How God Brings Change To His Church

The Parousia Update Letter For the Week of February 10, 2011
All past newsletters now posted as PDF files in our Newsletter Archives at  www.safehousesofhopeandprayer.org


How God Brings Change To His Church

The history and experience of the Church over the past 20 centuries tells us that when God  desires to bring about profound change in the life of His Church, He usually does it in one of four  ways. I want to explore those four ways God brings about change, and then reflect a bit on those  change He is bringing about in His Church today, particularly as it impact’s the organic house  church movement.

1. Change Through Leaders Whom He Sovereignly Raises Up and Anoints For A Purpose. In the year 1904 Seth Joshua was an official evangelist of the Welsh Presbyterian Church (then  called the Calvinistic Methodist Church) and an official evangelist for the Methodist Forward  Movement in Wales. He had become concerned with the over-emphasis of the Presbyterian  church upon the academic and educational qualifications of its ministers. So, Seth Joshua had  begun to pray that God would raise up a lad from the mines or fields of Wales, even as He had  taken Elisha from behind the plough. Not from Cambridge or Oxford to pander to the people’s  pride, but a lad from the mines or the  fields to revive his people and lead them back to God. His  prayer was soon answered in the person of a 26-year old former coal miner and first year bible  school student named Evan Roberts.

At a gathering for organic house church leaders several years ago, George Barna suggested that  a revolution without leaders is like a war without Generals. When it comes to spiritual revolutions,  the same principle seems to hold true historically. The story of Seth Joshua and Evan Roberts is  only one of many which we could share to illustrate this point. The starfish concept of leaderless  movements not withstanding, every great move of God’s Spirit in the past 500 years of western  Christianity can be linked to identifiable individuals (people we call “leaders”) whom God   sovereignly raised up and anointed to carry the torch of His purposes for that move or that  generation. And in  every situation that I can document, these individuals did not set out with the  intent of becoming a leader, or of even leading a movement. Quite the contrary, they were  simply people who chose to obey God. And God significantly used them, usually to their own  surprise (and I’m not talking about false humility).

Who are the people around you whom God is raising up to lead in this new season? Don’t look in  the mirror. Look in the harvest.

2. Change Through The Collapse of Old Paradigms and The Rise of New Ones. God often changes His Church by challenging its existing values and paradigms. A good  Scriptural example of this is found in Acts 15 where the mission work of both Paul and Peter to  the Gentiles forced the Church to re-consider its spiritual values to include non-Jewish believers  without requiring them to become practicing Jews. This re-evaluation and change of values  represented a water-shed moment in the life of the early Church.

An historical example of God challenging old values and changing old paradigms while raising up  new ones can be seen in the Protestant Reformation and the doctrine of “the priesthood of all  believers”. For nearly a thousand years the Church taught, and people believed, that personal  access to God could only be gained through the ministry and intercession of recognized and  ordained priests of the institutional Church. The teaching of the Reformers challenged and  changed this widely held belief through their insistence that every believer is a priest before God  with access to Him through Jesus Christ His Son. Once this biblical doctrine was understood, the  Medieval Catholic Church lost its institutional grip on the hearts and lives of men and Protestant  Christianity was born.

A third example of God changing old values and paradigms can be seen in the missions  movement of the 19th Century, including the idea that world missions are the responsibility of all  believers. Few Christians today realize that prior to roughly 1795 there were no Evangelical  Protestant missions or mission organizations, apart from a handful of isolated missionaries and a  small band of Moravians in Germany who were starting to send out missionaries (the Moravians  were pioneering missions in the mid-1700s, which brought them in touch with John and Charles  Wesley). Beginning in the late 1700s, God began raising up individual missionary leaders who  taught that missions to reach the lost in foreign lands was the responsibility of every believer.  This was a radical notion that was strongly resisted by Church leaders. But when it caught on it  ignited a missionary movement which resulted in what Church historians describe at the great  century of Christian missions throughout the 1800s.

A fourth example of God challenging and changing old paradigms while raising up new ones can  be seen in the radical idea of the Church as a change agent in society. This idea that the Church  could and should change society for the better took root during the Evangelical Awakening in  England. There was a book written in 1938 by a fellow named John Wesley Bready entitled  “England Before and after Wesley: the Evangelical Revival and Social Reform”. The author  documents the profound changes in British society which came about as a result of the  Evangelical Awakening under Wesley, including the abolition of the slave trade in Great Britain  and the establishment of such things as child labor laws and the Sunday School movement. The  greater impact was the idea, born out of that spiritual awakening and its aftermath, that the  Church - working through the lives of redeemed individuals in their particular spheres of  influence, could be a powerful agent for profound change in society. This idea found expression  through people like  William and Catherine Booth, who were chased out of the Methodist Church  for their participation in the Awakening of 1857 in England and went on to found The Salvation  Army with the vision of bring profound spiritual and practical change to the poorest populations of  England. Do you know who the acknowledged father of modern investigative journalism is? If  you ask any reputable school of journalism in America today who the father of modern  investigative journalism might be, one name comes up. He was a close friend of William and  Catherine Booth and an evangelical Christian himself. His name was William Thomas Stead -  W.T. Stead. He was a journalist who, by his own testimony, got into journalism in order to give  the devil a black eye! He worked with William and Catherine Booth to expose the reality of child  prostitution and sex slavery within upper British Society and to secure legislation to outlaw it. He  was nominated 5 times for the Nobel Peace Prize. It was widely believed that he would have  received it in 1912 had he not perished aboard the Titanic on his way to a peace conference in  New York in April of that year.

I want to close this section on the collapse of old values and paradigms and the rise of new ones  by offering one current-day example that is relevant to our situation in the organic house church  movement: the rise of the idea and the value of Church as an organism rather than an  organization. I believe that the idea of the Church as an organic gathering of believers  irrespective of any institutional setting or organizational requirement represents the most  significant change of values and paradigm shift since the Protestant Reformation. Its full  implications are yet to be fully understood or felt, but it is an earthquake of historic proportions in  the life of the Church. Are you part of it?

3. Change Through Social Upheaval. In a workshop at a CMA Conference in 2007 Alan Hirsh asked this question: “How did the early  church grow from 25,000 in AD100 to between 20 & 25 MILLION in just 200 years (by the time  of its legalizing under Constantine)?”  Alan went on to muse even further. How did they do it?  What makes it all come together in a movement that can only be described as KABOOM!?  These questions are particularly challenging when we consider that these early believers owned  no buildings, possessed only fragments of Scripture (if they could read at all, which many of  them could not), had no seeker friendly services or any of the things people today associate with  “church growth”. Hirsh went on to suggest that one of the reasons can be found in the “viral”  nature of Christianity at that time: it was so simple as to be “sneezable”: “Jesus is Lord”. This  “sneezable” proclamation of faith stood in sharp and direct contrast to the official proclamation  demanded of every Roman: “Caesar is Lord”.

But to say that the faith of the early church was “viral” and “sneezable” begs and leaves  unanswered another question that must be confronted, especially since the declaration that  “Jesus is Lord” doesn’t seem to be viral today in most of the Western world. What set of  circumstances must exist in order for Christianity and its timeless proclamation that “Jesus is  Lord” to become viral and to spread uncontrollably. I want to suggest two things. First, Church  history seems to bear clear testimony that Christianity becomes spontaneously viral during times  of spiritual awakening and outpouring as God sovereignly moves to renew His church and  expand His Kingdom. I’ll spare you another lecture on the history of revival to illustrate my point.  If you’re interested, you can read my book on the great Welsh Revival of 1904, posted on our  website.  That spiritual awakening went viral and circled the globe in three years, brought millions into the  Kingdom of God and left a legacy spiritual legacy (including Azusa Street) which still resonates  today.

Second, Church history also clearly testifies to the power of persecution to turn Christianity  “viral”. Just look at China. When China expelled all Western Missionaries in 1949 the Chinese  church numbered somewhere between 1 million (on the low side) to around 5 million (on the high  side, based on 1% of a population of 541,670,000 in 1949). When China re-emerged on the  world scene and began to open its doors following the disastrous “Cultural Revolution” of the ‘60  and ‘70s, during which Christians were ferociously persecuted, the Christian world was “stunned”  to discover that the Christian community - far from being destroyed - had grown to an estimated  25 million (on the low side) to 50 million (on the high side) by the early 1990s (these numbers are  based on publicly available studies. The CIA World Factbook suggests that 3%-4% of all the  population in China are Christians as of 2002. Independent estimates of the underground house  church movement there have ranged from 40 million to 100 million). How can we explain such  phenomenal growth of the Church in China between 1949 and 2000? I would suggest that  persecution, combined with a genuine move of God’s spirit, turned Christianity “viral” in China  (which also explains why there is no “China model” that can be reproduced or implemented  elsewhere, but why persecuted churches in other hostile countries experience a similar “viral”  phenomenon).

In case you were wondering, my “punch line” here is exactly what you feared it might be; that  the prospect of our seeing genuine “viral Christianity” in the West (and, yes, that includes the  organic house church movement) depends upon whether or not we experience the two primary  catalysts of such viral growth: persecution or genuine spiritual awakening (or both).

4. Change Through Seasons of Divine Visitation and Spiritual Outpouring. My fear in even broaching this subject is that regular readers of this newsletter will cry out in  exasperation and frustration, “Enough already! We get it! We need a spiritual awakening!” My  response is twofold. First, historically speaking, spiritual awakening doesn’t come to the  frustrated, but to the desperate. The “bane” of the Church in the west is that we’re frequently  frustrated, but seldom desperate. Frustration means our carefully laid programs aren’t working  out the way we planned them - huge expenditures of time, effort and money with little to show  for it. Desperation means we’ve given up on both programs and on fixing the problem ourselves,  and we are willing to humble ourselves and beseech God for His solution on His terms. Second,  I’ll place my bet-for-success on the history of God’s sovereign dealings with His people, rather  than on recent (and constantly changing) church growth fads. Scripture teaches and history  records identifiable seasons (kairos) of divinely inspired awakening and renewal through which  He transforms His Church, empowering and equipping it for the task at hand. That’s where I’m  placing my hope, my prayers . . . and my bets. Next Week: Seven Profound Changes  Confronting The Church