Look again under the heaps of stones
I hear far too many cries: “Something must happen, but nothing should change.” Maybe we need to look decidedly beyond the blurred vision of folks seeking security in play-safe huddles, structures, traditions, salaries and well calculated plans, an trust a seemingly crazy and unsafe God who calls all of us to walk on water and go places without money in the belt. I feel we all need to break the ice in 3 areas. Take the apostolic issue first. There we are, both desperately longing for the (real!) apostolic, and desperately afraid it might truly come. True: many of us shudder when we see our American or African friends proclaim and ordain top-down, here-I-come-here-is-my-account type of “apostolic leaders.” Jesus said God has sent many apostles and prophets - some of them have been killed, some stoned. I think true apostles and prophets are such revolutionaries given the context of a Church that is generally anything but mission shaped, that we have driven most of them out of our churches like we would a demon. I guess we will find many true ones as we look under heaps of stones – that we as a Church have thrown ourselves! Go grab a hardly protruding leg yourself.

The second is money. It almost defies gravity how we as a financially rotten, stingy and ill-budgeted Church strategically break every financial apostolic rule and doggedly ignore true New Testament finance-principles. Here we need a complete reinvention in the area of money and work, and no, spiritualizing the workplace is a dead-end road for dreamers, sorry Rich. Remember John Mulinde? Where does the smoke in his original vision, spiritually killing Europe, come from? Forgotten? Exactly!

Lastly: we need to break out of the “We-thing”. Building God´s temple we MUST stop building our own. If Haggai 1 is truly a prophetic chapter for our time, we must stop starting with OUR church. True apostolic leadership needs to be freed from being an ox before a human oxcart (a man-made we-did-it-thing, a denomination, a parachurch, a structure with - oh yes! - a life of it´s own). Maybe we need to cast out Luke 10:2-style heaps of folk out of OUR structures into the desert of God: to cool down, detox, recatch their excaped lion-spirit (thanks, John!), or just for religious quarantaine, to get the system out of you, to unchurch oneself, to become –normal.

And then lets work, retake the land, led by authentically dead, humbled, broken no-name disciples who will be able to lead the current apostolic migration from the Babylonian captivity of a Church that has broken almost every covenant of Gods book, forsaken any 1.Cor 12:28 or Eph. 2:20/4:11 type order and has institutionalized selfordained spiritual militia as the norm. Remember the T-Shirt? No risk, no fun.