http://vimeo.com/41388326

http://vimeo.com/41403447

http://vimeo.com/41322038

Negative media reports have been published about American soldiers and organizations providing humanitarian aid in Afghanistan. The aim of the reports has been to persuade Afghan rulers and politicians that the objective of the aid is really to spread the Christian Gospel. At the same time human rights advocacy groups are concerned that reducing the power of the U.S. in Afghanistan will result in the growth of religious based violations and Islamic persecution of religious minorities, especially Christians. Farsi News Service has published a unconfirmed report that some members of the Afghani Parliament have converted to Christianity. This clearly indicates that a reform is taking place in Afghanis’ zealous and traditional beliefs.”
Source: Mohabat News

This morning, as I was pulling out of my driveway to meet with some guys in the jail, I felt the Lord say it was time to plant a church among them.

Indigenous Church in the Local Jail
I’ve been mentoring and building relationships with a group of thirty or so men in the jail, as we periodically meet to discuss the things of God. Some are believers, and some are believers in the making. This morning, I was prepared to share with them about slaying those giants in their lives which stood in the way of God’s promises. But I felt the Lord say, instead, that it was time to actually start an indigenous church in their housing unit.

Church Planting

This sense that it was time to plant a new church among them did not strike me as the least bit odd. I am part of a fellowship that has planted various sister churches that are thriving in other housing units in the local jail, as well as in other improbable places. So the sole issue for me was simply being receptive to the Lord’s timing, by acting only when and how He says.

This morning I set aside my plans as the men and I talked about Jesus being in us, so that Jesus becomes manifest among us, and thus Jesus becomes expressed through us. We talked about how this is the foundation for authentic church. We then talked about Ephesians 4 and how each individual has particular gifts that the rest of us need, and how together we are different but integrated parts of the whole Body of Christ. I joked with them about how I am the asshole of the Body of Christ, because He often uses me to get the crap out of people’s lives. They laughed, but also understood that they too had something unique to offer and that unless we all participate in each other’s lives by ministering one to another – as we share the life of Jesus in us with each other – we have little hope of finding health and wholeness. We also looked at 1 Corinthians 14 and how Paul commanded that when we gather together we each are to have something to contribute, rather than expecting to always receive. Thus, church meetings are active and participatory. Finally, we talked about how Jesus is present when two or three gather in His name, and how God often meets us and our needs through each other.

The great thing about planting churches in the jail is that the men aren’t saddled with all kinds of religious “stuff” to unlearn. They “get it” right away.

Individuals of Peace and Hospitality
Towards the end of our time together, I told them it was time to start being the church in their unit. I then asked who, among them, were men of peace – the social glue, so to speak, of their housing unit. They quickly identified several men, who seemed embarrassed – which was good because there were no ego agendas among them. I asked those guys to come forward and stand around me. Then, following Jesus’ instructions in Luke 10, I explained to all of them that I was going to bless those men of peace, because Jesus wanted to use their gift of hospitality to pull them all together each evening for fellowship. You see, God gives some the special gift of hospitality and peace, and we see in Luke 10 that those attributes are vital for bringing forth a church in a new community.

So, following the example of Luke 10, I asked those several men of peace to identify some issue in their lives or circumstances where they needed the Lord’s blessing. When they did so, I held hands with them and prayed a blessing over them as I asked the Lord to meet those needs.

Now here’s the neat part about planting churches, which I have seen time and again. This week, the Lord is going to answer those prayers and bless those men. And when He does, they in their excitement will become catalysts for attracting others into fellowship. And from that, a new church will merge. In fact, I expect to see that new church in operation when I return next week, and I will then join them on occasion to simply encourage Jesus in them, among them, and now through them.

Trust and Obey
I’m not so sure why we make this so complicated. Maybe it’s because we don’t trust that Jesus knew what He was doing when He instructed His disciples in Luke 10 on how to usher the Kingdom of God into new communities. Maybe it’s because we don’t trust that God will bless those individuals of peace in that community, and then use them to attract others into His Kingdom. Maybe it’s because we think it’s all up to us. But nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, my role is very limited: I am to bless those whom God has pre-positioned as catalysts of peace and hospitality, gently encourage the emerging believers, and then get out of the way so they can come forth, minister one to another, and participate together in the joy of knowing Jesus. Once that foundation is laid, the rest just sort of naturally follows.

An update (April 6, 2012)
I was unable to return to that housing unit until a month later. When I did, I was swamped by guys telling me how Jesus was doing amazing things among them as they met together. Their enthusiasm was contagious!

It’s now three months later, and that church is truly indigenous and going strong, just like I knew it would. When we minister and plant churches the way Jesus taught us to do it, it works. Imagine that! I just planted the seed, but Jesus actually brought the increase. And it didn’t cost a penny to do, require that I assemble an upfront ministry team (in fact, Biblical leadership in a local church emerges from fellowship, and not fellowship from leadership!), hire a professional worship leader, buy expensive sound equipment, or involve any of the other complicated stuff and methods the so-called consultants charge big bucks to teach you. I estimate that in just the last three months alone, we’ve seen around 50 men receive Jesus through the indigenous churches we’ve planted in our local jail – and the spiritual maturity they are finding and reproducing among each other is astounding.

We are seeing the same results in the homeless community and in other segments of our county as we go and offer to help be the church with you and your friends, rather than invite you to come and attend church with me and my friends.

What a radical concept!
For more information on how Jesus taught His disciples – and us – to plant churches, see my blog on Participatory Church.

Another Update (May 9, 2012)
That one church plant has now blossomed into at least seven additional fellowships in the jail, in addition to the others already existing there. I believe there are more, as men go to other units and facilities, so those seven are just the one’s I personally know and have met with.

What is really neat about these new fellowships is that they all arose at the initiative of the inmates themselves. Furthermore, they are populated with primarily new believers.

Life reproducing life, just like we see in the New Testament.

It is funny how certain things get stuck in your brain.  As I pondered this little one liner I found myself becoming even clearer concerning what I have come to believe and why.
My journey out of traditional church into more organic mission and church has been a particularly long and arduous one.  Often I would find the Lord revealing new ways of looking at things to me through his Word or directly by his Spirit.  These things would certainly strike me powerfully and often as a part of my preaching through Mark’s Gospel I would also teach them to the parish.  Whilst many loved and appreciated my sermons, few actually really understood and internalised the fullness of what I was trying to convey.  Some would miss the point altogether.  As for me, I would find myself struggling for weeks, months and even years to slowly untangle myself from the things that I had believed and accepted for so long to embrace the new things God was showing me.

Around the time I left my ministry and stepped out from the previous ways of living and doing church, many others I knew did similar.  Interestingly enough most have gone back to traditional churches and have not been able to fully transition into an organic understanding of church.  In some ways, this doesn’t surprise me all that much.

Before we step out of something we have always known, most of us really need to do our homework well.  It is not enough to read some Frank Viola books (or similar) and think that somehow we can and will simply reproduce what he is talking about.  We, like Frank, can only do similar, not the same of course, if we are also personally prepared to wrestle with God and think and pray through the issues.  It has taken years for me to fully internalise what I am doing now.  It takes a long time for truth, even powerful truth, to travel from my head to my heart.

I am convinced that good theology is important in this.  What I mean by this is twofold.  Firstly, we need to have a theology consistent with Scripture.  Much bad theology presently being promoted in popular Christian books has little basis in any thorough reading of the Bible.  The fact that so many Christians readily imbibe it and accept it suggests that they too pay little attention to the Word themselves.  Secondly we have to work through our theology ourselves.  It is not good enough to simply work out what we believe on the basis of what someone else says based on their wrestling with the Bible.  The reason why I have read comparatively few books on house/organic church is not because I think they are unhelpful, rather I want to spend more time in the source itself and own what I believe, not simply spout what someone else is saying.

I also think that few are prepared for the inevitable desert times.  After Jesus was baptised and the Father affirmed his Son from heaven, he was sent out into the desert to fast and face demons.  Likewise, Israel spent forty years walking through the wilderness on its way to the Promised Land.  It is a scriptural pattern for good reason.  Whenever God reveals new truth to us or calls us to a new season or a new mission; we must go through a period of transition.  We need to be thoroughly cleansed of our Egyptian experience; otherwise we will repeat it in the Promised Land.  We also need to learn to do battle against the forces and attacks of the enemy, along with the inevitable self questioning and doubts that assail us as we leave behind the familiar.

I sometimes explain to people that I had to go underground for a number of years and avoid nearly all contact with people from more traditional Churches.  One reason was because of the hurt and frustration I felt towards the church and the pain it had caused me and many of the people I had been called to minister to.  Another reason was my lack of tolerance to what seemed to me to be blatant stupidity that many Christians seemed to spout.  But on yet another level, I needed to slowly extricate myself from all that I had known and was familiar to me and start a new journey with God.  I had lessons I needed to learn, lessons I could only learn in the discomfort of the wilderness.  I would not be able to learn these lessons if I continued to fill my head with books written by people who were simply rehashing more of what I had previously known.  Of course there have been many times I have longingly looked at churches and desired to go back to what I knew for the sense of familiarity and comfort that they offer.  I have desired the support and love of friendly faces, and the prayers of beloved saints just to relieve something of the loneliness and the vulnerability of walking an unmarked track.

My journey has left me questioning everything I held for granted previously.  How I pray, how I worship, how I fellowship, how I witness and so forth have all come under the microscope.  At times I have gone down unhelpful paths.  At other times I have rediscovered what I have already known or done previously.  Nonetheless, it has been important to make the journey and take the risks because I do not simply want to regurgitate someone else’s faith or experience.

The journey has also forced me to learn to rediscover God in the lives of people who don’t know him and in uncomfortable situations such as a gay hotel.  God had told me not to implant anything on people in the bar and to wait until they asked.  It would be foolish to suggest that I didn’t go with some sense of strategies, hopes, and expectations.  It would also be true to say that little has turned out how I expected or hoped and again I have had to let go even more in order to fulfil God’s mission and be a Christ-like witness in this context.

Even in our more regular house fellowship meetings, many of the ideas and plans that we initially had have failed to take shape and instead we have found ourselves constantly re-evaluating, simplifying, and learning to let go of things.  As many already know within the context of house fellowship it is all too easy to simply do what we have always done in church, or even to search the Scriptures and implant a model of church that we somehow discern there onto our little group.

Eventually as I explained to my sister in Christ, I have unashamedly decided to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  As I discuss in my book, “Mission on the Outside”, Lazarus needed to die.  It would have been more comfortable for all concerned if Jesus had decided to hasten his journey to see his cousin as requested by Mary and Martha.  He could have got to Lazarus before he died and simply healed him.  Instead he took his time and his friends and relatives had to experience the pain of the death of a loved one.  I suspect that this principle holds true for all of us and most of us prefer to keep things propped up or as they always were because we refuse to allow things to die trusting that if God is truly in something he will indeed resurrect it.

And so it is not that I have a problem with singing songs of praise and worship within a house church context, or that I deny the power of such worship, rather instead of simply adding another component to our fellowship, however holy and good it might be.  (It is not actually up to me anyway, but the group as a whole as to whether we worship in a particular way or not.) Rather, as part of our simplification process, to continue in the basics of fellowship, prayer, waiting on God and Scripture reading and see where God will take us next allowing him to awaken or reawaken appropriate responses to him as he sees fit.
As I am in a fellowship made up of mainly new believers or people seeking faith, I want to provide a context where they feel safe.  (I have found most Aussies are extremely uncomfortable singing.)  I also don’t want to add anything extra or unnecessary.  One of the reasons I have avoided formal teaching or using teaching DVD’s, audio, books etc is because so much around still comes from a context of the old wine skins.  Likewise it also means that people quickly learn to rely on the faith and experiences of others.  Of course, at times, I will explain the context of a passage when necessary or bring out some pertinent points.  I try, however, to only do so if it contributes to what has already been discussed or if it might add some light to something that seems incomprehensible to someone unschooled in the Scriptures.

And so I unhesitatingly would say, “For goodness sake, just throw the baby out with the bath water.”  God is faithful and he will indeed lead us and keep us.  If we are doing anything out of a sense of guilt or obligation then we really need to stop doing it.  If we are doing stuff out of some misguided belief that our relationship with the Father is dependent on it, then again I would suggest that we are basing our relationship with God on the wrong things.  As Paul wrote to the Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set you free do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”

As I will always argue, our goal is Christlikeness, not doing church or worship the right way.  Let us live, love and worship out of the freedom and confidence that comes from being in Him and having Him living in us.  As we continue to follow him and the leading of his Spirit, not only am I confident that many unhelpful things will fall away, but that likewise, what he replaces them with will be even more glorious than the best of what we have experienced thus far.

The five key objectives of the conference are to:
a)    inspire renewed faith in church, marketplace and Christian organisational leaders
b)    bring the wider church together for a day of combined prayer and worship that uplifts Jesus in our city
c)    provide a citywide church rally
d)    grow a wider understanding of the future of church and marketplace integration
e)    inspire citywide understanding of how Jesus loves our city through his people.

The prophet in his day is fully accepted of God and totally rejected by men.
Years back, Dr. Gregory Mantle was right when he said, “No man can be fully accepted until he is totally rejected.” The prophet of the Lord is aware of both these experiences. They are his “brand name.”

The group, challenged by the prophet because they are smug and comfortably insulated from a perishing world in their warm but untested theology, is not likely to vote him “Man of the year” when he refers to them as habituates of the synagogue of Satan!

The prophet comes to set up that which is upset. His work is to call into line those who are out of line! He is unpopular because he opposes the popular in morality and spirituality. In a day of faceless politicians and voiceless preachers, there is not a more urgent national need than that we cry to God for a prophet! The function of the prophet, as Austin-Sparks once said, “has almost always been that of recovery.”

The prophet is God’s detective seeking for a lost treasure. The degree of his effectiveness is determined by his measure of unpopularity. Compromise is not known to him.
•    He has no price tags.
•    He is totally ‘otherworldly.’
•    He is unquestionably controversial and unpardonably hostile.
•    He marches to another drummer!
•    He breathes the rarefied air of inspiration.
•    He is a “seer” who comes to lead the blind.
•    He lives in the heights of God and comes into the valley with a “thus saith the Lord.”
•    He shares some of the foreknowledge of God and so is aware of impending judgment.
•    He lives in ‘splendid isolation.’
•    He is forthright and outright, but he claims no birthright.
•    His message is “repent, be reconciled to God or else…!”
•    His prophecies are parried.
•    His truth brings torment, but his voice is never void.
•    He is the villain of today and the hero of tomorrow.
•    He is excommunicated while alive and exalted when dead!
•    He is dishonored with epithets when breathing and honored with epitaphs when dead.
•    He is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ, but few ‘make the grade’ in his class.
•    He is friendless while living and famous when dead.
•    He is against the establishment in ministry; then he is established as a saint by posterity.
•    He eats daily the bread of affliction while he ministers, but he feeds the Bread of Life to those who listen.
•    He walks before men for days but has walked before God for years.
•    He is a scourge to the nation before he is scourged by the nation.
•    He announces, pronounces, and denounces!
•    He has a heart like a volcano and his words are as fire.
•    He talks to men about God.
•    He carries the lamp of truth amongst heretics while he is lampooned by men.
•    He faces God before he faces men, but he is self-effacing.
•    He hides with God in the secret place, but he has nothing to hide in the marketplace.
•    He is naturally sensitive but supernaturally spiritual.
•    He has passion, purpose and pugnacity.
•    He is ordained of God but disdained by men.
Our national need at this hour is not that the dollar recover its strength, or that we save face over the Watergate affair, or that we find the answer to the ecology problem. We need a God-sent prophet!

I am bombarded with talk or letters about the coming shortages in our national life: bread, fuel, energy. I read between the lines from people not practiced in scaring folk. They feel that the “seven years of plenty” are over for us. The “seven years of famine” are ahead.  But the greatest famine of all in this nation at this given moment is a FAMINE OF THE HEARING OF THE WORDS OF GOD (Amos 8:11).

Millions have been spent on evangelism in the last twenty-five years. Hundreds of gospel messages streak through the air over the nation every day. Crusades have been held; healing meetings have made a vital contribution. “Come-outers” have “come out” and settled, too, without a nation-shaking revival. Organizers we have. Skilled preachers abound. Multi-million dollar Christian organizations straddle the nation.
•    BUT where, oh where, is the prophet?
•    Where are the incandescent men fresh from the holy place?
•    Where is the Moses to plead in fasting before the holiness of the Lord for our moldy morality, our political perfidy, and sour and sick spirituality?
GOD’S MEN ARE IN HIDING UNTIL THE DAY OF THEIR SHOWING FORTH.

They will come.

The prophet is violated during his ministry, but he is vindicated by history.

There is a terrible vacuum in evangelical Christianity today. The missing person in our ranks is the prophet. The man with a terrible earnestness. The man totally otherworldly. The man rejected by other men, even other good men, because they consider him too austere, too severely committed, too negative and unsociable.
•    Let him be as plain as John the Baptist.
•    Let him for a season be a voice crying in the wilderness of modern theology and stagnant “churchianity.”
•    Let him be as selfless as Paul the apostle.
•    Let him, too, say and live, “This ONE thing I do.”
•    Let him reject ecclesiastical favors.
•    Let him be self-abasing, nonself-seeking, nonself-projecting, nonself-righteous, nonself-glorying, nonself-promoting.
•    Let him say nothing that will draw men to himself but only that which will move men to God.
•    Let him come daily from the throne room of a holy God, the place where he has received the order of the day. Let him, under God, unstop the ears of the millions who are deaf through the clatter of shekels milked from this hour of material mesmerism.
•    Let him cry with a voice this century has not heard because he has seen a vision no man in this century has seen. God send us this Moses to lead us from the wilderness of crass materialism, where the rattlesnakes of lust bite us and where enlightened men,  totally blind spiritually, lead us to an ever-nearing Armageddon.
~ Leonard Ravenhill