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by Leonard Hjalmarson
We create our buildings and thereafter our buildings create us.
This spring I read Gilbert Bilezikian's "Community 101." In his book he states that, "An increasing number of Christians are waking up to the fact that .. the church has become ineffective in fulfilling its mission because it has lost a sense of its own identity as a community. They realize that not every organization that calls itself a church represents the church as Christ conceived it." He goes on to say that he asked fifty junior and senior college students to write a one sentence definition of the church. Their answers varied from "people who are saved," and "places of worship" to "opportunity to put on a Sunday disguise" and "sanctified gossip centers." Zondervan, 1997, pp.48-49
Whatever you make of the relationship between community and kingdom, it isn't difficult to see that the western church is largely failing in her task. We have become "holy huddles" of middle class saints, safe in the fortress.
Is the fortress mentality completely new? Or do our modern "temples" have their counterpart in the bible? And is there another biblical image that can lead us back to the freedom and mobility found in the New Testament? After all, Stephen showed us the way forward when he proclaimed to the Jews, for whom the Temple and Jerusalem were everything...
"The Most High does not dwell in buildings made by hands; as the prophet says, "Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool; What kind of house will you build for me?" Acts 7:49
* * *
The Mosaic covenant and the forty years in the wilderness on the way to the promised land are the defining story of Israel. The events surrounding the deliverance of Israel from Egypt are recounted more often in the Psalms and the Prophets than any other story. The lessons learned in the wilderness are recounted in story and song again and again by David and other Psalmists.
The stories and songs that have been given to us on the Exodus event have often been seen as a prelude to the "main event." While it's true that the arrival in the land of Promise is the goal, we make a mistake when we connect the building of the Temple with this fulfillment. It would be more true to say that the pilgrim people of Israel settled in the land and lost their edge. They lost the sense of being a pilgrim people, and they lost their dependence on the Holy One of Israel. For that reason, the Lord had to give them over to their enemies.
There are many lessons for us the people of God. First, we were never intended to be settled; we were meant to continue to be a pilgrim people. We were never intended to move away from transition: we should continually be in transition with God to unknown places - that's the walk of faith. It's when we are secure in the land that the danger starts.
A few weeks ago I picked my copy of Jean Vanier's book "Community and Growth" from the shelf and was leafing through it.
"It is important for communities to discover the focal point of fidelity which enables the spirit to stay strong, and what makes for deviation from it. There seem to me to be two essential-- and linked -- elements which lead to deviation: the search for security, or a weariness of insecurity, and a lack of fidelity to the initial vision which gave the foundation its spirit.
"When a community is born, its founders have to struggle to survive and announce their ideal. So they find themselves confronted with contradictions and sometimes even persecution. These oblige the members of the community to emphasize their commitment; they strengthen motivation and encourage people to go beyond themselves to rely totally on Providence. Sometimes only the direct intervention of God can save them. When they are stripped of all their wealth, of all security and human support, they must depend on God and the people around them to understand the witness of their life. They are obliged to remain faithful to prayer and the glow of their love; it is a question of life or death. Their total dependence guarantees their authenticity; their weakness is their strength.
"But when a community has enough members to do all the work, when it has enough material goods, it can relax. It has strong structures. It is fairly secure. It is then that there is danger."
The tabernacle was ordained by God. It is a picture of God walking with His people in the wilderness. It's a picture of a pilgrim people with their pilgrim God, always on the move, always flexible, always adapting to a changing environment. It's a literal picture of the people walking with God, dependent on Him and constantly on the watch for what He is doing. It is a picture of the church in transition.
On the other hand, the Temple was not ordained by God, but was David's idea. It is a picture of institutionalization (sometimes called, "hardening of the categories"). The Temple was fixed, permanent, inflexible. It is a picture of the institutional church, a church which no longer responds to the voice of God and fears change and transition. It's a picture of a church secure in the culture, with too much at stake to be flexible and adaptable.
Let's take a look these Old Testament pictures and see what we can learn about transition and change.
Old Covenant and New Covenant
There are three central elements in the Mosaic covenant: sacrifice, priesthood and tabernacle. Together these constituted the covenant relationship between God and His people. Sacrifice and priesthood and atonement cleared the way to God and were the center of covenant faithfulness.
We stand in a new dispensation, however, where Jesus Christ has fulfilled sacrifice, priesthood, and tabernacle. He is our great High Priest; therefore we need no earthly priest (Heb.4: 14; 8: 1). The priesthood has passed away, or rather has been given to all believers (1 Pet.2: 9).
Likewise Jesus is the true sacrifice, to which all sacrifices looked forward. No further sacrifice is necessary or even possible (Heb.7: 27; 9: 14, 25-28). The sacrificial system has become redundant because all that was foreshadowed in the covenant with Moses was fulfilled in the death of Jesus. The only sacrifice that remains is the church herself as a "living sacrifice" (Romans 12: 1-2).
It is also true that Jesus is the fulfillment of the tabernacle (Heb.8-9). He became flesh and dwelt (literally, "tented") among us (John 1: 14) and "has entered, not a sanctuary made with hands, a copy of the true one, but into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf" (Heb.9:24). In another sense, the church, His body, is part of the true tabernacle. We are "God's house," (Heb.3: 6; 1 Tim.3: 15), a "holy temple," (Eph.2: 21; 2 Cor.6: 16), a "dwelling of God in the Spirit" (Eph.2: 22).
Sacrifice, priesthood, and tabernacle - all these were instituted through Moses, and all passed away with the coming of Jesus and the birth of the church. The church was born without any religious cult, though it took some time for the understanding of these things to soak in (see for example Paul's dispute with the Jerusalem leaders in Acts 15, reflected in Galatians 2 and 3).
The temptation has been to reinstate these three elements among God's people and to turn community into an institution. At times, the church has done just that. Returning to the spirit of the Old Testament religious system, she has set up a professional priesthood, turned the Lord's Supper into a sacrificial system, and built great Temples. When Reformation has responded to these backward trends, reformation in doctrine has not always been accompanied by changes in structure. While the modern church is orthodox in theology, she is often heretical in practice.
The Role of the Tabernacle
In the Mosaic covenant the tabernacle symbolized God's presence. In his Gospel John makes use of that symbol in a way his readers can understand when he says of Jesus that he dwelt (Greek: "tented") among us.
The Mosaic tabernacle was literally a tent, and it was assembled at the command of the Lord to Moses: "Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst" (Ex.25: 8). The core idea was God's habitation with His people. The Lord could not dwell in their hearts because of sin and rebellion, so his living among them had to be symbolic. The Lord ordered the tabernacle assembled, and He revealed the lay out to Moses in exacting detail (Ex.26: 30).
For the church, however, the tabernacle is fulfilled in the body of Christ, and the necessity of physical symbols has passed away. God now dwells in the hearts and bodies of His people by the Holy Spirit (John 14: 17). Jesus said that if one loves and obeys Him, both the Father and Son "will come to him and make our home with him" (John 14: 23).
The amazing reality of the New Covenant in Jesus' blood is that God no longer merely dwells AMONG us, He dwells WITHIN us! The veil has been torn in two; the heart of stone has been replaced with a heart of flesh. WE are the very stones in the wall; together we are a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
Progression from Tabernacle to Temple
In the OT we see a progression from tabernacle to temple. Then the NT shows us an inward movement from Temple to people.
In the reign of David the tabernacle was replaced with the temple. Are these things only different forms of the same idea, or do they represent different aspects of God's plan? The Old Testament account shows clear differences between tabernacle and Temple, and in the differences we can shed light on the purpose and place of the church in our day.
Before we look closely at the rise of the temple, consider the description of the ark of the covenant, which rested within the tabernacle.
Two cubits and a half shall be its length… And you shall overlay it with pure gold.. you shall cast four rings of gold for it, and put them on its four feet.. and you shall put the poles into the rings on the sides of the ark, to carry it by them.. (Ex.25: 10-14).
On top of the ark were the mercy seat, a golden cover with two cherubim, with wings stretched out over the ark. Isn't it striking that this beautiful and costly creation was carried on ordinary wooden poles?
The ark itself was a perfect symbol of the Presence of God with His people. The people of God moved with God. God was not captured or anchored in the tent of meeting, but was mobile. God is free to be spontaneous, unpredictable. He is always true to Himself, but not limited to our conceptions.
In the same way, the tabernacle symbolized God's presence with His people. The mobility of the tabernacle represented His dynamic nature.
So the tabernacle was flexible, impermanent, mobile. It was a simple yet beautiful place. But the temple was fixed and immovable.
The tabernacle was God's idea. But the temple was David's idea. God sent word to David:
"Would you build me a house to dwell in? I have not dwelt in a house since the day I brought up the people of Israel from Egypt to this day, but I have been moving about in a tent for my dwelling. In all places where I moved with all the people of Israel, did I speak a word with any of the Judges of Israel, whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying, "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"
Furthermore, while it is true that David was king, the kingship itself was not God's idea (1 Sam.8: 4-9).
God allowed the temple to be built, but not by David. David made the preparations, and Solomon did the building. In contrast to the tabernacle, the blueprint did not come from Mt. Sinai. God was not the architect this time.
The tabernacle was the true sign of the presence of God with his people, and only secondarily the temple. The tabernacle is a truer picture of how God acts through history.
Church Which is Not the Church
So, today we have our "churches" which are not the church, since the church is a people. But we have buildings which we sometimes talk about as "sanctuaries" as though there are holy places. There are not; there are only holy PEOPLE.
These places are fixed. They are immovable. They can't move with God and the Spirit. They lose flexibility and cause us to become inflexible.
Buildings do not depend on what God is doing; they are there whether God continues to ordain them or not. Even when the Lord removes His blessing from the church on the corner, the building remains. Those who have not heard His voice will think of fleshly ways to maintain the structures: funding drives, luncheons, or manipulation of the few people who remain to increase their giving.
We can't risk "ending" a church because we have a mortgage and priests, or pastors to support. We have to keep oiling the wheels. As long as the structure stands we feel we must support it. God is not free to move; he is not free to take us in new directions. For this reason God is raising up people outside the structure, primarily small groups of people who are not tied to tradition and are not afraid to venture to unknown places.
Structures Are Temporal
Some years ago Elizabeth O'Connor wrote that,
"Sometimes when the fire of faith burns low and we forget that the maker and Builder of our City is God we look at the structures of our church and become anxious. It seems that we move too fast and there are too few of us, and that we are inadequate for the task. At one of these moments someone said to Gordon, "Can't you see all the weaknesses everywhere and the possibility that these little structures we are building will all come tumbling down?"
He replied, "That which is in God cannot be shaken. If it is not of God, then let us praise Him when it collapses and move on to the next thing." Call to Commitment, p.178
Our temples are territorial. They cause us to ask questions about "who is in" and "who is out," and to worry about the other temple down the road lest they gain more adherents than us. They support competition and division in the Body. They cause us to dwell in fear and to regard people as our possessions instead of the Lord's.
Our temples are fixed in time and place. They symbolize the inflexibility of the old rather than the freedom of the new. They symbolize religion, with its many stipulations and its spirit of control. They tie up wealth that should be used for the kingdom. But this was never God's desire.
Consider the woman at the well. She understood the culture. She knew, as we know today, that the building on the corner is where true worship occurs. But she had a problem with that, because it excluded some people: namely, the Samaritans like herself and other outcasts.
Sound familiar? How many of the marginalized people do you see in church on a Sunday morning? But Jesus came not for the healthy, but for the sick. Dallas Willard writes,
So we must see from our heart that:
Then there are the "seriously" crushed ones: The flunk-outs and drop-outs and burned-outs. The broke and the broken. The drug heads and the divorced. The HIV positive and herpes-ridden. brain-damaged, the incurably ill. The barren and the pregnant many-times or at the wrong time. The overemployed, the underemployed, the unemployed. The unemployable. The swindled, shoved aside, the replaced. The parents with children living on street, the children with parents not dying in the "rest" home. lonely the incompetent, the stupid. The emotionally starved or emotionally dead. And on and on and on. Is it true that "Earth has sorrow that heaven cannot heal?" It is true! That is precisely gospel of heaven's availability that comes to us through Beatitudes. And you don't have to wait until you're dead. Jesus brings to all such people as these the present blessedness of the present kingdom - regardless of circumstances. The condition of life for by human beings through the ages is attained in the quietly transforming friendship of Jesus.
These people don't fit in our churches because our churches are places of security against the culture. They are designed to exclude people, and to keep others comfortable. They are fortresses and Temples, not tents and tabernacles. Willard continues,
Can't we feel some sympathy for Jesus' contemporaries, who huffed at him, "This man is cordial to sinners, and even eats them!" Sometimes I feel I don't really want the kingdom to be open to such people. But it is. That is the heart of God. And, as John learned from his experience preaching to those wretched Ninevites we can't shrink him down to our size.
In Paul's first letter to the church at Corinth, he gives an awesome list of those who, continuing in their evil, cannot "inherit kingdom": "fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, male prostitutes, ac homosexuals, thieves, the greedy, drunkards, slanderers, a swindlers" (6:10). Then he adds, "And such were some of you, you were cleansed, made holy and justified in the name of the I Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God." The Divine Conspiracy
When the Samaritan woman asked Jesus about worship in Jerusalem, he responded to her that "the time is coming and now is when those who worship the Father must worship him in spirit and in truth." The heart is the place of true worship. Linking worship to a particular place or a fixed time is religion and idolatry. Worse, we take pride in our temples, in outward appearance, instead of the real issues of heart.
On the morning of February 4th, 2000 I was reading in Nehemiah and Ezra, thinking about the church in the new millennium. The Lord was helping me pull some pieces together when I had to leave to meet some friends for coffee.
I drove to the home of a friend, and when he got into my car he began telling me about a dream that another friend's nine year old son had had early this same morning. The boy's name was Joshua.
In his dream Joshua was standing outside a temple and God was standing beside him. God spoke to Joshua and told him that the temple had to be destroyed because the people were not worshipping the true God; they were worshipping other things.
God told Joshua to kick the temple with his heel. Before he did so, Joshua yelled at the people inside, warning them about what was going to happen. Some began running out of the temple, but there were some that stayed in the temple and who wouldn't come out. Joshua then kicked the wall. The people who remained inside were standing under their idols when the temple started to collapse. Joshua saw the idols that they had made fall on the people and crush their heads.
The LORD is shaking all that can be shaken, that what is built on the Rock alone may remain. Old things must come down before new things can rise from the dust to replace them. As Graham Cooke put it,
"We cannot hold onto our old order and still progress to a new level of anointing. When a new paradigm unfolds before us, it will always take us back to ground zero. Paradigms do not build on each other; they replace each other. God loves this! We start again with a new dependency rising out of fresh inadequacy." A Divine Confrontation, Destiny Image, 1999
The church is to dwell in tents. A tabernacle (or tent) can be taken down in an instant. It can be transported to other places. A small group of people in a tent can move quickly when the cloud moves. A large group in an established temple have too much to protect.
The Loss of the Prophetic Voice and the Danger of Idolatry
With the building of the Temple a religious class grew up, and eventually the priests were found in the Temple, but the prophetic voice was outside it. There came an inevitable separation, because God was increasingly identified with a structure He had never intended. Israel had literally placed "God in a box," to try to make him safe. But God is never safe, and doesn't dwell in our boxes.
This separation between the prophetic and the pastoral is a common problem in our modern churches. Many churches have completely lost the prophetic voice, and are unable to listen to God. They intuitively know that He is not safe. Inviting Him to speak would be like letting the lions loose. They sense that they are not really pursuing the kingdom, but only playing church games. But the games are comfortable and familiar.
On the other side of the coin we have churches which have a powerful prophetic voice, but lacking pastoral sensitivity. These churches have institutionalized the prophetic in an effort to preserve it. They don't trust the body; they only trust authority. They have settled for a different kind of safety and they have lost an accurate perspective on history. Philip Yancey writes,
"There are two ways to picture how God interacts with history. The traditional model shows a God up in heaven who periodically flashes a lightning bolt of intervention: the calling of Moses from a burning bush, the Ten Plagues, the prophets, the birth of Jesus. The Bible indeed portrays such divine interventions, though they usually follow years of waiting and doubt.
"Another model shows God beneath history, continuously sustaining it and occasionally breaking the surface with a visible act that emerges into plain sight, like the tip of an iceberg. Anyone can notice the dramatic acts --Egypt's Pharaoh had no trouble noticing the plagues--but the life of faith involves a search below the surface as well, an ear fine-tuned to rumors of transcendence." Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor, page 252
There in a nutshell is one difference between the mainstream charismatic and prophetic movements and my personal inclination relative to the church and the kingdom. Some want to live on the mountaintop. Perhaps some can. For me the air is too thin, the sun too hot. I'm growing to love the cool and green of the valley.
In the gospels we find a single literal instance of Jesus on the mountaintop. On this occasion Jesus appears with a Patriarch and a prophet, and the disciples want to build booths. They'd like to stay up there in the clouds. Who wouldn't? It's glorious up there. But Jesus doesn't accept their proposal. The easy path to glory is not for us. Instead, the only possible path to glory is via the cross, "always carrying about in our bodies the dying of Jesus, that the life of Jesus may also be manifest in our flesh." Jesus leads the disciples back among the ordinary people and the outcasts.
We have to live in the tension between the Temple and the tabernacle, the institutional and the spontaneous, the word and the Spirit, begin relearning to be a pilgrim people, a people on a journey of faith together.
Whenever we define as permanent and heavenly that which is temporal and earthly, we are attempting to invest with divine reality that which is of human construction. We are essentially building an idol. As a Mennonite theologian once phrased it, "We build images of godness and then attempt to breathe life into them."
In Joshua's dream the walls falling down interests me in a particular way. Walls represent human construction of boundaries. Boundaries are a way of telling who is in, and who is out. Boundaries define property, and they define authority. And boundaries create restriction.
I don't think that our human construction of boundaries and territories has helped the Lord in building His kingdom. Note: the church is not the larger context of what God is doing in the world, the Kingdom of God is the context.
Isn't it interesting.. Jesus did not come "preaching the church," but rather, "preaching the Kingdom of God." And where was that Kingdom? Was it in the synagogue on the corner? Jesus answer to the woman at the well is relevant. "Those who worship the Father must worship Him in Spirit and in truth." The kingdom of God is "among you."
Consequently, it isn't the where. It isn't even really the how. It's the people of God, and it's the purposes of God in sending His Son and loving the world. Those purposes capture our hearts, and no earthly authority is needed to pursue those purposes.
The Birth of the Church
With the birth of the church the need for an actual temple or tabernacle passed into history. There was no longer any one place where sacrifice had to be performed, because Jesus had already entered into the true tabernacle. Now all that was necessary was for the people of God to gather, and there He was among them!
Stephen's speech in Acts 7 is particularly striking. He moves directly from a discussion of the tabernacle and temple to a condemnation of the Jewish leaders.
Solomon built him a house. However, the Most High does not live in temples made with hands, as the prophet says:
Heaven is my throne and earth is my footstool.
What house will you build for Me? Says the Lord.
You stiff necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears!
You always resist the Holy Spirit! v. 47-51
Stephen's point is that the Jews are slow to recognize the true signs of God's presence. They "resist the Holy Spirit" by trusting in the physical structure, failing to see Jesus as the fulfillment of both priest and king. So used to looking for God in stone and mortar, they don't see Him in human flesh (John 1: 10-11). They have rejected Jesus and are trusting in the mere shadows.
Moses and the Gods of Egypt
Moses has been on my mind a great deal lately. I see the church captive in Egypt, with a few waking up to the fact of slavery. Leaders arrive on the scene who proclaim how much better it is to be free! They declare to the powers.. LET MY PEOPLE GO!!
Some of the people follow these leaders into the wilderness.
Things are different in the desert. The provision isn't instant. In Egypt the task masters fed the people regularly, even if the pickings were slim. Suddenly the people have to search for their own food, or rely on God to provide it by miracle.
Where before people could rely on others telling us what to do and when, now they have to seek the Lord. There are no maps. It's unfamiliar territory. We aren't sure where we are going. It feels like we are wandering.
A few years ago a secular group wrote a song which was probably about drugs. But recently the Lord brought a few lines back to me:
"See I've been to the desert on a horse with no name,
"In the desert you can remember your name." The desert is a place of testing. Familiar comforts are a mere memory. As a result, the desert is also a place of purification. We are stripped of those things which we use to define ourselves. We are alone with ourselves.. and with God. We are forced to confront our deepest fears.
That is the trial of the desert. But in that trial, there is also possibility; the opportunity to discover our true self. What is that hidden name, written on the rock, that God alone knows? I believe that the Lord is leading groups of people through desert places so that they will trust in Him alone. In the wilderness they have the opportunity to discover their true calling.
The desert is a difficult place to be. Some want to return to Egypt, to the simplicity of the old ways and dependence on human provision. Others, meanwhile, begin to discover the pilgrim God who loved to live in tents. They discover the old wells and find themselves renewed like the eagle.
Going back to Egypt is not an option, because Egypt is not Egypt of old, but religion. Egypt is Jerusalem and the temple. Egypt is sacrifice and ritual. Egypt is the place of the pride of man and finding our own way to God, going back to worship on a schedule and letting the priests do the work for us.
A few weeks ago my wife had a dream. She was in our house, and she realized that it was built between two powerful rivers (we have no powerful rivers near us in actual life).
Then she was standing before a tall cliff with a well known prophetic leader. Together they were looking at two paintings hung on the rock, and an old door.
The two paintings were water scenes, painted by this leader. The door had been painted by me. The door was an antique door painted green, but it was a door of incredible beauty.
The man looked at the door and remarked how beautiful it was, "an incredible work of art. You could sell that for a lot of money."
I sent the dream to a friend of mine, and he gave his interpretation.
"You have found an old pathway to life, growth, protection, strength and security. The paintings represent what you will find if/when you go through the door. The antique wooden door represents an old entrance or entry way. (Christ, our entry way to life, truth, to the Father). The fact that you had just painted it green represents a refreshed/renewed look on this old entry way. The color green is symbolic of life, growth and prosperity (not necessarily financial prosperity)."
So we must make a choice: to go back to the old, familiar ways, or to die to the old ways and seek God for a new name. We could also choose to sell our birthright, as many are doing, and prosper from the Gospel. I have a feeling that isn't the right choice.
I believe it will primarily be small groups of people making the old journey to a new place. Why?
In the desert, all are equal; equally lost and equally dependent on God. This means that everyone has a voice, though most will have nothing to say. The desert is an empty place, a place of emptiness and a place of possibility.
A few years ago Lerner and Lowe made a beautiful movie based on St. Exupery's book The Little Prince. Shortly after the downed pilot meets the strange boy in the middle of the desert, they do looking for a well. Together they sing a song, antiphonally:
"What makes the desert so lovely at night?"
The Challenge
Church buildings are
* a witness to immobility
When Moses had a revelation of God on the mountain, he was told,
Recently, Andrew Strom wrote about the movie Braveheart on the New Zealand Prophetic List:
"The thing that struck me most about this film was that the majesticly daring spirit displayed by William Wallace throughout WAS EXACTLY THE KIND OF DARING TENACITY THAT GOD REQUIRES OF ALL WHO WISH TO BE PART OF THE COMING MOVE OF GOD. God spoke to me several years ago about the major qualification required to enter into the coming Reformation / Revival. He simply told me: "WHO DARES WINS". And if there is one spirit which imbues the film 'Braveheart', it is this spirit of DARING.
"From the days of John the Baptist until now, the kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent take it by force". It is not enough to prophesy (though prophesying is good). It is not enough even to pray (though praying is good also). For only those who DARE will win their way through into the coming move of God. Ours is to be a 'violent' faith - a 'violent' DARING, which takes the kingdom by force. Only then will true Revival and Reformation come down.
In Martin Luther's day, many leaders were well aware that some form of Reformation was essential. But they were shocked at the daring of Luther, who took on the whole Roman Catholic empire and won. For there is a day for RECKLESS DARING, and my friends, THAT DAY IS NOW.
"They loved not their lives unto the death" (Rev 12).
This is our challenge. We aren't seeking the tabernacle or the temple, the former things which were a shadow of the life we have in Christ, but we are seeking new ways of being the church in this generation. We search the Scriptures, search history, and we seek God to find that pattern. The furniture of the church is encrusted from centuries of custom. Together we are seeking "the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God."
"For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel in those days, says the Lord: I will put My laws in their mind and write them on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.
None of them shall teach his neighbor, and none his brother, saying, "Know the Lord," for they shall all know Me, from the least of them to the greatest." Heb.8: 10,11
"The God of heaven Himself will prosper us;
Therefore we His servants will arise and build..." Ezra 2:20
Breaking Down Walls
Six months after I wrote this article a friend brought me a copy of a dream that Steve Philips was given some years ago. In it the Lord told him, "This is the New Tabernacle. It is a New Covering I am building over all of the earth." Then He said, "I never wanted to live in a
house made of stone - I rather liked traveling about in a tent!" (For more see Dream of the Tent).
We need to ask ourselves a few serious questions. We have lived with one model of doing church in North American for about a century. How are we doing? Are we accomplishing the task of reaching our generation? Is the church thriving and growing? Do we see the poor among us?
No. The church in North America, in spite of renewal, is on the decline. The poor are not welcome among us. Believers are not being released to serve. We are captive to our idols. Yet .. "If we always do what we've always done, we'll always get what we've always got." We desperately need change.
Recently Andrew Strom published an online book about the coming reformation. I'll quote a small section, but you can find more HERE.
God is also going to use this Reformation and Revival to smash down the dividing walls that separate the Christians. Jesus has never stopped desiring that there be only "one" undivided body. Today, however, just amongst the Charismatic Christians alone there are so many divisions, "streams" and denominations that it is almost impossible to count them all. Each division has it's own `label', and in many ways they operate like competing corporations, selling the same "product" under different labels (with slight variations). It's ridiculous! And the whole church system today is set up in such a way that it just ensures that these divisions continue. These are `structural' divisions that have been virtually set in concrete - "institutionalised" divisions that are simply accepted and perpetuated by each new generation of Christians.
We desperately need change. We will never reach the world with our current system. Many current leaders are deceived that the war can be won with present methods, and they are confused that we refuse to join them in the trenches. Two years ago Rick Joyner wrote that,
"The seeming foolishness of the new leaders to actually believe the war can be won is going to bring about considerable discord... many leaders who are accustomed to fighting only in the trenches will be discouraged when the new leaders refuse to get in the trenches with them.
"However, the new movements which are being raised up are called to "ADVANCE" and not merely to hold the old lines."
The article closes..
"The end of trench warfare is near. The church will break out of the four walls of her own buildings, attacking the enemy FROM HOUSE TO HOUSE and from street to street, until the victory is won for our cities and our nations."
May the Lord shake the church and break down the walls! Come Lord Jesus! Renew Your people!
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Renovare /
Christians for Biblical Equality /
Soul Horizon /
Allelon /
OpenSource Theology /
Jesus Radicals /
Regeneration /
New Phuture /
The Off Ramp /
Society for Kingdom Living
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• © 1999-2002 Len Hjalmarson.•
Last Updated on May 16, 2002
Sacrifice, priesthood, and tabernacle - all these were instituted through Moses, and all passed away with the coming of Jesus... The temptation has been to reinstate these three elements among God's people and to turn community into an institution.
