Julian Adams Weekend

Next weekend we have the privilege of receiving the ministry of Julian Adams into the life of Life Changers. A friend, a worshiper and strong prophetic voice, Julian manifests a theology and lifestyle of what a true son looks like. A ministry marked by prophetic accuracy and signs and wonders, this promises to be an inspiring, equipping and life-giving time as we prioritize the presence of God, His voice and in celebrating His faithfulness in giving us gifts. We are expectant and we recognize Julian as an Ephesians 4 type Prophet, but how can you best prepare your heart preceding the weekend and as well as during his visit in order to fully receive "a prophet's reward"?

1. Come with a faith-filled open heart, recognizing the office of a prophet which is more than a gift of prophecy we can all operate in.

2. Celebrate the corporate prophetic word for the church and do your part to see it fulfilled.

3. Rejoice with those who may receive personal words. If your heart leaps and witnesses with that word by faith, receive it for yourself.

4. Open your heart and mind to an impartation of the mantel Julian the prophet has so you can begin to walk in more of your prophetic gift, that is within each believer.

 

 

Matthew 10:41: “He who receives a prophet in {the} name of a prophet shall receive a prophet’s reward; and he who receives a righteous man in the name of a righteous man shall receive a righteous man’s reward.”

 

 

IMMERSED part two

 

Last weekend saw us preach our second installment in our new series "IMMERSED", where we are exploring the fundamental doctrines of baptism that we find in scripture. Week one saw us inviting our church to wade deeper into the depths of real community life as we unpacked what it meant to be immersed into the body of Christ. In week two we painted a compelling and strong case why baptism by full immersion in water is so vitally important for us individually, corporately and for the world, so much so that we abandon the previously held religious connotations and mindsets that come with it and rather embrace the life changing power of obedience that leaps from faith.

The response to the Word of God being preached uncompromisingly was staggering. Multiple first time commitments to Christ in both meetings, mothers who attended the morning going home and bringing the rest of her family in the evening (and the family responding to the Gospel) and a queue of people signing up to publicly declare their fully immersed faith by being baptized this coming Sunday.

 It was a humdinger of a day!

And so tomorrow our journey continues as we seek to dive in deeper into the wild adventure of faith that we have been called to. Our church floor will be soaked no doubt, but our prayer is that that won't be the only thing completely drenched. The thing our city needs most is not more dry religion. It needs wet, wild and alive Sons and Daughters who have fully leapt into the ocean of adventure, forsaking the safety of the shallow-end, and pushed out into being immersed in the pursuit of Christ, community and the mission.

IMMERSED part one

 

We've started an exciting four week journey as a church community with our new series, "IMMERSED". Over four consecutive Sundays, we are inviting our church to explore four fundamental and yet revolutionary doctrines surrounding the baptisms we find in scripture:
The baptism into the body of Christ, baptism in water, baptism in the Holy Spirit and the often ignored baptism of suffering.
Hebrews.6 speaks of these "baptisms" as elementary teachings and yet the vast majority of christendom as we know it are only ankle deep in their understanding and application of these truths.

We believe that God is taking us deeper as a people, as we get ready to go wider in our efforts of discipling our city and the nations. Our prayer for this series is that we would dive into the greater depths of community, discipleship and mission that scripture and the Spirit are calling us into.

 

If you'd like to join us on this life changing journey, add us on twitter, read our blogs, study the scriptures and join us on Sundays 9AM or 6PM. Alternatively, you can check out our website where all this content will be readily available.

www.lifechangers.org.za

We Are The Church (Red Week #3)

Video summary of a week that changed many people's lives...

Why we canned our Prayer Meeting

 

Sometimes churches are in danger of becoming museums or mausoleums rather than a place where the life of God fills and spills out of. We get so caught up with defending and propagating our systems, our “holy cows”, “it’s just how we’ve always done it” way of thinking that we become not so different to the manufacturers of caskets who spend thousands of rands and countless hours in fashioning out elaborate handles, felt inner linings and ornamental outer decorations that we forget that all that these glorified boxes are doing is containing death.

 

Our homes can become like this as well. We break the bank in buying the new flat-screen, the latest leather lazy-boy, lavish new carpets and mini fridges fully stocked and the only people who get to enjoy them are people who have removed their shoes at the door, who place their glass on a coaster and who make polite conversation around why we should upgrade our hi-fi system. They look good, but are lifeless in terms of kingdom benefit.

Same with our cars.

Same with our churches.

A few years ago, we at Life Changers decided that it was time to take out our shot-gun and get the braai ready as we prepared to take down one of christendoms plumpest holy cows. The prayer meeting.  Phrases such as “you judge the size of your church by the size of your prayer meeting”, “your prayer meeting is the engine room of your church” and “we’ll cancel Sunday before we cancel our prayer meeting” made us all weary to ever even consider tampering with this midweek meeting. Sure we could shake things up every now and again (pray in pairs and not just in groups of four or five) but this was one closed-handed issue that seemed as immovable as the Rock of Gibraltar itself.

 

But after quite a dry spell of poorly attended (by our people and of faith and life) Tuesday prayer meetings , we courageously pulled the plug on this meeting to the sound-track of anger and shock from many voices at home and from a far. But just to show you that we are not heretical, and that this was a faith inspired assassination and not just because of a lack of attendance, here below are some of the reasons why we canned our midweek prayer meeting.

We want to be less busy

-We gather on a Sunday and on a Wednesday already on top of other social and outreach moments. We never want to be a busy church that is so consumed with meetings that it forsakes what the church should really be doing. We wanted to free up an extra night for people to be with their families, to join a tennis club or to invite other people over to their homes.

We want to be hungrier

-The same people at prayer meeting were the same people at everything else. And they were tired. Doing away with the prayer meeting got us thinking about how we could get more people praying. We had to ask ourselves the hard questions that we had so often just skirted around with dogmatic statements about prayer that we had just inherited.

We want revival

-Probably our greatest trump card for drawing the season of a formalised midweek prayer meeting was because we heard God say so.  We couldn’t help get away from the fact that even though we had an hour dedicated to corporate prayer each week, we were not a praying church. Ever since we closed it down, people are gathering off their own bats, in smaller informal gatherings, to pray and worship together, sometimes into the early hours of the morning. Since Tuesday nights of prayer came to an end, we have begun a journey of corporately fasting and praying in unique ways that have released the life of God like we haven’t seen before. Prayer is starting to become the language of our home groups. God spoke, we acted, and life has come back to our prayer expression as a community.

 

We don’t have the full answers. We are still learning. We might even go back to a weekly prayer meeting into the future. God will highlight his strategy as we continue to pray...

All we keep reminding ourselves about is that our God is not a God of a set of formulas that need to be followed for his life to come. We love to pray because it helps serve as a catalyst to seeing the life of God released more and more in our lives. We don’t want to be so present and pursuing the right ingredients, that we actually end up missing His presence. We applied this to our prayer lens. We want this to be the measuring stick of everything in our lives. 

 

A coffin has a body, but contains no life.

 

We Are The Church (Red Week #2)

Here is how Red Week went, by the numbers:

5- the number of days (various nights and mornings) that people abandoned their television schedules, their evenings at home, their Saturday lie-in, their Friday date-nights, and instead donned their Red Week T-shirts, got their hands and feet dirty and pursued what a church could look like when it started behaving like The Church.

+200- total number of different volunteers over the course of the week

176- number of one of a kind Red Week T-Shirts sold. That means I still have 24 left. Perfect stocking fillers for Christmas. Just saying.

3000- number of sandwiches (brown bread if anyone is asking) made and handed out. 2000 went to a pre-primary, a primary and a high school in DuNoon. The rest was delivered to individuals in the wider community of DuNoon during our Saturday morning Soup Kitchen.

+50- number of police and firemen we blessed and visited on the Friday evening.

+100- sick people visited and prayed for on the Wednesday night at the government hospital in Tygerberg. Emotional and faith stirring evening that not many will soon forget.

 2500- the collective age (or somewhere in that region) of the elderly folk that we visited, loved on and prayed for in the old age home in Melkbos.

40- the amount of people who were available on a Thursday morning. Apologies to all bosses for the numerous employees playing hooky that day.

Countless- number of lives that were impacted and changed through this week. Whether it was by making a sandwich or receiving one, visiting or being visited, life can not be the same again.


The Shepherd in Luke.15 left the 99 and went after the 1. His heart is our heart. Red Week, and The Church for that matter, should never measure its success on mere numbers. May our ongoing pursuit of being His hands and feet always be about the individual and not just an accumulation of figures to bandy about. His economics are never like ours.

Incoming Calls

There is a certain sense of electricity in the atmosphere as God is on the move in Life Changers like never before. With strong prophetic preaching and ministry over the last month or so, there is a definite acknowledgement that God is taking our moments and stringing them together like only He can do, to put together an exciting revival type feel. But for a community to live in an ongoing and sustainable state of revival, expectation and breakthrough, individuals have to carry it first. 

Realising the season we are in, we as a church leadership have invited three apostolic and prophetic Ephesians 4 gifts to come and add perspective, impetus and guidance into the life of our church over the next few months. To whet your appetite, below is just a brief synopsis of each of these friends of ours and the dates they will be coming:

Mark and Candice Van Pletson

(13th-14th October)

-Been on the eldership team at Glenridge under both Rory Dyer and Ryan Matthews where Mark oversees the worship, the operations and does a large portion of the preaching at their two sites. He carries a strong apostolic gift and speaks into church leaderships around the country.

Ryan and Melissa Matthews

(15th-18th November)

-In 2008 this couple took over the leading of Kingsgate (then London Church International) in London, UK before returning in July 2011 to Durban to take over leadership of the Glenridge eldership team. Ryan is passionate about the presence of God and for the church to live in the full expression of the trinity

Julian Adams

(2 weekends in January 2013)

-Julian is currently based with The Kings Arms in the UK where he ministers from and into many other nations and contexts all around the world. He is recognized as a Prophet and with a strong apostolic edge as his heart is to build prophetic cultures and lifestyles and not just events. He oversees a ministry called Frequentsee. (http://frequentsee.wordpress.com/)

 

A "tear the roof off" kind of faith

 

Yesterday was a good day.

Waking up several times through the early hours of Sunday to give attention to the very loud manifestations of my illness, I eventually decided to give up on any last vestiges of sleep and begin preparing myself for a day of preaching.
 
Smart shirt- check. Hair combed- check. Bible and notes in hand- check.  

Those were the easy things. The hard part was battling bouts of extreme nausea (which necessitated in several “pitstops” along Sunningdale Drive on the way to church), a cough that could wake the dead, as well as the creeping sense of fear and unbelief that I was in no way in the right frame of mind (or health) to be preaching on “A tear the roof off kind of faith” that morning. But the longer I get to walk with God, the more I’m realising the less and less it has anything to do with me. Elementary I know, but God sometimes has to get us to our end so that we can begin to allow him to do only what he can do. Faith is learning how to live by his faithfulness.

 

Someone we can take a few pointers from is Abraham, the father of faith. Way past the age of having children, Abraham and his wife Sarah are given a promise from God that they will have a son. But just like us, the enemies of faith often are given a louder voice of prominence in our lives than the call of abandoning our own resources (or lack of resources) and fully trusting what he has said. Here are the top 3 robbers of faith that we can pick out from Abraham’s journey and take heed of in ours:

 

-Circumstances (either too good or too bad...relying on our 5 senses alone)

*Faith is not a denial of the facts, it’s the acknowledgement of THE fact! In God’s economy, faith trumps reason everytime!

Abraham was told by God to go claim the land of Canaan, but he finds it drought stricken and in famine so he runs to Egypt where to save his own skin he lies about his wife to the Pharaoh there

-Compromise

*the root of all compromise is found in an underlying disbelief that God is good

Abraham promised many children, but at age 85 Abraham stops trusting God and takes matters into his own hands and sleeps with his female servant Hagar

-Critical Spirit

*whether at God or at others, very dangerous as it’s a sin of idolatory. It’s putting my reasoning above God’s by saying, “I will be God unto myself.”

At age 99 Abraham laughs in God’s face when God confirms the original promise (Sarah pregnant at 90?)

Home sweet home

Back two days in chilly Cape Town after quite a substantial stretch in the somewhat warmer and drier climates of Namibia and Zimbabwe and I’ve already got my famous lists going. Here’s my top 5 reasons why I’m happy to be home.

1.       Clean clothes

18 nights away, 6 different places to sleep, a very full schedule and a small suitcase leads to the need to have my skinny jeans and limited amount of secret socks washed farely regularly...and when you’re constantly on the move in foreign homes, the smell of Omo is a very welcome sight!

2.       Ster Kinekor

With the majority of cinemas shutting down in Zimbabwe due to the skyrocketing prices and burgeoning  piracy market, just the knowledge that I can go watch the latest Hollywood fare with popcorn and coke in hand puts a smile on my face

3.       Photo’s on facebook

As with most events these days, everything is put on mainly so that you can tag yourself in all the facebook photo’s afterwards. I particularly like the picture above cause it reminds me that popular South African band The Arrows opened for my preach last Saturday night. Doesn’t happen too often!

4.       Life Changers

The oft quoted, “absence makes the heart grow fonder” was definitely not first penned knowing that it would ring ever so true in my heart! But everytime I’m away from home base I am reminded what an incredible privilege it is to be a part of this beautiful local church here in Tableview. A church rich in resources, wealthy in community and overflowing with raw love for her King, Life Changers are a people that are truly supernatural!

5.       Planning to go again

The nations are our inheritance. The nations are OUR inheritance. I want to go again and again and again...and I want  more and more people to come with me! So start saving now...and then you'll be able to start writing your own top 5 lists!

Your roots Are Showing (Part Two)

This last fortnight’s series, “Your Roots Are Showing”, has been an incredible journey and defining period for us as a community of faith as we have dug down a little deeper into the very root system of who we are. Beginning with God’s original intent of intimacy, influence and inheritance found in our primary texts of Genesis 1 and 2, we then finished week one in chapter 3 of the book  of beginnings where our devine DNA and desires was distorted by the second preacher to become weaker and yet still controlling passions for sex, sleep and success.

Week two saw us launch into Acts 2 as we rapidly glanced at how this thing we call church was birthed. Contrary to popular belief, the church was not launched after much deliberation by grey haired men in stuffy windowless rooms surrounded by piles and piles of doctrine and creeds.

No, the church that the gates of hell will not prevail against, was birthed in fire and drunkenness that took weak, fearful men and women out of hiding in a second story room and onto the streets of Jerusalem with utmost courage.

We also see from this passage that the Holy Spirit was poured out not for feel good, bless me club meetings but for the mission! To give weak, cowardly people like us a boldness and power that is not of our own but that would be used also not for our own fame but the fame of another. Which brought us to our landing point: The church was birthed for Jesus.

What began in Genesis.2:7 with a kiss will culminate in a wedding. Jesus is coming back for a bride, His bride! We believe that this whole thing called humanity and creation was a glorious setup for Christ to be glorified. And as John Piper writes, “God is most glorified in you when you are most satisfied in Him”. Or as the ancient creed says, “The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.”

These are our roots. And as we said often over the last couple of weeks, our roots determine our routes. What began with Christ will end with Christ.

He is our proclamation.

He is our preoccupation.

Our roots are showing more and more, and our routes have never looked more exciting!

http://www.lifechangers.org.za/sermons/your-roots-are-showing/

Your Roots Are Showing (Part One)

A few years ago, I went through this strange phase of being embarrassed of my red hair.
Strange, I know.
But for a period of around 10 or so months I would dye my glorious ginger locks a dull and deathly boring black. Now, this isn’t that weird a phenomenon for teenagers just out of school desperate to express themselves, but it becomes peculiar when you remember that I have a paler skin than the entire cast of Twilight. And unfortunately I don’t sparkle, so without my red hair I’d disappear into a hazy background in the majority of photos. So for all intents and purposes, 2006 was a quiet year on my Facebook timeline! That being said, things got a whole lot crazier when my natural colour started to push its way back to the fore after a few weeks after the dye process! I moved very swiftly from having a goth-type look to having an absurd tiger effect going down.  Looking back, it was all very embarrassing.

It’s with this unusual trip down memory lane that we kick off our two week series “Your Roots Are Showing” at Life Changers in the evening meetings. For too long the church, the “ecclesia”, the called out ones, have been duped by the second preacher who introduces his lying self in Genesis 3 and who continually distorts the word of God to us and sends us on a lifetime of retreat, religion and cover ups. Over this fortnight we aim to remind ourselves of our roots and to begin a journey of removing the metaphorical dyes that we have allowed to discolour our lives.

Stick around on this blog as we expand on this and check out the sermons of this series on our Life Changers website if you want to join us on this journey.