| | Life is starting to normalize again. After three months of extreme physical, emotional and spiritual fatigue from our move out of the house, we're starting to come around again. The process of cleaning, readying, and selling a house in three weeks is without a doubt something I hope I never have to do again. We just moved in two weeks ago.
All of that left us hardly ready to go to Arizona for a different kind of informal gathering; this one -- a continuation of Colorado Springs -- was one where we listened to the Lord for what we were supposed to do. Why 10 people would clear their schedules and meet in the desert for something they're not sure about in the why and what realm is absolutely ludicrous if you think about it. Where the last gathering was mainly listening for the CHURCH, this one was different.
How was it for me? Surreal and life changing are the two words I would use to describe it. I'm not sure I can adequately explain what happened. And I'm not even sure that 90% of the Christian world would even believe me when I do.
It was surreal for me personally because I was dealing with overwhelming feelings of inadequacy, feeling like I did not belong. L. went to Colorado Springs and at least befriended all these other simple church leaders. I've sat under their teaching in seminars, conferences, and books, but here I was in a "meeting" with them, and unlike most of them, I'm not prophetically gifted. I was "hanging out" and ministering as a peer with those who spawned the house church movement in England in the 70's and carried it over the States in the 90's, with a couple that have had a hand in over 1,000,000 lives being touched in India over the last 8 years by training leaders in the church planting multiplication movement there, with a man who was at the heart of training up the house church leaders in China in the 90's -- a movement of roughly 80-100 million people. That fellow had a hand in planting hundreds of thousands of churches in China, India and Indonesia alone in that decade. And I haven't even talked yet about the Neil Coles. But somehow God wanted L. and me to be there with these folks 10-20 years our seniors and light years beyond that in terms of spiritual maturity and ministry fruitfulness and faithfulness. I laugh still when I think about it, but after the weekend, I laugh with a sense of acceptance. It was absolutely personally surreal. Why would God have us in their company? Perhaps for the same reason he chose Jacob instead of Esau? Just ... because.
One point made by one of the fellows there there was that more than fruitfulness, what bound together this group of people was willingness. That made a LOT of sense to me. I know I'm there. My thirst and hunger to know Jesus as Lord of the Harvest is raging within me. And I want it more badly than I want a comfortable life or even a long life. And I have come to see that all the ministry experiences I've had in my young life have taken me to this point of raw, insatiable hunger to be with Jesus on the front lines and to throw away safe, comfortable Christianity. I'm done with that.
It was also surreal generally because there was a lot of the supernatural going on. My two year missional journey into Organic Church and Church Planting Movements has come to show me the true life of a disciple of Jesus Christ and the place of the supernatural in the midst of it all. It's funny b/c most think house, simple or organic church is primarily a renaissance of church structure traveling back to a bygone era of "New Testament Church." For the hurt-by-institutional-church-and-still-deconstructing-house-church-groupies [in my opinion, parallel to this generation's "emergents"], it is. This expression is more about church renewal [and these expressions always come and go] more than it is about mission. But for me it is squarely about mission -- the ORIGINAL MISSION Jesus gave us to love our neighbors and to make disciples. I've come to see that no other church expression can handle the rapid multiplicational growth of churches that organic churches can. Yes, they ARE infinitely closer to what Jesus told us to do than the Sunday ministry monster we are doing now across the West, but that's secondary for me [check out Frank Viola's Pagan Christianity for a shocker on the "pagan" origins of most of our current church practices]. When Jesus shows up, traditional structures, funding, salaried clergy, by-laws, and so on slow things down. Not to mention we cannot possibly fund and staff churches that continue to multiply to the tune of 40,000 in a decade in one region of North India alone or churches that multiply to the 10th generation and are just as healthy as the first generation church. So it's primarily about FUNCTION for me than about FORM. And meeting these practitioners in oversea missions has confirmed that all the more to me. They are not being invited to the "emergent" conversations and conferences. They are not trying to rewrite theology and shake their fists at those bad, bad denominational churches. They are trying to join God in reaching all His lost children across the world, and they've seen just how committed God is to prepping the harvest for reaping. And with that eye-witnessing is the element of the supernatural.
Anyhow I digress... there was a LOT of supernatural and preternatural things happening. The agenda the Lord gave us was basically to go on the offensive in this small Arizona town. It involved undoing curses on the land uttered by Apache Medicine Men in response to mass genocide from the Colonial Euro-Americans. There was empathic intercessory repenting on behalf of those sins against the Apache Indians. There were prophetic visions giving glimpses to where the spiritual centers/locations as well as people/hosts of demonic strongholds that had to be broken and blessed -- even a wild prophetic vision of the past that saw the activity happening, who was at its center, and even gave correct architectural details of the insides of that home that none of us had ever been in before. There was a nighttime appearance of a demon to one of our members and a daytime appearance of four angels. Surreal.
I'll just leave it at this: I got a FIRST RATE introduction into spiritual mapping and warfare prayer walking from people who have done this on every inhabitable continent. Whatever you may or may not believe about the supernatural, I will say this: the veil in the West is getting thinner and thinner between natural and supernatural. [Read James Rutz's Mega Shift for an excellent book on this. Jim is a self-appointed scribe tracking the supernatural in the world and also a grandfather of House Church in America. He's also a fantastic writer who was at one point the highest paid copy writer in America.] The up-front, in-your-face spiritual warfare that Christians face in the 2/3 world is becoming a greater reality in the West as well. Why I don't know, but I've heard it countless times, and now I got to see it with my own two eyes this past weekend.
Surreal.
Well, it's getting late, and we leave at the crack of dawn for a vacation in Hawaii. If you're still reading this, you really do love us... or you're really, REALLY bored.
When we return from our vacation, I'll talk about the life-transforming bit. That part I still need to process with L. But as you can possibly infer already, one does not receive mentoring from people like this and experience such realities without some sort of life transformation that happens. I'm grateful for it. Please pray for us in this time.
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| | Posted 6/25/2008 2:36 AM - 30 views - 0 comments
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