” is true in many unintended ways. The world is changing and it won’t be in ways that anyone imagined.

I had the greatest pleasure the other evening of dining with a former boss of 30 years ago, Harold Smith, who writes a website from Jerusalem. These days I count him more as “friend” and “brother”. We had dinner and a discussion that lasted four hours. I would have been perfectly happy eating nothing and only listening. We shared how our lives had gone — how we’d both been derailed only to find God’s greater purpose.

That discussion touched on some of my unspoken questions about the direction my book was taking. I thought how interesting that we were seeing so many of the same things even though we came at what we saw from different directions. I recommend his article on “Loaves and Fishes” (in his site’s left-hand menu), because I think it answers some concerns about David Wilkerson’s latest show-stopping article. It is exactly in keeping with my later sense of the matter and some of the balancing comments that others contributed.

The issue of “Social Justice” also left me a bit torn. I have often been divided on what part of our efforts should be world-directed and what part should be brethren-directed. We do have to care about the lives of others not of our “fold”. Yet God did not call the Church to actively campaign to save the world from itself. If confusion has always existed on that point, I believe it stems from the fact that the Church has been run in large part by the world since it threw in its lot with Constantine. Geographical areas became parishes and dioceses when the Church decided that its mission lay with the kingdoms of this world. Yet Christ made it clear that His kingdom is not of this world. I can see why so much confusion exists between the life of the Church and the life of the world, between the interests of the Church and those of the world — and of how far and to what extent God’s salvation reaches the non-seekers.

I believe this is why when I sought the Lord on the matter, His message was, “Live out of me.” Sometimes it is so simple that it’s hard. My search seems to entail pushing the walls to see how far out they will go and then finding that I’ve pushed them beyond the foundations. I have to withdraw a bit then. I do believe that our direction is going to come first from the spirit and not the natural mind.

Harold said something that rang true with my spirit, which I have said somewhere myself. There is a scripture that is often mishandled:

Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done [it] unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done [it] unto me. [Matt. 25:39-40]

The “least of these” refers not to people in the general population. It refers to “my brethren”. These two words are not set apart with commas, or this might legitimize the popular meaning. But it doesn’t. Jesus went first to the Jews (people of the kingdom, most of whom rejected their King) and secondly to the Gentiles (people outside the kingdom) as in the cases involving the Roman centurion [Matt. 8] and the Syrophenician woman [Mark 7]. Yet even these two were people of faith — not the general masses of the world. Matthew 25:39-40 is talking about the brethren and not the world.

There are two bits of observation about the Life of Yeshua that are revealingly enlightening. The first is that, as a man of flesh, just like we are, Yeshua exampled an intimate relationship with the Father only using what scripture was available to Him, the Torah, to validate that relationship He found in the Spirit – but that was not where He acquired it. This is important.

…scripture does not tell us He sat around with the disciples all day teaching them the intricacies of Torah – He taught them of this intimacy He had developed with the Father. His primary message consistently was to ‘Love the Father with all your heart, all your mind and with all your soul and your neighbor as yourself’. [Smith, "Loaves and Fishes"]

It is this life of Jesus in the brethren that made the miracles of Acts possible and that drew those sitting in darkness to its flame. “Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set on an hill cannot be hid. [Mat 5:14 ]” Didn’t He also say: “I am the light of the world: [John 8:12a]?” He has sent us out as little Christs that the world may see — “orbs” Harold calls us. We are aliens and strangers in this world with no more place to rest our head than Jesus had.

For we which live are alway delivered unto death for Jesus’ sake, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our mortal flesh. [2 Cor. 4:11]

Read his article. It is too good to miss.

I have just had a startling thought regarding what we call “fellowship”. It started when I quoted this verse to someone:

As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good unto all men, especially unto them who are of the household of faith. (Gal 6:10)

The reader commented that the phrase “the household of faith” seems to distinguish those who have identified Jesus of Nazareth and have committed to following Him. It sounds exclusive, perhaps — and it is — just not in the way of a social clique that refuses to associate with outsiders.

It honors God for us to treat all of His creation with care. I suspect that the statement from Galatians was a way of regarding the deposit in the believer, which is actually the spirit of Christ. We should always honor and care for the spirit of Christ above all else.

John wrote much about loving the brethren. It is the witness to the world that we are Christ’s disciples (John 13:35). [Cf. 1 John 4:8] It does not mean that we do not care for others, but to care for the world at the expense of caring for the spirit of Christ and the unity of the Body is backwards.

Caring for the brethren is literally caring for Christ. When Paul was on the road to Damascus a light from heaven blinded him. He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The voice answered, “I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you persecute.” Jesus introduced himself by His earthly title when, in fact, He was in resurrection. This suggests that He identifies with the frail humanity of His people. They are literally His Body on earth. Everything we do to His people, we do to Him:

…Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. (Mat 25:40)

(Notice that the word “brethren” is in apposition to “one of the least of these”. The brethren — not the world — are both the doers of the action and the recipients.)

We do not share this same absolute identification with humanity at large although they reflect a marred image of God. They have not yet the spirit of Christ, but we treat them as pre-Christ bearers in hope that they will one day become brethren. But our real communion is with God — that is, with the Father and with the Christ in one another.

That which we have seen and heard declare we unto you, that ye also may have fellowship with us: and truly our fellowship is with the Father, and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:3)

If our fellowship is with the Father and with the Son, then it follows that our transformation and fellowship with other believers is made possible only through nurturing the indwelling Christ. Our fellowship cannot take place between our natural persons, but between the spirit of Christ in one with the spirit of Christ in another. In other words, our true fellowship is the communion that God has with Himself expressed through human vessels.

Jesus answered and said unto him, If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him. (John 14:23)

Jesus mentioned this communion with believers (not unbelievers) in the context of his words here:

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. (Rev. 3:20)

Unbelievers, on the other hand, do not have the Father and the Son dwelling with them. It is spiritually impossible. And yet, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son….” (John 3:16) God’s heart and hands are always stretched forth to the unbelievers dwelling in the earth. Even when we were His enemies, He loved us.

For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life. Romans 5:10)

We cannot fellowship (have communion) with one another unless we first have communion with God. If it seems that some believers look like the world — yes, it is very hard sometimes to tell a believer from an unbeliever when they behave so much alike. Paul indicated that there is a process of being filled to the brim with the spirit of Christ:

My little children, of whom I travail in birth again until Christ be formed in you… (Gal. 4:19)

God’s ministerial gifts were given for the express purpose of completing this process:

And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers;
For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ:
Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ:…
But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: (Eph. 4:11-15)

If it seems so hard to love one another and to love the world… if it seems so hard to forgive grievous wrongs and injustices… know that the world has no solution. Only continued communion with the Father and with the Son will bring us into that reconciliation in all things that we long for.