We Are The Church (Red Week #3)

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

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"

The right questions

 

 

In a world where the quick answer has become king, the rewards of asking the right question becomes less and less appealing and this leads to an almost wreckless pursuit of solutions rather than of truth. And we all have the tendency to ask the wrong questions. It's human nature. Fueled by the competitive lenses that the world has sold us, when-ever we get together whether we are being successful or not is put up against a pre-determined measuring stick. Our questions of each other and that we ask of ourselves are often based not in an endeavour to get at an answer, but rather based on what we've already established (or allowed to be established) the answer to be.

 

 

Confused? I think we all are...and that's the problem!

 

 

Here at Life Changers, we are on a journey of rediscovery as we have begun to deconstruct the targets that we've been aiming at, whether they've been self-erected ones or simply just aiming points that we've inherited from our world-view and from those around us. The question of what success looks like has become so disfigured and tarred with such carnal brush-strokes that we've sent ourselves on never satisfying and very expensive rabbit trails that have often left us jaded, guilty or just ready to give up.

 

The simple agenda of this blog is to suggest that maybe we've been getting the wrong answers because we've been asking the wrong questions.

 

Or maybe we've not posed the right questions because we've allowed wikipedia, google or the latest best-selling growth book with 10 easy steps to success to lead us into frustration for too long.

 

Or maybe the problem is quite plainly the fact that WE'VE been asking the questions in the first place!

 

Maybe one day when we hand-over all our solutions and ready-made answers to all our insecure, self-imposed questions, He will quiet our posturing, push aside our growth strategies and ask us these questions:

 

 

"When I was hungry did you feed me? When I was thirsty did you give me something to drink? When I was a stranger, did you invite me in? When I was naked did you clothe me? When I was sickdid you look after me? When I was in prison did you come visit me?"

 

 

A good way to end this blog is with a good question...

 

What questions, or even better still, whose questions are we allowing to motivate our pursuit of success?