2 wise perspectives of church

This morning at staff meeting, we discussed the recent ministry of Pastor Mike and Cindy Riches and a ministry team from CloverCreek Church that has spent the last 10 days doing a series on hearing God's voice at our church in Paris. My wife and I have missed most of it due to my recent U.S. trip and other events that we've had on at the same time.

I appreciated several comments that Pastor Mike made at the meeting. Here are some of the notes that I took during the meeting.

"One thing that God has revealed is that the kingdom is to be revealed in simplicity and power...so that everyone can do it. Simplicity of God’s truth with the power of God’s Spirit that allows us to do it. This transforms lives. The life and words of Jesus were simple, but powerful. When power is missing, we try to compensate for it with programs. Ask “Why is the power not here?” We need to find why, repent, and recover the simplicity of God’s truth. We need to live in such a way that if God doesn’t show up, it will be a mess or boring. Coming here, we don’t have anything to offer except God’s truth. If we don’t offer this, lives aren’t changed, people aren’t delivered, etc. This is something for the church to recover. If God’s power isn’t with us, we need to humble ourselves and ask why. He reveals it to us, we repent. What the Lord is asking us to do is Jesus’ ministry: the gospel, restoration of lives, deliverance/restoration of lives. We need to be confident of God’s power and go after the demonic. Understand power of humility, which is a source of God’s power. Repentance is how we live all day, everyday. Humility needs to be demonstrated to the people by the leaders. We should see healings everyday and strongholds being torn down every week. Not a program that we go and get somewhere, but a way of living life. I’m not going to bring you into new truths, but recover ancient truths and new wineskins. Church reformation: recovering in the church ancient truths in new wineskins."

"The movement that God’s wants to bring is with the nameless and faceless, those who appear to be unimportant in the world’s eyes. The same power of God in the leader will be in the people. Prepare the saints to do the work of the ministry. Leaders must see potential in people, not as they are today, but how they will be in God’s power. Many of the teammates were very broken, confused, disoriented people. Process of healing (inner and physical) and speaking God’s words over people. See with Jesus’ vision what He intends people to become. Teammates and leaders are always receiving prayer. It’s a state that we live in. How can we get it from us down to the people. Set us infrastructures so that anyone can minister to anyone."

"Power in humility, but don’t confuse this with passivity. Matthew 10: The kingdom of heaven is taken by forceful men. Some of the things that we’ve learned aren’t going to automatically become part of our lives. We must go after them and seize them. Human/divine cooperative. Go after truth and God’s Spirit makes this part of our lives. Aggressive humility. For example, hearing God’s voice. We have to set ourselves apart to hear God’s voice. We won’t automatically destroy these strongholds. We have to go after it with force. Have to move like warriors to go after truth."

While on the bus today, I read the chapter "Church: How I Go Without Getting Angry" in Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality (Thomas Nelson: Nashville, 2004). As one who loves the Church, yet pulls out my hair because of it sometimes, I appreciated his reflections.

"Here are the things I didn't like about the churches I went to. First, I felt like people were trying to sell me Jesus...I never felt like Jesus was a product. I wanted Him to be a person. Not only that, but they were alwas pointing out how great the specific church was. The bulletin read like a brochure for Amway. They were always saying how life-changing some conference was going to be. Life-changing? What does that mean? It sounded very suspicious. I wish they would just tell it to me straight rather than trying to sell me on everything. I felt like I got bombarded with commercials all week and then went to church and got even more." (p. 131)

"And yet another thing about the churches I went to: They seemed to be parrots for the Republican Party. Do we have to tow the party line on every single issue? Are the Republicans that perfect? I just felt like, in order to be part of the family, I had to think George W. Bush was Jesus. And I didn't. I didn't think that Jesus really agreed with a lot of the policies of the Republican Party or for that matter the Democratic Party. I felt like Jesus was a religious figure, not a political figure. I heard my pastor say once, when there were only a few of us standing around, that he hated Bill Clinton. I can understand not liking Clinton's politics, but I wanted my spirituality to rid me of hate, not give me reason for it." (pp. 131-2)

"One more thing that bugged me, then I will shut up about it. War metaphor. The churches I attended would embrace war metaphor. They would talk about how we are in a battle, and I agreed with them, only they wouldn't clarify that we were battling poverty and hate and injustice and pride and powers of darkness. They left us thinking that our war was against the liberals and homosexuals. Their teaching would have me believe I was the good person in the world and the liberals were the bad people in the world. Jesus taught that we are all bad and He is good, and He wants to rescue us because there is a war going on and we are hostages in that war. The truth is we are supposed to love the hippies, the liberals, and even the Democrats, and that God wants us to think of them as more important than ourselves. Anything short of this is not true to the teachings of Jesus." (p. 132)

Don Miller ended up being involved in a church-plant in Portland, Oregon called Imago Dei. Since beginning with a handful of primarily young people in 2000, Imago Dei has now grown to around 500 people of different levels of society. Don Miller mentions 4 things that he loves about Imago-Dei.

"First, it is spiritual. What I mean is that the people at Imago pray and fast about things. It took me awhile to understand that the answer to problems was not marketing or program but rather spirituality. If we needed to reach youth, we wuldn't do a pizza and a game night, we would get together and pray and fast and ask God what to do. God led some guys to start a homeless teen outreach downtown, and now they feed about one hundred homeless teenagers every week. It is the nuttiest youth group you will ever see, but that is what God said to do. I love that sort of things because rather than the church serving itself, the church is serving the lost and lonely." (p. 136)

"Second: Art. Imago supports the arts...Artists feel at home in Imago...I think there are artists at a lot of churches who don't have an outlet, and by creating an outlet, the church gives artists a chance to express themselves and in return the church gets free stuff to put on their walls." (pp. 136-7)

"Third: Community. (p. 137)

"Fourth: Authenticity...By being true I am allowing people to get to know the real me, and it feels better to have people love he real me than the me I invented." (p. 137)

"So one of the things I had to do after God provided a church for me was to let go of any bad attitude I had against the other churches I'd gone to. In the end, I was just different, you know. It wasn't that they were bad, they just didn't do it for me...In my mind, I had to tell my heart to love the people at the churches I used to go do, the people who were different from me. This was entirely freeing because when I told my heart to do this, my heart did it, and now I think very fondly of those wacko Republican fundementalists, and I know that they love me, too, and I know that we will eat together, we will all break bread together in heaven, and we will love each other so purely it will hurt because we are a family in Christ." (pp. 137-8)

So here is a step-by-step formula for how you, too, can go to church without getting angry:
**Pray that God will show you a church filled with people who share your interests and values.
**Go to the church God shows you.
**Don't hold grudges against any other churches. God loves those churches almost as much as He loves yours. (p. 138)