INTRODUCTION

 In this book I am quite critical of the instituted church. I believe I can do this because I love the Church. Frankly, if I did not love it, if I were indifferent to its fate, then I would not have gone to the trouble to devote so much time and energy to write an entire book about the church, analyzing its current state, pointing out where it has gone wrong, and suggesting a possible new way to bring the gospel to the world so desperately in need of Good News.

I always try to follow the Scriptures, of which one text tells me that, when I speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15) we will in all things (ta panta) grow up. One of my main points is that the church has failed to consider the “all things” angle. In my book ‘all things’ means exactly that: not only us, the human race, but everything the Lord has created.

 I realize that some people will say that I am too blunt, that my treatment has been too harsh, my words too judging, my suggestions too utopian, and there is some truth to that. However, I believe that it is too late in history to beat around the bush, to pull my punches, to talk in veiled language, and hint at matters rather than call a spade a spade.

I take my cue from Jesus who was very outspoken when it came to his mission, calling the then church leaders all sorts of names. I have been much more gracious there, because I realize that they are simply repeating what they have been taught in their seminaries.

I very much emphasize that we live in the Last Days and that now Satan, God’s great adversary calls the tune, by and large.

I do hope that where I have gone wrong in my reasoning, people will correct me, also speaking the truth, as they see it, in love.

 I am not a theologian. By the grace of God I started 24 years ago writing a daily meditation based on the lectionary, in a journal published by The Upper Room in Nashville, Tenn. In all these years I have never missed one day, writing about 400 words on weekdays and 800 on Sundays. There I learned about Scripture and about myself in a way not possible by any other means.

Dated May 2009,                                         Tweed, Ontario.

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 25

How then shall we live? (Continued)

Come out of her, my people,

So that you will not share in her sins,

So that you will not receive any of her plagues

For her sins are piled up to heaven

(Revelation 18:4)

The above text is not an isolated passage of Scripture. The same plea can be found in Isaiah 52:11, where this prophet makes an identical entreaty when he tells the people of Israel to “Depart, depart, go out from there!” That ‘there’ is idol worship, is the defiling of God’s name, which, in current language means to stop any further polluting of the earth, the creation which carries God’s name. Polluting is like defacing the Mona Lisa, but then on a universal scale. That text is preceded by the beautiful words depicting the proclamation of the New Creation, “How beautiful on the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!” That captures the new mission of the church, the Church in Flux.

Jeremiah too tells us to get out, but in starker terms. In Jeremiah 51:45 he foresees the present time, when (verse 44) “The nations will no longer stream to him. And the walls of Babylon will fall. (45) Come out of her my people! Run for your lives! Run from the fierce anger of the Lord.” He had made that call before in the same chapter (verse 6) and justifies this sudden departure in verse 9: “We would have healed Babylon (would have liked to convert the entire world, impossible now, as related in the parable of the ten bridesmaids) but she cannot be healed; let us leave her and each go to his own land, for her judgment reaches to the skies, it rises as high as the clouds.”

What does all this mean for us today? Does this mean that I have to go back to the land where I was born? No. it means that “in the House of the Lord are many mansions” which means that we, each in our own way, must prepare for the Kingdom, God’s new creation, to come, which goes back to the original question “How then shall we live?”

In earlier chapters I have outlined the Covenant, and have repeatedly referred back to that concept.

In that covenant that God made with his people he, in unambiguous terms, made him self equal to us, by offering a partnership, where God would share all he had with us if we were to share all we had with him. What God expects us to do, as our part of the Covenant is quite concisely captured by Micah (6:8) where it says, “And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”

It’s as simple as that, except that we have forgotten that to act justly applies to all God’s work, trees, soil, air, fish, animals, people. And to love mercy means to treat animals as our neighbors, while to walk humbly means to continually praise God for the gift of Creation.

Now, as the prophets have written, God’s judgment reaches to the skies, her sins are piled up to the heavens, an eerie prophecy of air pollution and Global Warming.

Of course we can’t get out of this world. As the laws of ecology state: nothing disappears, as everything is connected to everything else, as everything must go somewhere. We too are finding out that nature knows best and that there is a price to pay for everything as there is no free lunch.  In simple terms this indicates that we cannot disassociate ourselves from this world and its problems. But we must somehow cut the ties with the system that is in charge, a system that is ruining God’s world. Perhaps we can call it Capitalism, which pursues ‘creative destruction’ even though Communism has been equally destructive and Socialism too has been a willing partner in pursuing Economic Growth: all have stolen from creation to pursue happiness, which was seen as gathering as many toys as possible without regard for the environmental consequences. As Herman Daly in his book Beyond Growth has argued “We should strive for sufficient capital wealth, efficiently maintained and allocated and equitably distributed, for the maximum number of people that can be sustained over time under these conditions.”(p. 220).

There is an economist speaking in his special jargon. I should note that the goal is not maximum per capita wealth but ‘sufficient’ for a good life, over time’, always taking in consideration not only the well-being of the human race- which until now has been the only concern of the vote-buying officials-  but acting so that our actions benefit all of cosmos. As I have argued, we, as the human race and the land are engaged to be married. As soon as Christ returns, the marriage ceremony will take place.

I earlier have shown, referring to Job, who was converted from an ego-centered fellow to a eco-centered man, and in the parable of the 10 bridesmaids, that there is more to being a Christ-follower than going through a prescribed routine. We have to think outside the box and that means to think outside the contours of organized religion. “Come out of it” doesn’t mean to leave the church just as it doesn’t mean that we must leave the world – which is impossible anyway – but it does mean that we free ourselves from the constraints the organized systems place on us.

All along I have hinted, perhaps even more than that, have suggested that we must go back to house churches. That is not good enough in this day and age. Life is more than church. Life is religion. This means that our next step is much more radical than meeting at a certain place, where a limited number of people pray, sing, read scripture and share insights.

We must go beyond that, and do so in various ways. E.F.Schumacher, in his Small is Beautiful wrote already in 1973 that “the modern industrial system consumes the very basis on which it has been erected…. lives on irreplaceable capital which it cheerfully treats as income.”  He already then recommended that a new life-style is needed with new methods of production and new patterns of consumption. He approvingly quotes Thomas Aquinas who defined a human being as a person with brains and hands, enjoying nothing more than to be creatively, usefully, productively engaged with both his hands and his brains, and recommends exactly a full-orbed life. He points out that “rather less than one-sixth of the total population is engaged in actual production. With a fully employed person, allowing for holidays, sickness and other absence, spending about one fifth of his total time on his job, it follows that the proportion of “total social time” spent on actual production is roughly, one-fifth of one-third of one-half = 3.5 %. The other 96.5 % of total social time is used in other ways, including sleeping, eating, doing jobs that are not directly productive.” He suggests to give ourselves a goal to increase productive time six-fold to 20 % in which to actually produce things, employing hands and brains. He writes,” Think of the therapy of real work; think of its educational value.”

That sort of successful, creative, life-enhancing activity took place in the Celtic Christian Communities which Ian Bradley describes in the book by that name. Under the heading of “Colonies of Heaven – the Monastic Model”, the title Ian Bradley gave to these communities, he calls them “perhaps the most striking feature of Celtic Christianity.” Writes he: “For Christians in the British Isles between the fifth and the eleventh centuries, the monastery rather than the parish church was the primary focus for worship.”(p. 2)  This sort of monastery was not a monkish affair, but involves entire families, married, single, men, women, married priests and single clergy as well.

In the preceding chapters I have argued against heaven in no uncertain terms. Thus to name such communities today ‘Colonies of Heaven’ is inappropriate. Our emphasis should be on preserving the earth: calling them New Creation Colonies would be a better designation, even though the name sounds somewhat pretentious.

As always, matters are open to experimentation. To quote Ian Bradley again: “To establish places on earth which speak of Heaven [- or, in our context, of a Renewed Earth -] is certainly fundamental to the Christian faith and practice in the British Isles in the so-called Dark Ages [the 6-11^th Century] …. It is most definitely a vision that we need to recapture if Christianity is to shine again in our own perhaps even darker age.” (pp. x, xi)

In short, I have related what the Bible says about the Christian life in particular, how it has to re-focus on living the New Life on a New Earth, in a world now increasingly threatened by irreversible destruction. I also have stated that today our world is basically ruled by God’s great Adversary, the Satan, whose only aim is to destroy God’s world, a peril not at all recognized by ecclesiastical institutions which have closed their eyes to present-day dangers and only see an escape to heaven as the way out. Seeing the situation in this light, I have argued that it is imperative in these last days to witness of Christ’s impending return in ways that try to simulate the New Future.

How this should be implemented cannot be prescribed in any detail, as “there are many mansions in God’s house” which suggests that there are multiple ways to play with this concept. It is well-known that the Lord delights in variety: not one of the untold billions of people who ever lived was ever precisely identical, not even identical twins. Not one leaf is exactly the same as another, not even one snow flake, so variety is the spice of life, provided that the basic principles of glorifying God in all our works remain its foundation.

As usual the world is already busy with this concept. “Transition” is the new name of the game, where the buzz word is resilience, with its implications of being skilled, being ready, being confident, and therefore being optimistic about The Day After Tomorrow. We know that The Day after Tomorrow is when the Lord returns. The world sees Transition as the new concept of green and sustainable and eco-once hot, now almost clichés, and subject to corruption by the market. A resilient person is one who can adapt to new circumstances.

Transition was founded by Rob Hopkins, an English academic, who wrote in his Transition Handbook that he has “found a way for people worried about an environmental collapse to invest their efforts in ongoing collective action that ends up looking more like a party than a protest march.”

He hits the right note there, as I have described in my book From Eternity to Here, a Bible-Fiction Tale. Hopkins showed his students The End of Suburbia and they all got supremely depressed, before resiliently bouncing back to found Transition! In short, the film is about how in 1956, a geologist named M. King Hubbert, using a bell curve to chart the world’s petroleum reserves, predicted that global oil production would peak sometime around the year 2000 and then decline rapidly. Energy companies, government officials, academics, and environmentalists disagree on whether the peak has happened, or whether it’s five, 10, or 20 years down the pike. It’s impossible to know a precise date, because between half and two thirds of the world’s oil is in the Middle East, and those nations treat information about their reserves as if they were state secrets. However, since 2005, world oil production has not increased, even though global demand continued to rise until the recent recession.

The descending slope of Hubbert’s bell curve is very steep, so if oil sources are depleting, the stuff will stop flowing faster than we can kick our addiction. Given that our electricity, our transportation, and most of our goods depend on oil, we’re pretty screwed.

This is where Transition taps in. The movement offers a framework for planning an orderly and even a “prosperous way down” the curve, to quote a book well known among Peak Oilers, to a world with less oil. Transition is about communities-in particular “re-localizing” them, and this you probably know something about: eating local and buying local, but also manufacturing local. It’s also about “re-skilling”-learning to do the things our great-grandparents knew how to do, such as growing food and building things. Most importantly, Transition is about resiliency, or, as Hopkins says in his book, “a culture based on its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its limits, and to be able to thrive for having done so.”

So it seems the time is right and the circumstances ripe to prepare for the real Great Transition, from the Old World to the New World.

The Church with a Capital C is in a state of Flux. The church with a lower case should be resting in peace, should be pursuing shalom, but instead it is rusting to pieces, slowly descending to nothingness, because nothing ever remains the same. Its present form does not reflect the reality of tomorrow, a life to be lived to the full in a renewed creation. The course we are following today is the way of death. The course we must follow is the way of Life, eternal life in a creation deeded to us as heirs of the Kingdom.

When the Lord returns he must find us busy in preparing for that heritage. “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city (Revelation 22:14).”

THE CHURCH IN FLUX

Chapter 24

How then shall we live?

We often accuse the church that it is behind the times, old-fashioned, not in touch, too bound to outmoded traditions. Here is a paradox: in order to be with it, in order to actually be ahead of the curve, in order to be able to give real leadership to a society that craves for solutions, if the church really is concerned about its future – and, of course, it should be – then, in these last days, it has to go back 2000 years, to the church’s first days. That is the paradox the church faces.

In that glorious beginning when people responded to its call in droves, the first-time Christians, all over the Roman world, formed small groups of tiny active cells, anticipating and preparing for the imminent return of Christ.

Of course, the Roman Empire provided the necessary infrastructure for the gospel to spread world-wide: a world-government, universal travel, security guaranteed by the Pax Romana, also one language, spoken or understood by all aware people, all this aided the spread of the Good News.

Now, after 2000 years, after a long human history in which people organized themselves to a Tee, have become technically capable of previously un-heard-of feats, many now start to realize that all this progress has come at a price, that the bills are coming due, that the debt is so large, an amount larger than life, greater than anything the world can ever produce. Fortunately the account has been settled, the bill has a stamp on it: paid in full at Golgotha. Yet this rescue plan comes with a condition attached: only those who are ready to enter the new creation, those who have actively sought the Kingdom will, when the human-induced collapse occurs, when renewal is at hand, gain entrance there.  

So the crucial question today is: “How then shall we live?”

That is the issue all Christians face now more than ever. Preparation for the Lord’s coming cannot involve the aid of the gadgets which is causing the demise of human culture in the first place. Today, almost everything we do involves the burning of fossil fuel which is the greatest threat to God’s creation. The question ‘how then shall we live?’ forces us to explore the initial problem of ‘how can we live without these mechanical aids?’ The simple answer is that we cannot, and yet we must try, and when we fail to do that – and we will fail because we have painted ourselves in a corner – the least we can do is pray for forgiveness, while keep on experimenting to live holistically, always with the welfare of creation in mind. In other words, we now must strive for a life that will last for eternity. Now is the time to enter that new life, so that easing ourselves into that New Creation by actively being engaged in living that life now is not an impossible task. From now on it must dominate our very thinking all the time.

In the previous chapters we have seen that in our age Satan calls the shots. He has determined the sort of development humans must undertake, development that, in the end, proved to be creation destroying, leading to a total disintegration of civilization.

This means that we have to start from scratch, start very modestly, heeding Jesus’ words that “where two or three are together in my name, there I’ll be also.” This means that it cannot be done within the current ecclesiastical organizational structure, even though mostly church members would be involved. Only personal witness, not so much through the spoken words, but mostly be through acts of charity and expressed through showing constant love for all God’s creation. E. F. Schumacher, in his “Small is Beautiful”, has shown that small is better anyway. Massive gatherings always entail massive use of energy in transportation, in heating or air conditioning costs. Mega churches have no other goal than promoting personal adoration, results in becoming super organized and so becoming subject to the law of bureaucracy and de-personification.

The New Testament points to house-congregations. The church in Jerusalem which counted thousands of members, avoided the danger of being oversized by splitting into manageable small units that met in each others homes, as is evident from Act 2:46 where it says that ‘they broke bread in their homes and ate together with sincere and glad hearts.” The apostles too went, according to Acts 5:42, from house to house and never stopped teaching and proclaiming the good news that Jesus is the Christ. Romans 16:5 relates that the Christians in the capital of the Empire worshipped in the home of Priscilla and Aquila, to which Paul sent his greetings. He also visited – see 1 Corinthians 16:19 – to the (house) churches in Asia, as well as to Nympha and the meeting at her house as is plain from Colossians 4:15. Philemon 2 confirms this structure as well.

So there is overwhelming evidence that this form of simple organization on the grass root level contributed immensely to the rapid spiritual maturing of the first generation Christians. This process has everything to do with them being on their own, with them personally discovering the depth of Christianity, its wide scope and its broad implication through self-discovery, through prayer and meditation and discussion on a communal level. This was possible because they believed that they were indeed all prophets, priests and kings.

It’s a great pity that the later church has not seen this as a proper way to grow. Soon thereafter the church appointed leaders who then, in turn, prescribed for them how to act in matters religious. This hierarchical structure also resulted in Old Testament ornate vestments and intricate pageantry so unlike the simplicity and freedom Jesus showed in his life.

Of course delegating authority is the easy way out, except that a faith function cannot be delegated: it is a personal matter. The church in becoming a sort of travel agency where guides did the planning, where the clerics became the travel consultants, in this way eliminated personal excursions, and stifled spiritual growth.

The Reformation was supposed to have changed this concept by giving power to the believers, but in reality nothing much different emerged: the same principle of tour guides, of specially trained persons, schooled in dogmatic and theological questions, robbing the laity of exercising personal growth and developing Kingdom expertise, so different from the early New Testament vision where not a professional power structure oversaw developments, but where every member of a local church group saw as his or her calling to exercise the office of believer in their mission to realize their Christian goal. Nowhere in the New Testament is there any hint that the world must be conquered for Christ by means of an organized power structure.

Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 12:9, quoting Jesus’ words, “My power is made perfect in weakness.” The apostles did not, as a body, address the Roman authorities protesting slavery, nor did they send a referendum to the Emperor in connection with the idolization of his office, neither did they design a political manifesto to guide the bureaucrats who had become Christians in their work. What the apostles did do was to point out to the new Christians from all walks of life to be a shining light, to do what was  just, to love justice and to walk humbly with God: in other words, to live the Covenant. Those who kept slaves were reminded that they would have to treat their slaves as fellow humans. Paul told Onesimus, a run-away slave, to return to his master and gave him a note for him wherein he urged his former owner to treat him well, for Christ’s sake and not punish him because he had escaped.

It is with that sort of maturity, with that aim for self-responsibility, in being a grown-up Christian engaged in their own environment and busy in their own surroundings where the future of the church lies. That’s what caused the phenomenal growth of Christianity in the first Century. The growth of the church was not due to operating a smoothly functioning organization, no, it was the influence of adult-in-the-faith believers, who used their daily contacts in life to influence their pagan neighbors and acquaintances and even employers. According to various sources it has been especially the women who played an important role there, something true even today. It was through them that, in the year 95 A.D., Christianity penetrated even into the imperial family.

Because men, women and children in their full-grown faith in Jesus Christ did not hide their beliefs but in their day-to-day activities showed their faith for all to see, without relying on official pronouncements and well-run organizations, that Christianity blossomed in the world of antiquity. This indicates that the more the church favors organization over personal witness the less it becomes the communion of saints.

So how do we recapture that original spirit? How then shall we live to be found acceptable to Christ and be welcomed into the New Creation? That the present structure is not working is also evident from the burn out rate among the current clergy. The (Canadian) Presbyterian Record reports that in a survey of more than 300 ministers from six Canadian denominations, they found that the number of those who had been diagnosed with clinical depression was double the national average. It also mentioned that these statistics likely underestimate the extent of clergy suffering, since studies show that only about half of those with major depression seek help. It’s therefore no surprise that sermons, by and large, do little or nothing to enhance spiritual growth for the flock, as, says this article, “although ministers read the Scriptures in preparation for sermons, it rarely nourished them personally.” Let alone others, I might add. One minister calls “ministry an endless job, often a bottomless pit.”

Although the article lists several ways to help ministers to avoid work overload and deal with the many problems associated with being a church pastor, it fails to come up with a new structure for the congregation where pastoral care and preaching is delegated to those members of the church who have the time and the talent to do that.

How then shall we live?