Churchless Christian

Reformation is a free act or a repeated series of actions which are intended by the
reformer to recover, reestablish, augment, and perfect certain essential values which at one time existed in human society but which subsequently were lost or impaired by willful neglect or due to a general decline(Ladner, 1959).

During the 1998 Commonwealth games held in Malaysia an incident happaned which I will never forget. It happaned during the Men's walk. An unfancied New Zealand walker shot to the front of the race and left the rest of the field in his dust, including I think the current world champion. He ignored the incrediable, heat, humidity and pollution and walked at a speed he had never walked before. For over an hour all the TV cameras were fixed on this dynamic walk and with a few Km's to the finish it looked like he had the gold medal in his pocket. All of a sudden this Kiwi walker started to wobble and lurch as he walked. It got worse and worse he looked like he was totally drunk. The punishing pace was simply to much for his body. For a little while he tried to continue including crawling on his hands and knees but it was to much. Eventually he was bundled off the course and rushed to hospital in a critical state of dehydration. The brutal fact was that the last finisher in that race beat him because he did not complete it.

The reason I share this story is that it reminds me of my self. I sieze on a new ideas and plans and charge away with huge enthusiasim and motivation. People must watch and say wow look at that guy go. But a little way down the track I start looking like the Kiwi walker (usually I don't even get that far!). After a while I start off on a new project without finishing the project I was on. Being honest my completion rate can be very low. But you know what? Our God is a God of completion!

"Now Finish the work, so that your eager willingness to do it may be matched by your completion of it" (2 Corinthians 8:11)

1. Before God opens new doors of opportunity we need to complete and shut the doors he has already given us.

10. If this speaks to you, I encourage you to get up and go and find a door in your house that is open. Shut the door and as you do ask God to help you be a completer. If you can think of something specifically say it as you shut that door. Our whole family did this on Friday night, including our 4 year old, it was fantastic (except when they tried to lock each other in the toilet).

A mighty score of 61 to take Kim down for the first time in her chosen game YES

I am often asked by people about the types (or categories) of people who are starting to explore a more organic faith outside the Institutional Church. In my personal (and limited) experience I have found two obvious age ranges that appear to be dominating in New Zealand. The most dominant group I have noticed so far is people aged 55 to 75, both males and Females and couples with youngish children mainly in there mid thirties.
A new book by A.J Kiesling shows a slightly different experience of who is beginning to move into the organic church.

BACKDOOR BELIEVERS
Keisling breaks down the generations into five sub groups which he labels
Seniors (1926 and before)
Builders (1927 – 1945)
Boomers (1946 – 1964)
Busters (1965 – 1984)
Mosaics (1985 – 2005)
He states that the older two groups are more likely to cling to the traditional church and the sacred hour on Sunday morning. Predictably, the farther you move down the age scale the less resistance you find to change, including the decision to leave the institutional church (IC) for other expressions of Christianity. Young boomers on the cusp of the buster group may straddle the fence for awhile if they reach a place of spiritual inertia. Busters and especially mosaics won’t stick with anything for long if it doesn’t ring true or relevant.
George Barna backs this premise up by stating “The great interest in spirituality among Baby Busters is assumed to have led them to embrace churches as their second home. Actually busters have the lowest level of church attendance, church giving, Sunday School involvement, small group participation, church volunteerism, Bible reading etc. Busters are the single most disengaged population group (in the U.S.A) in relation to organised religion.
Little wonder then that alternative forms of ‘churching’ appeal so much to the younger generation among us. This trend away from traditionalism towards creative expression expressions of faith will likely only gain momentum in the next few years.
Taken from Jaded by AJ Kiesling (Baker Books, U.S.A, 2004) pg 42

One of the hardest habits (or addictions?) it seems for an organic believer is to break free of our liturgical behaviour when we gather together. As soon as we get together we automatically assume there must be some praise and worship songs sung. We often expect that we should open in prayer, have a time of prayer. The big part of our liturgy is that a ‘special’ person chosen for the day shares ‘the word of God’. We quickly compartmentalise everything and expect it to be over in less than two hours. When we are so used to doing ‘church’ we quickly behave and do what we did in our home group / cell group settings. The fact is many organic believers and churches once again slip into institutional church behaviour except now its being done on a smaller less effective scale!

Wolfgang Simson points out that the liturgy of the church service hardly differs between denominations, whether Pentecostal, Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical etc. He also points out that it is not based remotely on the New Testament but on what they did in the Synagogue which was an invention of man not God (remember there is not one single prophecy or mention by God for the Jews to establish synagogues in the Old testament). And as Wolfgang who is Jewish points out if you go into a synagogue today you will see basically the same liturgy.

So what should you do when you gather together? Well you need to work that out for your selves. I suggest you read 1st Corinthians and see if the themes in that book are being reflected in your own groups. I ask this of myself as I write these words.

Are people coming ready to share a prophecy, a song, a testimony, a revelation from the word of God.

I really try and remind people when they gather that they should spiritually and physically (eg food) give something to the gathering and take something from the gathering. If everyone does that it is a powerful time in Christ.

Even though things are a lot more casual and ‘real’ when we gather, as individuals we still need to before hand have prepared spiritually as an athlete prepares for the Olympics as Paul says. Slackness in our personal walk will equate with slackness when we gather.

Avoid ‘discussing’ what people share. Talk it through if there is lack of agreement or uncertainty but otherwise focus on applying what is shared to your life instead of wasting words with impressing one another with your ‘knowledge’ and your stories.

J. Lee Grady is the editor of Charisma. He writes his Fire In My Bones column for Charisma Online twice a week. www.injesus.com
Last week I addressed a group of Pentecostal scholars who had gathered at Lee University in Cleveland, Tenn., to celebrate the miracle of 100 years since Azusa and to envision the future of our movement. I told them bluntly: It is time for us to move on. We must kill our sacred cows, tear down the old monuments and have some funerals. As wonderful as the past was, we can't live there. God says to us: "'Behold, I will do a new thing'" (Is. 43:19, ASV).

Here are just a few of the "new things" God is doing :

1. He's shifting us from buildings to the organic church. Almost all ministry encounters in the book of Acts took place outside of religious buildings. Yet we still hang on to the outdated idea that God wants to live inside a brick-and-mortar temple. He wants to dwell among His people! Many of the people we are called to reach will never go near our buildings (which, by the way, sit empty most of the week). We must take Christ to the marketplace through home churches, workplace Bible studies, campus ministries, street meetings—and into cyberspace.

2. He's shifting us from pulpits to people. The believers at Azusa Street celebrated the fact that God can use anybody—regardless of class or religious pedigree. But we quickly fell back into the old mind-set that requires a vast chasm between clergy and laity. Every member of the church is a minister. We must equip the saints for the work.

3. He’s shifting us from racism to reconciliation. As much as we talk about our heritage of racial integration, the truth is painful: We are still too separated. (And it’s not just white folks who harbor racist attitudes.) Jesus is serious about having a church that reflects the rainbow colors of heaven. We must think multiculturally. And we must sit at the feet of ethnically diverse leaders—including those from the developing world—and adjust our outdated Western paradigms.

4. He’s shifting us from male-dominated to egalitarian. We must allow full participation of women in ministry, and make room for their leadership gifts. We will never reach modern American culture if we keep our chauvinistic mind-sets. And we will never fulfill the Great Commission if we don’t empower and equip the female half of the church that has been marginalized and neglected.

5. He’s shifting us from hidden sin to healthy holiness. We have congregations full of people who are not whole. A large percentage of Christians struggle continually with addictions, bitterness, life-crippling beliefs systems, wounds from dysfunctional families and even occultism. We must become bondage breakers. We need another holiness movement—but this time it must focus on the heart rather than on a dress code, and it must lead people to an encounter with the Father’s love rather than into paralyzing legalism.

6. He’s shifting us from human ability to supernatural power. We Pentecostals claim to believe in miracles, but we have little to show for it. Has our faith dried up?God wants us to rediscover New Testament, book of Acts-style Christianity. And that won’t happen until we rediscover book of Acts-style prayer.

7. He’s shifting us from poverty to prosperity. I’m not talking about a message that tells every Christian to expect a Lexus in his garage, or that causes preachers to chase after watches, yachts and Botox injections. We must dispense with that foolishness. But we must also reject the Pentecostal poverty mentality of the past so that we can have the faith to fund world evangelism. God wants to give us billions of dollars to feed the poor, plant churches, build hospitals and transform nations.

8. He’s shifting us from escapism to conquest. So many of us have viewed the future with pessimism. We’ve been wimps rather than warriors. We thought everything was getting worse, as if Jesus simply wants us to “hold on” until the rapture. God is calling us to adapt a triumphant view of history. The Bible says we win. We need to start acting like it.

The most terrible truth I have had to face upto in my own life during 2004 was that I had been living in a Christian ghetto for the majority of my life. What is a ghetto? A ghetto is an area where people from a specific culture or religion live as a group, voluntarily or involuntarily, in milder or stricter seclusion. That’s what church as I knew it was!

A couple of times I have heard people express concern about my apparent negativity towards the institutional church. They say to me “Large church, small church, house church, we need them all to reach New Zealand for the Kingdom of God”. Deep down my desire is to be a typical Kiwi and nod my head and smile, and agree with them, and say that they have a point, and say that I was not intending to be negative about the institutional church. However friends let’s be honest, after three or four generations of my family being in Leadership in the church and the mission field, and from sitting down and trying to read the New Testement without my cultural glasses on, I do feel negative about the institutional church. So what is my view point on the institutional church?

1. Institutionalised Churches are great community organisations. They provide food banks, counseling, after school care, toy libraries, budgeting advice, spiritual support, friendship etc. Former Prime Minister Jenny Shipley acknowledged that the New Zealand church provided one third of the social welfare cover during the late 1990’s. The negatives to this are: a) Christ never told the church to make this their primary purpose. He told us to look after the poor amongest us. b) As community organisations the institutionalised church has not succeeded in extending the kingdom of God, and bringing the other 90% of the nation into the church. 90% of NZ are unmoved by this awesome effort, and no closer to discovering Christ. If being an effective community organisation was a key to fruitfulness, New Zealand would have been in revival for 150 years!

2. Awesome Music…………. And? New Zealand Churches spend more money on their sound systems then on Evangelism. They spend far more man hours on organising and producing the music then in any other area of the church. Most churches when they plant, spend the majority of the money they have initially on a sound system (I did!). Is this biblical? Does this help us worship God through our lives every day? Does it please God to watch this? Is all of this effort and money worth it just for a sing – a - long that gives you goose bumps?

3. Awesome Preaching……….And? We as Western Christians know more, and have trained more then any other Christian generation in history, yet we have produced the least. We are addicted to information we do not act upon, and are allergic to the obedience that Christ calls for.

4. Good programs for our kids………Really? The reality is that we as Christian parents, thinking that our children are gaining spiritual input from youth group or Sunday school, make spiritual guidance and input at home less of a priority. Statistics tell us that children’s and youth programs make no statistical difference to the horrendous fall out rate of young people between 18 and 28 (some estimates put it at 75%). We forget that Sunday Schools and youth groups were started in the 19th Century for slum children who worked and had no education or Christian input. For this purpose they were excellent, but they were never expected to be Christian baby sitting services or primary religious education vehicles as we use them now. Parents are abdicating there Biblical responsibility to raise there children in the Lord to the organisational church, with disasterous consequences. If a child does not experience day to day spirituality (more than just grace at dinner or bedtime prayers!!), and live Christ in the home it’s irrelevant whether they go to a programme or not.

The most terrible truth I have had to face upto in my own life during 2004 was that I had been living in a Christian ghetto for the majority of my life. What is a ghetto? A ghetto is an area where people from a specific culture or religion live as a group, voluntarily or involuntarily, in milder or stricter seclusion. That’s what church as I knew it was!

Let’s be honest. Most ‘committed’ Christians are so involved financially, emotionally, relationally and timewise with their local church, that they are cut off from the rest of the world. The majority of church members often don’t even have close friend’s who they spend quality time with that are not believers. John Baker in a recent book review remarks on being raised in the New Zealand church “I was basically born into the Christian faith. From the time I was one week old I was in church every Sunday. Don’t try and quote scripture at me, I know it all. I know how to act to be accepted and look spiritual within the Christian world. I cannot point to a time in my life when I could say I wasn’t a Christian. But I am not at all sure I know how to relate to the 90% of the New Zealand population that will only ever be seen dead inside the Church, and maybe not even then”. Bill Hybels said that the local church is the most complex organization in the world. He’s right (sadly), and to keep this complex organization functioning we need to do everything that Christ either said not to do or at the best didn’t mention to ‘serve the house’, and thus run out of time and energy to do what he did command his followers to do.

As institutionalized believers we are trying to be salt in a salt mine or light in a lighting shop!

It is strange that we try and get people to join our Christian ghetto by utilizing bizarre mating rituals called ‘methods of evangelism’. We need to invent these methods such as Evangelistic rallies, Impact World Tour or Alpha etc to artificially create ways of making contact with the other 90% of New Zealand who do not know our Father. Yet we wonder “why?” after all the buzz is over. “Why?” after all the positive responses and full alter calls and commitments to faith, “why?” after a month or two, hardly anyone has climbed over the ghetto wall and joined our group? (When these methods do work in growing our church, it is usually people from another Christian ghetto). When I was in Singapore I loved visiting places such as Little India or China town with all their attractions and interesting things, but I wouldn’t want to live there. Now that I am a ‘back slider’, I love popping along now and then to a church service (not really!) but I don’t want to live out my life in Christ there.

Church leaders would reject what I am saying here and point to all the things their church has done to advance the Kingdom of God. But the normal church member who sacrifices so much to keep their church organization functioning and flourishing but have lost touch with the other 90% of New Zealand, must realize that these points are true. How can we change the world when we do not even connect with the world? Friend, how sad is this, that I had to leave the organized church; I had to resign my professional ministry, to have a chance of breaking free from the ghetto. Even after a year of leaving, I realize that I still have the habits and culture of the Christian ghetto. But as I am breaking free, I am truly becoming a follower of Christ. I am learning to be salt to a flavorless dinner, I am learning to be light in darkness, and I am starting to see friends and family that I was too busy for before, starting to say yes to Jesus Christ. I am finally being obedient to Christ’s last words to go into all the world.

Friend we can continue to sit in church and sing and pray, prophecy and run programs for revival, fantasizing that 90% of this nation are all of a sudden going to jump over the ghetto wall and join our club, or we can gain the courage to climb over the 1700 year old walls of Christendom ourselves, and join the real world, with the radical love of Jesus Christ in our hearts, ready to be salt and light.

Friends I do believe that the institutional church is a brake to the advancement of the Kingdom of God. Inban Caldwell once said to me, ‘the Devil never worries when we go to church, but he really worries when we become the church’. Let us truly become the church without walls, and be obedient to Christ and GO.

I bought Kim an ipod for our 13th wedding aniversary. Its a 4 gig nano and I got it for $260.00 (NZ)new, which I felt was a bit of a bargin.
I have found it awesome for private conection with God, and has really kick started me in prayer again. Got me back into music more as well, after hardly listening to any over the last few years.
I also love the pod casts, listening to alot of history and politics ones at the momment. Its actually got me back into walking so I can listen to my podcasts. Physical and spiritual health through the ipod. The organic believers baptisim or is it communion?

This ia a picture of my 5th win in the annual house church waterslide competition. We did not have it this year which was a bit slack