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dr. greg austin

~ . . . a Bridge Between Two Worlds

dr. greg austin

Category Archives: Ekklesia

There is a breathing, living and moving Company of those who “have an ear” that is rising up – invisible to the institutions of Religion and unseen by the tradition-bound. It is World-wide, Simultaneous and Spirit-led. It is nothing less than the appearance of the church Jesus promised He, and He alone would build. And all those who have been born the second time through faith in Him are integral members of that church.

Came a Gentle Whisper . . .

14 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Discipleship, Ekklesia

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Among the means by which our God and Father communicates through us, there exists both the declarative and the contemplative word of the Lord. The Old Covenant prophet Elijah knew it by experience; the “still, small voice” is seldom spectacular and rarely is it the thrilling, supercharged, goose-pimple producing “thus saith the Lord” revelation men so frequently clamor for. On the other hand, the thundering, awe-inspiring, earth-shattering sound may be, but seldom is the true Voice that is above every other voice.

It is not volume, but value that reveals the difference between the counterfeit and the authentic. The brand name ‘Rolex’ doesn’t make the watch genuine, it’s the materials and workmanship inside that validates genuineness.

Indeed, Elijah had perhaps more New Covenant comprehension than did any of his contemporaries. He was no stranger to raising the dead. He called down fire from heaven and entered paradise alive in a whirlwind without tasting death. He was superintendent of the school of the prophets and knew intimately and personally the voice of his God.

And God said to this man, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper’ (1 Kings 19:11,12).

The first instructive words are these, “the LORD was not in…” Oft-times, perhaps more frequently than we want to admit, God is “not in…” our carefully structured plans and programs, our schemes and our suppositions and our limited understandings of the things of God. God may be fully engaged in our worship songs or He may be nowhere in sight when these same songs become more show than worship, more narcissistic expression than humble adoration of the King of all glory.

It is right to want Him, to want to hear His voice, to see His hand extended, to experience Him in full display of divine mercy, grace and goodness, but it is wrong to insist that He move by our schedule; that He descend when we declare, that He comes when we command. He is no wish-fulfilling genie in iridescent garments with whom we have to do. There is a bigger reason, a grander purpose that He has for our lives than we can possibly hope to comprehend in our limited imaginations and narrow thoughts.

The human psyche seeks irrepressibly to rise… above. It is both a natural and an evil desire. It was observed by the pre-incarnate Word who “saw Satan as lightening fall from heaven” after the same declared, “I will…!” Five times he declared. Five times he insisted. Five times he made known to the heavens his insistence that glory should surround him to the want of the King of glory. (See Luke 10 and Isaiah 14).

Unless we should think too highly of our spiritual estate, scripture reveals that it was Lucifer, the son of the Morning, the beatific being who reflected God’s luminescence more magnificently than any other angel who would fall to the lowest and meanest estate and spiritual condition. Lucifer: powerful, intelligent, beautiful, proud, intimately near God’s Person and throne. Yet tragically, perhaps inevitability, he fell.

Hear his ancient declaration, “I will…” “I Will!” Hear it through the centuries and with the expanse of history from the beginning until now: “I WILL!”

So we must exercise great caution and humility when the desire rises from within to shout our will; to invade heaven with our demands. We want to declare and watch our demands take shape and form. We insist that our decree is His decree. But if caution is not exercised, we will appear as the children of Israel testified of the divine origin of their creation when they certified that a golden calf fairly materialized from the flames of man-made fire.

Our every motivation and desire must always be not what we demand, but what He desires. Rather than insisting that our decree become His decree, we ought always to determine that His decree should become our decree.

Scripture gives us divine order: “Delight yourself also in the LORD; and he shall give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). The key here is found in the words, “in the Lord.” Note that it is not “in our understanding, in our desire, in our wish,” but it is “in the Lord” that He gives us the desires of (our) hearts. “Delight in the Lord” brings “the desires of your heart.” This is so because when we truly find our “delight” in Him, His desires become ours. We then find ourselves praying, claiming and declaring in His will and not in ours. Remember the words, “…not my will, but Thine be done” (Luke 22:42).

In our desiring and our declaring, we must consider that above, beyond; of chief priority to the redeemed heart is the desire and yearning of the perfect and matchless God of all creation, our heavenly Father. What does He, what do You desire, my sovereign Lord and my all-consuming King, my gracious Savior and my Lord?

Before we hazard to declare, before we utter what we presume to be God-generated pronouncement, may we hear Him; may we hear the singular Voice of whom it is made revealed, “in these last days has spoken to us by His Son.”

Oh, it is true that ‘wherever two or three of us shall gather in His name, there He is in the midst of us.’ Indeed, our very humble bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit. It is Christ in us, the hope of glory. Scripture abounds to indicate and to qualify that when Christ is “in us” we are accompanied and indwelt by the fullness of the triune God.

Yet He chooses often silence over sound and gentle breeze over hurricane wind to speak to us in the depths both created and plumbed by the same Creator and Sustainer who is our God.

Listen. This is my plea. Hear Him. Hear Him clearly. Before rising in the midst of the assembly of the saints of God to declare, first discern. Loud and rumbling thunder may shake hearth and home, but booming sound does not guarantee life-giving rain. There are many “clouds without water, carried to and fro of the winds” (Jude 1:12).

“A great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper.”

As comes a gentle whisper, may we provide a listening ear.

 

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How Dare They?

17 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Ekklesia

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How dare he live as though he were forgiven? As though he never had done any errant thing. How dare she walk as though she were free? Liberated from a verdict of guilt and a penalty of condemnation; freed from the prison clothes of the blameworthy. How dare they lift hands in worship that were lifted in anger, hatred, lifted in sin?

Repent! you shout. Let him bring us evidence of suffering, proof of his pain. Let us judge her heart, evaluate his intentions, determine their rightness, let us cast with pride our ballots of heavenly retribution.

Their standards must be OUR standards! We would not; therefore they must not. We decide, we determine, we establish what is acceptable and what is intolerable.

We know. That is the crux of the matter: We KNOW.

We know what is in their hearts. We know what God knows of them. We know what ought to be done with them:

Banish them! Bind them with the steel of our judgments. Surround them with the tsk of the tongue and the wag of the head. Crush them with the hushed whisper and the subtle snub.

Disapprove them. Disparage them. Disallow them. Disinvite them. Disengage them. Disfellowship them. Deny them, deride them; hold them in disdain.

Sinners! They have stumbled, fallen; they have muddied themselves in the mire of sin. Offenders! They have tripped, proven their humanness; they have demonstrated their weaknesses. They are “less-than.” “Less than” who? Less than us, surely! We would not. Stumble, stagger, we would never fall.

But they, they have been brought to the court of human righteousness and they have been found wanting in our all-seeing eyes!

Or perhaps they have not. Stumbled, as we have believed, fallen as we have observed; perchance we were misinformed, given one side, but certainly not the other side of the story, but let us not let truth obstruct our righteous and holy highway. We are certain, we know, we see what God may not see: We know motive, intention; we know the flaws.

How dare they? When they demonstrate by their attitudes, by their words, by their acts, they do not know God; they do not know His heart; they do not understand His ways, His purpose, His love.

How dare they? Reinterpret, misinterpret His words? God forgives, “so far as the East is from the West so far has he removed our transgressions from us.” He forgives and “will remember their sin no more.” Teachers of the law and the Pharisees were invited to cast stones of death at a woman found guilty of mortal sin, should they be without iniquity. The woman was instructed merely, “Go and sin no more.”

How dare they? Misrepresent those holy words? How dare they? Pervert perfection by dragging lofty righteousness to man’s grimy and unholy estate.

How dare they? How dare they assume a position reserved only for One, for One Holy, for One righteous Judge Who gave His life that we might be tried in the court of heaven’s grace, judged with the beauty of mercy, found innocent because of the pouring out of His own, pure blood?

How dare they? Oh, they dare . . . they dare because they do not believe.

 

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a NEW VOICE, a NEW FACE, a NEW HEART

06 Thursday Aug 2015

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Apostolic, Ekklesia

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With all my heart and soul I believe this: The citizens of planet Earth are currently living through the most critical and significant hour in human history. Further, the Holy Spirit of God is leading those “who have an ear” into a new dimension of revelation and glory that will catapult the Church of Jesus Christ into her true, God-ordained destiny in the earth.

With the infinite array of information, speculation, myriad “prophetic” voices; voices of doom, voices of encouragement, voices of sheer, emotional fantasy there remains one true, sure and unalterable word. That word proceeds from a heavenly and not an earthly Source. That word is the living, eternal and supreme word of God. It is from this word that all my belief and anticipation emerges.

As Christ’s church moves forward, we must recognize that our enemy is as much the “status quo” as it is Satan. The desire or need or penchant to return to past experiences, or the vestiges of that which God has passed by; any business-as-usual church experience will sound the death-knell to the full desire of the Spirit of God.

As surely as I know Him I am convinced that God is raising up a NEW VOICE, a NEW FACE and a NEW HEART in the earth. In 2008, Great Britain reported less than 2% church attendance. Having spent a good deal of time in England, I can attest to the veracity of that figure. Something is gravely wrong when the land that felt the footsteps of Spurgeon, Whitefield, Wesley, Wigglesworth and other powerfully gifted and anointed men and women of God has deteriorated into the state it currently languishes.

In America, the echoes of Azusa Street have faded into oblivion. The times of Jonathon Edwards and the Great Awakening have become merely historic footnotes in the anthology of the church. Dwight L. Moody, Aimee Semple McPherson, John G. Lake, Billy Sunday, Oral Roberts, Billy Graham all shook the land, but as someone has aptly commented, “America is overwhelmed today with dime-a-dozen imitator preachers.” Those who seek to plumb the depths of God’s Spirit and to tap heaven’s well of wisdom must look beyond former personalities and movements for direction and understanding. What God is doing is BEYOND. What God is doing is BEYOND denominations and conventional fellowships. Where heaven is leading is BEYOND corporations, programs, preaching services, man-made agendas, strategies and designs. God told Daniel to “seal up the prophecy” because it would require a future generation to understand. That future generation has been birthed, but where are the fathers, where are the leaders, where are those with “understanding?”

Ezra chronicled the temperament of the sons of Issachar “who had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do.” These understood the times, and knew what to do! It’s the knowing of “what to do” that is critical and essential. The same “Issachar spirit” that placed the Tribe in holy writ is being placed within a generation that has awakened to a new day of God’s anointing for the earth, and that “spirit” must be recognized and given freedom to speak, to be heard, to be heeded.

A nucleus of forerunners is rising in this hour. These contemporary “sons of Issachar” have understanding, and are hearing “what the Spirit says to the churches.” It is these who will make a difference for heaven in our time and we all, who would follow Christ and who will be His body must listen intently.

I sat as an observer in a staff meeting in a world-renowned church. The church had grown rapidly, even miraculously when leadership surrendered their positions of power in favor of the power of the Holy Spirit among them. Yet once the church had experienced sudden and God-engendered growth, the leadership had turned to formulae and program and methodology to continue what had begun in the Spirit. The Apostle Paul identified the tendency when he wrote to the Galatian church, “Are you so foolish? Having begun in the Spirit, are you now being made perfect by the flesh?” (Gal. 3:3).

I watched the expectant faces of the young leaders who had gathered in that staff meeting as the “orders of the day” were issued. The meeting soon descended into the drone of the minutiae of running a huge enterprise called “mega-church.”

My heart ached until I wanted to just get up and shout to them,

“This is NOT “that!” This activity does not bear the imprint of the Holy Spirit of Acts 2. These neat and impressive programmed services do not have the inscription and the unction of a church that turned the world upside down! Get Up! Get Moving! You can change your nation! Get up! Get full of God! Get His Power and His Resource and His Word and His Wisdom and His Enablement and abandon these man-engendered, man-enabled systems and storm the nations with His love and grace and mercy!

A Vital Question –

I love the men and women God has raised up in past generations. God uniquely placed and used them for their hour. I love and respect the men and women God has raised up in the most recent generation. But I wonder, could it be that God intends to use the former generation (my generation) to provide strength and stability to the church while at the same time an entirely new generation rises up, in union with the former, in a coalition of those who understand the times and who know what to do? Unless one is spiritually blind and deaf it is obvious that a rising generation will possess a completely new and different notion of changing the earth? The church of Jesus will never vanish away so long as the Holy Spirit remains in the earth, but the expression of His church is surely and essentially in the midst of tremendous transition.

Old systems are indisputably vanishing, cleaving away like a disused shell to reveal an inner vitality of the Body of life in God. An old wineskin, unable to contain New Wine is rotting before us, and a New Wineskin, capable of containing New Wine is about to appear.

I believe something significant is contained in the Darlene Zscech song, “Touching Heaven, Changing Earth.” We must place greater concern on “touching heaven” if we are to “change earth.” Where we have spent inordinate sums of money and time and energy with our buildings and carpets and music and lighting and preaching programs, we must place our resources on “touching heaven” because if we can touch heaven, if we can see heaven, if we can hear heaven, if we can understand what the Spirit is saying to us, to our generation, to our hearts, we will witness a changed earth.

The focus has been on doing “things.” Our energies have been consumed with developing programs, producing strategies, and doing things the way they always have been done because, our logic tells us, “if they worked for the church of the 1960’s and 1990’s and 2000’s, these things should work for us.” But to follow a former generation’s example without hearing the current whisper of the Spirit will cause us to miss what God is doing in our midst.

What God is now doing is unlike what He has done in other days. What Heaven is now doing is visibly and essentially different from what He has done. God is leading us, as He led ancient Israel into a place from which we one will testify, “When you see the ark of the covenant of the Lord your God, and the priests, the Levites, bearing it, then you shall set out from your place and go after it. Yet there shall be a space between you and it, about two thousand cubits by measure. Do not come near it, that you may know the way by which you must go, for you have not passed this way before” (Joshua 3:3,4).

If somehow we can shift our concerns from the next popular ministry emphasis or what is happening in this geographical location or that arena to an emphasis on heaven, to an emphasis on worshipping the God of glory without concern for worshipping the way somebody is worshipping in America or England or Canada or Australia; if we can focus on hearing God and not hearing what a voice here or a voice there is saying; if we can focus on building deep, real and spiritual relationships with others in the Body of Christ, the resulting transformations in our own lives will have a powerful impact on the earth without the machinery of the systems and programs we have known in the conventional, institutional church.

We’ve got to touch heaven! We’ve got to become more connected with heaven than we are connected to the earth and its dying systems. We’ve got to become more connected with heaven than we are connected with a denomination or a treasured way of “doing ministry”! Until our supreme connection is with heaven, all our best attempts to change our world will fall ridiculously flat.

The emerging church – the true church of Jesus Christ cannot be as churches have been, or we will no longer possess a reason to exist. Let God lead into the deep, into uncharted waters, into latitudes no one has explored. Let God’s Spirit and God’s Wind carry us into a destiny heaven determined before the foundations of the world were laid.

God is building something far more substantive than an organization or a building. He’s building His church. Observing the machinery of a great church is instructive, but let me be clear: It’s not about machinery, systems, models or imitations. It’s about touching heaven and by virtue of God’s indwelling Spirit, touching one another.

Let us refuse to imitate yesterday’s anointing and discover fresh unction for today. When His Spirit indwells His church, His systems and models, His eternally creative beauty and brilliance will cause the earth (to) “be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, As the waters cover the sea” (Hab. 2:14).

Victimized By . . . Ourselves

16 Tuesday Sep 2014

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Ekklesia

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ManinChurchHave we, the Church of Jesus become victims of our own success in our relations and interactions with God?

Looking with some twenty years’ perspective since the first Toronto stirrings indicated a fresh move of God’s Spirit in the earth, some painful possibilities exist. Many of us among the people of God had by the 1990s cried for God to refresh us, to revive His work, to visit us with His intimate presence, His person! “Church as usual” was no longer an option for hearts thirsting for God’s close fellowship and love. We cried for Holy Spirit to come, to visit us, to make His habitation among us, and He did it!

And when He came He showed us that lots of the formality of our religious experience was worthless. We discovered that God was not impressed with our man made spirituality. We got down off our high spiritual horses and became real with God and with one another. And God blessed. God came. Oh, how He came into our midst! Lives were transformed; not just adjusted or amended, this was no season of “soul-tweak” but lives were changed completely, totally, fully. Lives were healed of longstanding pains of physical, spiritual and mental abuse. What years of conventional counseling and praying and hoping and waiting could not deliver, God did in moments.

For those who recall those days (and many long, yet too brief nights) this was the apex of our experience with heaven. And then, so soon we became accustomed to Him. The extraordinary became the ordinary. We discovered that familiarity does breed contempt. No longer were we awed by His presence when we came together to worship. We could sing to Holy Spirit, we could worship God with one hand and hold our coffee cup with the other. We could drink in His presence while we drank down our coffee.

And at some point we lost the preciousness, the pricelessness of His presence. We lost the glory of His touch, we lost the awe of His communion, the intimacy of God’s heart with our hearts: We. Lost.

And so, as countless generations before us have done, we attempted to manufacture what we could not create – the holy, awesome, life-changing, intimate presence of the living God walking among us, touching our lives with His grace, transforming whole churches from mere places of worship to centers of mission and purpose.

And as I ponder these painful truths, the question arises, “Can we recover what we have lost?” Can we?

Certainly our times call for a supernatural church to confront a dead and dying world filled with the philosophies of meaningless and death. And if the times call for such a church, we ought then to cry out to God once again to come to us, to forgive us, to dwell among us, to sweep us, one more time into His arms of love and safety and protection and to there infuse us with His Spirit that we might be, in the midst of desperate times, the full representation of the hope of the world, even Jesus.

. . . I looked, and behold, a door standing open

25 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Ekklesia

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Allow me for a moment to challenge your perspective, your concept, your understanding of the word “church.”

For most people, “church” has come to mean a building, a denomination, or a program. I believe God has something else, something greater in mind when He uses the word.

A while back God began to speak to me about changes that the church needed to make if His followers were to make a significant difference in the world around us.

As my understanding of those changes developed, the Holy Spirit brought a truth to my heart that I didn’t fully comprehend: He illuminated this statement: “The door to the future is in the past.” Immediately I thought of the church of the Book of the Acts. That’s what we often refer to when we talk about a true, New Testament church. We examine Acts 2:42-47 to discover the ingredients of that church and try to apply them to our own experience and then wonder what we’re doing wrong when we don’t see three thousand or five thousand people born into the Kingdom in our meetings.

Part of the reason we can’t find the success we seek is that we tend to look for patterns to follow. We want systems and programs, concise equations whereby if we do “A” “B” and “C,” we will get “D.” There are church groups that instruct leaders to “Develop a first class children’s program, find talented musicians and preach no more than fifteen minutes on positive subjects and your church will grow.”

Unfortunately and all too often, our definition of “growth” differs greatly from God’s meaning. God cannot be reduced to a formula or a recipe. If the church is truly His church, it follows that “church” cannot be reduced to simple, repeatable formulae. Church historians know this: What worked for one generation didn’t work for the next generation. Look at the record of the church: Each generation was required to find God for themselves and to discover His direction and to hear His voice for themselves and for their unique generation.

As I contemplated that statement – “The door to your future is in the past” I asked God for understanding. He said, “Go back to Genesis.” I turned to Genesis chapter one and read,

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form, and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. (Gen. 1:1-3).

Allow a brief commentary: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” All that exists around us, every law and principle that provides the material and spiritual to exist were created by God. Man had nothing to do with any law, principle, truth or reality that enables the physical world to function. All things, everything existent was made by God without the assistance and before the existence, even of man.

“The earth was without form and void . . .” In order for God to “rebirth” or “restore” His church, we must come to a place of complete and total reliance upon Him. Any idea we have, any vision or concept of what the church is must issue directly from God and not from our own experience, education, or from our own minds or souls.

God must be the solitary source of direction, counsel, instruction and illumination if His church will indeed be the church Jesus said He would build. We must offer ourselves to Him “without form and void.” This is critical for us to understand: “without form,” and “void.” Empty of our ideas, empty of our theories and models, without any preconceived concept of what the church must look like, where it will meet, when it will meet, how it will meet. These are all assumptions and notions that we received, were handed down to us by former generations. It’s the “we’ve always done it this way” mentality that so often conflicts with the purposes and direction of a mysterious and creative God.

We have seldom emptied ourselves of ourselves, choosing rather to fill ourselves with ideas, schemes, plans and efforts that have only failed, disappointed and discouraged.

And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters . . .” It is the illumination and the inspiration of the Holy Spirit that gives life. We have relied on supposedly “tried and true” methodologies; we have learned from the examples of previous generations; we have absorbed the teaching of college and seminary professors but we have so seldom emptied ourselves of ourselves, regarded all our earthly understanding and learning as “dung” and with the Apostle Paul declare “this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.”

Then God said, Let there be light; and there was light. “Then God said…” it is up to the Father and His timetable to determine the “Then” moment of time when we will understand the nature, the structure and even the purposes of His church, this “New Wineskin” of which Jesus spoke.

We cannot determine the timing of any eternal thing; we can only move when heaven’s timepiece chimes. “Then God said, “Let there be light . . .”  Only when God reveals the light are we able to see. There is no artificial light source; no earthly beacon can shed light on and uncover what cannot otherwise be seen. Until God turns on the light, there is darkness in the house. But when God speaks, light appears; understanding comes; comprehension is made easy.

God does not cooperate with pseudo-church forms, the unsanctified bastions of religion and the ungodly mixing of the fleshly with the spiritual.

We are moving into a new, unexplored realm of experience in Jesus and in the church. God is not finished with the church, but He is finishing with His cooperation with pseudo-church, the unsanctified bastions of religion and the mixing of the fleshly with the spiritual. He is not only demanding, He is enabling a generation to “come out from among them and be separate” and to inhabit and comprise “a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish.”

This is the church that is emerging from the counsels of heaven; this is the church of the Latter Rain, the Temple more glorious, the church of the living God against whom the gates of hell cannot not prevail.

God is calling out His people; a committed remnant that desire more than a religious atmosphere and high, holy-sounding rhetoric. God is assembling an army of warriors who will storm hell’s gates and prevail against all of the enemy’s schemes. Heaven is sounding the trumpet call for volunteers to join that army and become the church that will stand faultless around His throne, a Bride adorned for her Groom, Jesus.

The doorway to the future is in our past, all the way back to the beginning, the Genesis of it all.

How Did His Church Become My Church?

25 Saturday Feb 2012

Posted by dr.gregaustin in Ekklesia

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How did His Church Become My Church?

“There are approximately 38,000 Christian denominations in the world.”

                                    (Christianity Today – General Statistics and Facts of Christianity Today, 2001).

* (Update: As of 2009, eight years after the CT study, more than 43,000 denominations have been identified).

Does this statistic bother you?

We so easily miss truth by way of our assumptions, our faulty perceptions, our beloved traditions. “We’ve always done it this way” is no excuse for error in our behavioral patterns. “We’ve never done it that way” is no justification of wrong-minded “rut” living

Have you considered that the word “Church” as used by Jesus and “Church” (as a descriptive experience) may not be the same? Indeed, they may be completely unrelated!

Jesus said, “I will build My Church and the gates of hell will not prevail . . .” We routinely reveal our error in understanding when we make statements such as,

“Are you going to church on Sunday?”

“Where do you go to church?”

“How do you do church?”

Jesus said, “I will build My church.” He did not say “I will build a school or an entertainment center, a business enterprise, a social gathering place, a nesting place for ‘birds of a feather to flock together.’”

What did Jesus have to say about church attendance? What did He say about “orders of service” and times of service and frequency of services and pastoral personalities and preaching styles and music preferences and, for crying out loud, the acceptable color and pattern of the carpet?

What did Jesus say about doctrinal distinctions and denominational differences and modes of baptism and understandings of communion? Or should we refer to the Lord’s Supper as the Eucharist? Did Jesus introduce the liturgy that so many view as sacred, proper, essential? Was it Divine genius that gave us homiletics 101?

What about “church growth” schemes? What did Jesus say about these? Was the Lord of glory the Originator of the Church Conference? Did the Savior introduce the Convention, the Congress, the Summit or the Seminar? Did He initiate the Saturday night “Prayer Hour?”

Was it Jesus Who suggested taping a Denarius, or in a rich neighborhood, an Aureus on the underside of a seat, to be won by the lucky worshiper who chose that moneyed seat?

Where did the term “Do Church” originate?

What makes one building a “church” and another a manufacturing plant? What makes one structure a sanctuary and another a dispenser of latte’s and pastries?

Did Jesus intend our Sunday-go-to-meeting duds should be different than our Monday-go-to-work attire? What chapter and verse in the gospels delineates a shopping mall for religious trinkets, “Christian” music and “Christian” books and “Christian” refrigerator magnets? Or perhaps it is Pauline theology that bears responsibility for the “Christian” financial enterprise that converts merchandise for millions of dollars each and every year that we await the rapture of the church.

I think we may have, somewhere along a long line of “doing” confused our being with performance, achievement, a “holy” but not wholly godly routine. Somehow, I think the “exploits” of Hebrews 11 and of the Acts of the Apostles have been largely lost beneath the sheer weight of a good-mindedness that is not necessarily God-mindedness. Our faulty definitions have displaced original intention and the simplicity of our watching, our cooperating, as Jesus simply, straightforwardly and miraculously, builds “His church.”

Acts 28, beginning in verse number 30 gives us a wonderful portrayal of the intention of Jesus in building: “For two whole years Paul stayed there in his own rented house and welcomed all who came to see him. Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.”

And he did it all, away from the synagogue, away from the crowds, without benefit of the limelight or the fawning groupies or the wild and raucous cheering section, all the while being held prisoner of the government of Rome. No, Paul wouldn’t “fly” in today’s religio-centric church, he was far too unconventional, too controversial, too “small time potatoes” for modern churchmen.

Jesus said, “I will build My church.” Oh, hey, I just noticed: “My” church, indicating possession, custody, ownership, control, proprietorship; “My” church

One of the first words learned by every toddler, beyond, “mama” and “dada” is “Mine!” It seems that we come from our Manufacturer uniquely equipped to issue that explanation to all in our world – “Mine!” And we carry that sense of domination and control and ownership into our concepts of church: Far, too many expressions of “church” are “mine” in either the collective or the individual sense. We’ve all heard it, “Have you attended Smith’s church?” Or, “What do you think of the __________________ (you fill in the denominational label) church?” Or, “This is my church.”

The songwriter penned the words, “What’s love got to do with it, do with it, do with it?” It seems that modern “churchites” have their own version: “What’s HE got to do with it, do with it, do with it?”

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