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.

We Are The Church (Red Week #1)

 

On the back of a highly successful and inspiring Red Sunday a couple days back, in the week to come we will be launching our first ever Red Week where we seek to flesh out our continuing journey in learning how the church really can be the church. We believe that Jesus is in a sense auditing the very core of those who call this local church community home at the moment and we are trusting for the things we profess with our lips to match up with the actions and motives of our hearts.

The ease in which it is to just slip into playing church is a scary reality for us and we are beginning to take our identity as the real deal very seriously.

 

We ARE the church. 

 

If we don't step up to the plate in our community, someone else (or something else) will. There is just no such thing as a spiritual vaccuum. We've been given authority, but if we don't exercise it the powers and principalities of darkness will take up that mantle very quickly.

 

So the burning question is how does the church operate in her rightful authority?

 

Is it "storming heavens gates" with all night prayer vigils?

Is it binding and loosing excessively until our voices are hoarse and our frown lines are permanent?

Is it picketing and marching against the major wrongs and evils prevalent in our society?

 

Maybe.

 

But just maybe true authority is exercised in the way a man named Jesus did it.

 

"If you want to be the greatest, serve"

 

A life of laying down his rights and any judgemental lenses didn't make him any weaker. Christ showed his strength and divine power through servanthood and the greatest moment of authority and dismantling of spiritual strongholds was when his feet couldn't march, when his hands couldn't hold a picketing sign and where his voice could do nothing but cry out in desperation to his father.

 

As Rory Dyer recently said,

"Until we feel the depths of our city's pain, we will not see the depths of His power"

a moment's ease at the expense of a miserable eternity!

After spending a weekend coughing and spluttering, running a high fever and becoming very familiar with how many steps it is from my bed to the bathroom (eight, if anyone else is counting), it was very tempting to become very sorry for myself, close the curtains tight and refuse to emerge till God took me home in the rapture.

But after refusing to yield to the soft option, I coughed and spluttered my way through a healthy diet of Puritan theology, large passages of Job and of course a dose of Foxe's Book of Martyrs.

To quote Esau, the biblical king of hyperbole, “I was about to die!” and so I turned to the comfort of those who have gone before (in both senses of the phrase) and find solace from the similar hardships that they had to endure.

 Here are just three examples that caught my attention:

1. Peter, a young man, (who lived in AD 249 under the reign of Decius) amiable for the superior qualities of his body and mind, was beheaded for refusing to sacrifice to Venus. He said,

"I am astonished you should sacrifice to an infamous woman, whose debaucheries even your own historians record, and whose life consisted of such actions as your laws would punish. No, I shall offer the true God the acceptable sacrifice of praises and prayers."

Optimus, the proconsul of Asia, on hearing this, ordered the prisoner to be stretched upon a wheel, by which all his bones were broken, and then he was sent to be beheaded.

2. Chrysostom, was seized upon for being a Christian. He was put into a leather bag, together with a number of serpents and scorpions, and in that condition thrown into the sea.

 

3. Denisa, a young woman of only sixteen years of age, who beheld this terrible judgment, suddenly exclaimed,

"O unhappy wretch, why would you buy a moment's ease at the expense of a miserable eternity!"

 Optimus, hearing this, called to her, and Denisa avowing herself to be a Christian, she was beheaded, by his order, soon after.

 

 

After reading these and other accounts of Hebrew 11 type heroes of the faith, even in my sickly state I felt ashamed at how quickly I can lose sight of the joy set before me. Weak and momentary afflictions when not measured against things of eternal value and pleasure can very quickly consume and devour us as we become "martyrs" at our own hand.

 

How often in the majority of christian circles, our "joy" just tracks our circumstances?

 

O God, give me eyes that see past the temporal and to our Man in glory, Jesus! Scarred but not defeated in the slightest. My home is with Him in eternity!