01.30.08

prophetic 2008

Posted in ekklesia, formation, gospel, theology at 4:00 pm by len

Backyard Missionary writes,

I began pondering why we crave this revival experience and I wonder if its because we are too lazy to get off our own butts and get involved with the people in the communities we live in and do the hard yards of making connections, knowing that many of them will never lead to a person coming to faith? I wonder if we don’t just want God to do the ‘hard work’ of mission (we will hold prayer meetings – until we get bored because nothing has happened) and then when he has done his thing people will flock to our churches to join us… and become like us… and we won’t have to change one bit… we won’t have to experience any discomfort at all. Of course we only want ‘appropriate’ people to join our churches so it would need to be a selective revival of the middle
classes.In many churches the people pray and send God out on mission, when in reality it is us he has commissioned to the task.

We really have to stop this nonsense talk about taking the world for Christ when most of us don’t even know our own next door neighbours. And we need to stop expecting God to do what we are too lazy or afraid to do ourselves.

Amen. Kingdom Grace adds a thought from Shane Claiborne: “Get ready, friends…God is preparing us for something really, really-small.”

I love it. I remember debating with a friend of mine some years back who was speaking to teens one evening about their destiny. I told him I was tired of that word, and tired of over hyped promises of glory. I told him that more honestly we should be calling kids to serve, to be willing to stick it out through ordinary days, to exit the lime light, forget about themselves and find themselves through offering the love of God to others. The way up is down.

But at this time of year the so-called prophetic voices are busy with the yearly hype: key words being fresh wind, release, anointing, revival, destiny, inheritance, authority, harvest, new beginnings etc. It’s easy to sell this stuff. Who doesn’t want to revel in a future glory now? Who wants to embrace the Spirit with the Cross?

I took on the restorationist movement in a lengthy article about five years back, and you can find it HERE. The prophetic movement is generally gnostic, immersed in a spiritualist paradigm at the expense of an incarnational paradigm. David Fitch has taken on this issue from another angle in The Great Giveaway where he writes about two types of gathering: the lecture hall and the rock concert. And one of my favorite quotes from Jim Wallis runs like this:

Thus, the renewal of the church will come not through a recovery of personal experience or straight doctrine, nor through innovative projects of evangelism or social action, nor in creative techniques or liturgical worship, nor in the gift of tongues, nor in new budgets, new buildings, and new members. The renewal of the church will come about through the work of the Spirit in restoring and reconstituting the church as a local community whose common life bears the marks of radical obedience to the lordship of Jesus Christ.
Practically, this means a clear recognition that the demands of obedient discipleship will bring us into conflict with the ordinary social values and normal patterns of the world systems which continually seek to fashion us into their image and conform us to their molds.

Agenda for Biblical People, p.100-101

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