Chapter Six – Getting from Here To There
Ok I’m Convinced. Now How Do We Start The Revolution?
There are two ways – the "English" way or the "French" way. The "French" way involves guillotines and attacks on the Bastille and is very messy and is to my mind ungodly. The "English" way is slow and reasonable and thoughtful and kind. It’s the way I prefer. Revolutions don’t have to be awful, the Information Revolution has been fairly peaceful in fact.
Now I don’t think you can just march up to denominational HQ and yell “down with the denomination” and expect much joy at all. That’s immature and silly. What you can do is to tell them about this book and give them the URL so if they are interested they can get a copy. Please don’t email it to them as an unsolicited attachment please. Christian leaders get all sorts of huge unsolicited attachments in their e-mail from all sorts of strange people with bizarre notions and it clogs up the downloads and just gets deleted. Besides they might end up with 200 e-mail copies of the book from various well-intentioned members of their denomination. A brief e-mail saying why you like the book with the URL is all that is needed. If they want it they can go get it.
The six chapters of the book might make a good 6 week study for a home group or evening service and even if it doesn’t start a revolution it will at least get people talking and thinking about the nature and function of the local church and there is no harm in that.
Talk to pastors, lay leaders and denominational officials about the concepts in the book. Start building unity yourself and start praying for and with other churches. Introduce people of different denominations to each other and do all you can to build a climate of acceptance. Pray, pray, and pray! I believe God is in this. Unless He is it will not work.
Do You Honestly Think You Will Change Things?
Its absolutely impossible to say what will happen. At this stage I could end up with 5 downloads and a big waste of time or like the 95 theses on the door of the church in Wittenburg it could set the world on fire. Odds are it will be somewhere between the two!
Other Than Pray And Pass The Book Around What Should We Do?
Study the Scriptures until you get a burning vision for what God’s church should be like in love and unity and truth. Study it until you NEED to do something or you will explode. Study it until you are absolutely convinced that change is needed and needed “today”.
God will have a special place for you in His plan to restore the Church to unity, purity and truth and to complete the Great Commission. Only you know the turf in your area. Only you can get His will as it applies to you in your situation. That might sound trite but its where we all have to start under God and His Word in the particulars of our own situation.
Are There Some Things We Need To Stop Doing?
I covered a bit of that in the “rumours of wars” section. We need to think about what we are doing that hurts unity and trust and eliminate it. Some of these things are subtle like denominational “tunnel vision” so that only our things matter to us. George Otis Jr. talks about Kingdom vision “seeing the spaces between the churches” the unministered to bits of our society. I like that. We have to have a bigger picture that’s beyond our own backyards.
We need to stop having a vision of the Church and the Kingdom that is like a battle between fast food chains or supermarkets. We are not the world and we need not behave like the world and we are capable of much greater, better and more diverse things than a plastic, branded, consumerised Christianity. Fast food chains rely on creating exactly the same experience for each customer in each restaurant no matter where you go in the world. If that philosophy is applied to the church it becomes Satanic. It is boring, lifeless, plastic and not like God at all. We don’t want cookie cutter copies of consumer churches. We don’t want to be fighting for “market share”. We don’t want to be clones of the Market. The “bottom line” for God’s Church is holiness not the budget. Paul says it well in Galatians (Galatians 5:15 NASB) But if you bite and devour one another, take care lest you be consumed by one another. We need a Church community that is the exact opposite from the takeover, eat each other up, voracious consumer society and we will not achieve this while we live as competing denominations in the one local area.
We need to stop having panic attacks over “not our business” stuff like disputes in other churches or what deacon X said to deaconess Y last Sunday at church Z. Gossip could be a huge problem in a network . Other people will make different mistakes from the mistakes we make. Let them grow up by making their mistakes and let them leave us alone when we make ours while we maintain our love and acceptance of each other. Give other people the dignity that you would want under the same circumstances and unless there is a lot of evidence to the contrary it pays to believe that they are sincerely seeking God’s will just as you are and that they will sort things out just as you would.
We need to put the fences in the right place and pull them down if they are in the wrong place. If I wanted to kill a lot of people and get away with it I would build a fence at the top of a mounatin ten metres from the edge of the highest cliff. People would want to get closer to the edge and hop the fence, walk right up to the real and now unguarded edge of the cliff and some would slip off and fall. But “it wouldn’t be my fault I put a fence up”. If I wanted to save lives I would put the fence right on the edge of the cliff and people would say ‘I’m glad that fence is there otherwise someone might fall off” and no-one would hop it and no-one would be killed because the danger is obvious and the fence is in the correct place. Eve had her fences in the wrong place when Satan tempted her she said “and if we eat it or even touch it we will die” so when she touched it and nothing happened she was made bold to eat it and you know the rest of the story. Young people are sometimes told that dancing is wicked. They soon find that its pleasurable and harmless. So they are emboldened to go further and further until they end up in real sin. So it is with the churches. We have fences keeping people away from other denominations when they should be keeping them away from worldliness and compromise. We need to decide where the real danger is and put the fences in the right place and tear down all the fences that are in the wrong place.
How could a matchstick pull over a ten tonne truck? Well if you go to the edge of a precipice and connect the matchstick to a matchbox with a long thread and the matchbox to a biro and the biro to a small book on its edge by a string and connect the book to a larger volume and the big book to a baseball bat and the base ball bat to a bicycle balanced on its edge and the bicycle to a motorbike on its wheels and the motor bike to a small car connected to a larger car connected to a light truck, connected to the ten tonne truck…and you push the matchstick off the edge it will take the matchbox with it which will take the biro over the edge with it which will take the books which will take the baseball bat and as it whizzes to the end of its string it will pull down the bicycle which will upset the motorbike which will tug the small car over and as it flys down and jerks on its rope the big car will topple off the cliff, followed by the light truck followed eventually by the big ten tonne truck . Lesson: An unstable system on the brink of disaster can be brought down by a very small thing if that small thing is connected to bigger things which are connected to even bigger things etc. (e.g. domino effects and the Asian economic crisis etc)
The denominational system is on the edge of falling over. You are like the matchstick in the story and you are connected to someone who is connected to someone else who may be influential in your denomination. Connect with someone one notch higher than you in the pecking order and then ask them to do likewise once they are convinced of the need for change - and so on. Build the connections then jump! You may start the dominos falling and soon a seemingly immense system may start the process of transformation.
Please note that the analogy does not imply I want denominations to plummet to some terrible destructive doom. I will say it again - I want a slow, sane, planned, deliberate and godly changeover.
Now may the God of peace be with you as you build the Church of God.
John Edmiston
17 Karanya St.
Beyond Denominations.doc 247KB Microsoft Word document Date: 25/11/99
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