Yeshua Explored

1st August 2022

Good, bad and ugly

How to avoid the world’s agenda?

(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!)

One thing the Church most definitely should not be doing is pandering to the world’s agenda. This is ever-changing and a complete distraction, but still the Church gets sucked in. The latest nonsense is the ‘woke agenda’, this Marxist-inspired desire for uniformity in behaviour and attitude, leading to the ‘cancel culture’ of excluding those who haven’t bought into this and are therefore ‘enemies of society’. A recent episode in the ‘Christian’ world concerned a well-known Christian commentator being ‘cancelled’ by a large Christian media group as a result of writing an article that could be construed by ‘woke’ people as racist (but totally innocuous to the rest of us). If you are interested, I chart the whole history of this ‘infiltration’ in my book, Into the Lion’s Den.

The latter group – you and I – are the future of the Church, I believe. We need to take the initiative and the virtual world that has opened up through Flockdown is the key. We have potentially bypassed the malign gatekeepers, those who have locked down the Christian experience so that they could mould it in their image, rather than the benign gatekeepers who still treat us as a flock to be cared for and served. We have discovered a new world beyond the walls of church, both bricks and mortar and the unseen walls of spiritual control.

Let’s start again and return to the moment of your conversion, the moment God’s Spirit touched yours and the gates of the Kingdom opened for you. What next? Many possibilities lay ahead, but you’re looking for the very best to ensure that you can serve your apprenticeship well.

Here’s the good:

• To be discipled by a trusted contact, preferably the one who has taken you so far
• To be introduced to a group of fellow believers, all at various stages of the faith journey, but all willing to teach and to learn
• To be shown solid teaching resources that give a Biblical, rather than a traditional, viewpoint

Here’s the bad:

• To be invited to a church that seems to fit your profile
• To be mostly left alone to find your way or (perhaps worse) to have someone totally unsuitable ‘assigned to you’
• To be shown a set of rules and regulations that this church abides by

Here’s the ugly:

• To find your spiritual home through Google
• To fall under the control of a dubious “church” who only see you as a potential member and donor.
• To be fed only through YouTube

Not quite black and white, but the theme is for you to be treated as a precious new believer, to be nurtured and protected, rather than just a new recruit to a “church” system, which believes that everything has to be big, noisy and corporate to catch God’s ear!

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