Yeshua Explored
13th June 2022
How real is our faith?
Who is at the centre of our thinking?
(This series of articles was written a year after the first lockdown in March/April 2021)
Previous articles are still available on the Premier Christian radio website – https://www.premierchristianradio.com/Blogs2/Yeshua-Explored – (until they finally pull the plug!)
If there’s one major theme as a result of the Church replacing its Hebraic roots with Greek thinking (if this is a new concept for you then there is more in Flockdown and a full explanation in Hebraic Church), it’s the supplanting of God in the centre of our thinking, replacing Him with the thoughts of man, often resulting in God as a figurehead without power (as with our Queen). This was a non-issue in the early Church. God was at the centre of all that they did, He was a given, Someone to talk and argue with, not Someone to argue about.
This is a major fault-line through the whole structure of the Church in the West. God is not an added extra, an alternative, a genie in the lamp, a voice from ‘stage left’. Instead, He is firmly in ‘front of stage’. He is also director and producer, script writer and scene builder. This needs to be acknowledged by a Church more intent on reading its own script.
What should have happened during Flockdown is that Church leaders and influencers should have taken this as a time of reflection and new possibilities. Did this happen, rather than the blind panic that seemed to be evident? This had not gone unnoticed by secular commentators. Tim Stanley, writing in The Telegraph on 23rd November 2020, had this to say: We are in the middle of a national crisis, and it’s a crisis about death. This should be the Church’s big moment because the central message of Christianity is that while death is bad – and we will accompany you through it – it’s not the end. Jesus lived. He died. He rose again. This, Christians believe, is a historical fact, and it’s this outrageous claim that converted much of the world to Christ. But there is no accompaniment in 2020 because the churches have been shut (earlier this year, the Anglicans banned even their own clerics from entering them), and though the Church of England hierarchy spreads the Good News, it tends to do so quietly and thinly … The beauty and the liturgy remain, but what do they mean without faith? Without faith, the volunteers and money will eventually vanish, too, and the architecture will fall to ruin. It feels as if much of the Church of England has been on sabbatical for 50 years.
Stanley had hit the nail on the head. For a Christian, which should be a greater impulse, the inaction through fear (of authority or viruses) or the actions that result from faith? If our faith truly drives us, then surely COVID-19 would be presented as an opportunity, rather than an inconvenience.
Another commentator, Janet Street-Porter said the following in the Daily Mail in January 2021: And how has the church responded to our hour of need in the worse crisis since World World 2? By locking their doors in the name of ‘safety’ – something Jesus would never have done. Churches remain closed at a time when everyone (including non-believers) could have all benefitted from a quiet refuge to escape the crowded parks and streets. Covid has seen the church (as usual) stumble and fail to deliver.
So, it is time to be asking the big questions. What defines our faith, to follow our supernatural God and do supernatural deeds, or to follow our Church leaders and wring our hands and do nothing? Covid-19 kept us from our buildings, but it should never had separated us from our calling. A friend of mine, now sadly deceased, didn’t let Covid-19 keep her away from her calling, despite her vulnerable condition. She still followed the Spirit’s leadings in her wanderings outside her home and, consequently saw many set free and healed. If she’d listened to “advice” she would have been isolating and as helpless as most of the rest of us.
Our faith is in God, not in buildings, programmes, celebrations even worship events. How many of us have accepted our enforced seclusion as a hiatus in our faith journey and a time to safely venture inwards? This is not necessarily a bad thing and indeed may have been what God had been saying to you individually. But did this mean that everything else is put on hold? Are we working to God’s timetable or our Government’s guidelines, of when we can do what and how and with whom?
How real is our faith? How many mountains have we moved recently? How much of our faith journey has been dictated to by the secular authorities, even our denominational guidelines, even though instructions from our local church? Who really is in charge of your individual faith journey? Well it’s none of the above, it’s not even you. We follow One and One only:
Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. (Ephesians 2:19-22)
So what is Church? Yes, we have twigged that it’s about the people not the buildings. But we can take this further. It’s not always about the people you think it’s about. It’s not about following people who are themselves following a system (Church politics etc) rather than a person (Jesus). Our Greek thinking has added a whole set of intermediaries between us individuals and Jesus. They are often hidden in plain sight, because they have always been there and we have never thought about querying them.
We follow Christ … not Christians. Yes, we are part of a beautiful interlocking structure, as the Ephesians passage shows us, but we gain our strength from the cornerstone, Christ himself, not the supporting structures, who may well be fellow sojourners on the way. This is not a call to rebel against your pastors and ministers, or whoever you are accountable to, but it’s a call to embark on the personal journey that God has placed in your path. Others will join you on this journey, but beware of others who try to beckon you to join their particular path, even if is bestowed with glittering and exciting jewels and they seem to be abundantly gifted and charismatic individuals.
More next week …
This is an extract from the book, Flockdown Church: Back to the drawing board?, available for £5 at https://www.sppublishing.com/flockdown-church-278-p.asp
