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.

 

Unity (the introduction)

Unity is an interesting word.

Worth very little on the scrabble board, this 5 letter noun is thrown around often in political and church circles with such vehemence and passion that an unobservant outsider would think it is something we have waxed. Nestled near the back end of our scant used leather bound dictionaries, we often find ourselves spouting off some trite comment about unity (or lack there-of) in the church or amongst the churches and denominations as if we have the clarity and insight into it's true definition.


Psalm.133 "God commands a blessing when the brothers dwell in unity" is recited on mass by prayer groups the world over. As soon as we split up into groups of 4 or 5 (for this is how the Lord taught us to pray), it is worth taking the plunge and praying this verse upfront because if you hang back at all it will be snatched up quickly by another before you can say John.3:16.

(Quick side note on prayer meetings, always take the lead and pray the go-to scriptures early on and then settle back into the “Yes Lord’s” while the others fumble about, giving you time to scour the concordance at the back of your ESV (NIV is SO last year) for some more verses on that evenings theme. Useful tip I know. You’re welcome. But I digress.)

Over the next few blogs I am going to add to the vociferous commentary on unity by taking a few snapshots at what we as the wider body gather together around. Denominations, missional groupings, teams, teams within teams, circles, gatherings, or whatever the latest buzz-word is are coming together in a continuing pursuit for a truer and richer understanding of “unity”, with different ideologies, agendas and issues being thrown into the recipe of these collaborations.

 Can we learn from our mistakes or are we bound to just repeating them with just a different coat of terminology and slogans?

The next few blogs will be fun.

And I promise I won’t use Psalm.133

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 Heart-Beat of the Apostolic

 

Tomorrow I head off for the weekend for my second ever visit to Namibia. Just two months ago I spent just under a fortnight in the nation's capital with All Nations Church and my heart was so captured by this incredible local church and Her story of influence in the city that I find myself counting down the hours till I am back with them again.
Here is an attempt at explaining why we still prioritize travelling +-1500km's,spending four nights away from the city I love and even missing out on a Sunday at home base

 

 

Friendship before function

 

I am still a firm believer in the above well-worn-phrase. In a fast "developing" brand of inter church relationships, the word "apostolic" has seemingly become tied up with the word "mission" to such an extent that real heart to heart friendships that weather storms as well as sail in the wind are being given less and less value. Questions of whether we gather together primarily around similar theological viewpoints, common tasks and events or firstly around the reality of relationships have held much sway in these types of conversations.

 

My heart's conviction holds all three elements as valuable, but it is my natural bent,reading of the scriptures that conveyed Paul's heart, as well as seeing the present prevailing wind of self-interest and emperial thinking that leads me to push the relational aspect to the front of the queue.

This weekend I will definitely preach and declare the message of the King and His Kingdom (which is great theology and strongly missional focused if I can be cheeky enough to say so myself), but what is of real worth to me will be the dining room conversations, laughing with one another, the late nights engaging with new and even newer friends around our common denominators of Jesus, church and the life-changing Gospel, laughing with one another, sharing communion together...and did I mention laughing with one another?

 

 

I'm not going seeking a platform to preach

I'm not going to further a "movement"

I'm not going to see what opportunities there are for us in Namibia

 

 

The apostolic heart is a sefless one. One that says I will come even if it costs me.

Yes, I do go because I want to change the world.

Yes, I do go because out of friendship we will want to do more together.

But for the world to be turned upside down, we first need to be turned inside out.

Our motives and agendas need to be ongoingly re-examined.

It's not friendship for friendship sake...it's friendship for your friend's sake.

No greater love is there than this, that a man would lay His life down for his friends.

 

 

This is what we've been called to. This is the apostolic heart.

 

 

Jesus, sent from the Father, laid His life down for His friends

Other related posts:
http://gabephillips23.blogspot.com/2012/07/namibia-part-one.html
http://gabephillips23.blogspot.com/2012/07/the-nations-are-our-inheritance.html

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?