Building Empires

 Elitist corporatism over intimate family.


Programs over transformations. 


Budgets over people.   


Codependency over freedom.  


The western church has lost its way.  Having adopted a decidedly Americanized style of either stoic pageantry or contemporary pizzaz at the expense of substance, it more closely resembles a board meeting, or alternatively, a rock concert (depending on your particular denominational flavor) than an organic, vibrant community of faith.  The Gospel mission of spreading the Good News of Christ’s total victory over misery, death, and every false sense of separation has been abandoned for a seemingly more lucrative counterfeit that makes one dependent on the institution and its administrations to access the fullness of God.  It’s no longer about the Kingdom…but building personal empires.  Large, complex, self-important, and mostly ineffective, empires.  


Transforming people’s lives as they discover who they really are (and Whose they really are), while still given a measure of lip-service, has taken a back seat to building funds, membership drives, endless evangelism campaigns, and not an insignificant number of events that draw the eyes of local political and cultural ‘movers and shakers’.  


Saints, we were called to a Kingdom, not an empire.  Whereas an empire is built by using brute force to conquer and dominate for the benefit of the one atop the power pyramid, the Kingdom expands through love, peace, joy, and service to others.  Empires emphasize self-aggrandizement.  But the Kingdom centers on the diminishment of self in favor of an ever-increasing awareness of Christ.  


So what then are we to do?  


As the title of this series lays out plainly, the ekklesia is indeed changing!  A much-needed course correction is now dawning which will realign the focus back towards Christ’s inclusive Kingdom and away from empiric elitism.  How famous you made your own name won’t matter, but rather the extent to which the life of the indwelling Christ could be seen emanating from you.  People will not walk away from you believing they’ve just been in the presence of a great man, but rather a man carrying a Great Presence.  


Empires are about what you’ve done for God.


The Kingdom is about what He has done for everyone. 




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sometimes Certainty is the Greatest Sin of All

Image
One of the more offensive beliefs espoused by western evangelicalism (and there are many) is the notion that all expressions of the Christian faith preceding it - Catholicism, Orthodoxy, Reformed, et al - were in such gross and debauched error as to render them outside the familial participation of Jesus Christ and indeed worshippers of ‘another Jesus’ altogether.  They espouse this without really considering the ramifications of what they are saying.  If these traditional veins are indeed disconnected from the one true Vine of the church, that would mean that the assembled family of God was absent from the earth for over a thousand years.  Taking it a step further in logical progression, it would be asserting that all of the voices informing our current understanding of the nature of God and His Church are irrelevant as why would we rely on those worshipping ‘another Jesus’ for guidance of any kind?!  So that would mean… The doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement which evangelica
Read more

Deconstructing Too Far

“Deconstruction”, when done correctly, is a refiner’s fire burning away that which is faulty or harmful, a gardener’s pruning cutting off those elements contributing to pain and death.  It should never consume the whole nor should it attempt to disconnect the branches from the vine.   While much needs removed, much warrants preservation.  Indeed, like pulling weeds from among the flowers, the purpose of subtracting the faulty is to enable the healthy multiplication of the pure.   A deconstruction process that burns the whole edifice to the ground isn’t healthy and it isn’t helpful.  It’s a form of mass suicide that, by inflicting the same fate on the wheat and the chaff alike, results in the same end as would have been obtained had we never deconstructed at all: misery and death.  (Note: I’m aware there are other, far better terms for the healthy form of ‘deconstruction’.  But I am equally aware that this is the word most commonly used and have adopted it above for the sake of clarity.
Read more

The God of the Illuminated Journey

Image
The God of the Illuminated Journey The faith we experience is not our own or somehow under our manipulative control, to expand or shrink based on our effort or will, but originates from the Source: Father, Son, and Spirit.  As that faith grows, changes, and matures, it remains HIS faith at work in-and-through us.  We cannot multiply it or enlarge its borders.  We cannot order its comings and goings as if it were our subject, obliged to obey our command.  We simply discover it a little bit more each day.   We have, through the fear and intimidation of fundamentalist evangelicalism, substituted the journey with a destination.  By centering the argument on the false dichotomies (or, stated more accurately, false dichotomies as evangelicalism understands and articulates them) of heaven vs hell, saved vs unsaved, right vs wrong, the sunrise has been forfeited for a light switch.  Rather than experience Father, Son, and Spirit through a gradual unveiling of wonder wherein His luminance grows
Read more