Many of you will have seen the pictures of Mark Inglis and his frost bitten fingers after he climbed Mt Everest last week. It was a shock to see his hands looking fine but the tops of his fingers being competly black (and needing to be amputated).
As followers of Christ meeting in more organic ways we need to guard against winding up like those black finger tips cut off from the blood flow that course through the body of Christ and indeed through the whole Kingdom of God. I was reminded of this last week, when I met with a group of people I did not usually gather with. I was blessed to be prayed for and had prophetic and encouraging words spoken over me. I realised that it had been a couple of years since 'outsiders' had spoken into my life. Untill they prayed I never realised how dry I had become and how limited my thinking had became. As organic believers we often react from the excesses of normal church where we can go up for an alter call and hear a different speaker every Sunday plus a conference every week turning one into a bit of a fat cat. But at the same time to cut one self off from outside input turns the fat cat into a skeliton which is not great either. The key is balance.
In the world wide study of churches for Natural Church development. Schultz found that the two key factors to keeping believers and churches healthy was small groups (surprise surprise!) and lots of external input from those outside the local gathering. The brutal fact is that if we are not welcoming or even pursueing outside input it is likely what we are doing is going to get sick and possibly die or even worse become dangerous. Remember cults avoid outside input.
The neat thing is that as many of you are experianceing, the Holy Spirit is miraculously connecting people and gatherings together in his way and his time. If this is happening, fantastic. At the same time if it's not I personally believe (and am doing) that we should purposely seek out interconnection if it is not happening naturally.
The last two years have not been easy for the gatherings I have been connected with in regards to getting outside input. Now that we are outside the mainstream so to speak, its important that connection happens with gifts that are likeminded and are basically on the same page, which limits the connection one can find. At the same time because I have put the effort in to reach out and find out who else is around, I can confidantly say that within my area there is people outside my gathering who are basically on the same page and have the gifts mentioned in the New testement.