Kim Ilene was sharing about some rather controlling behaviour with Torben Sondergaard on the question of discipleship patterns. Sometimes it's good to look at the larger picture
Showing posts with label YWAM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label YWAM. Show all posts
Monday, 10 October 2016
Monday, 4 May 2015
Loren Cunningham and YWAM
From the time we first saw him and his boldness to buy up castles for Jesus we couldn't fail to be impressed how he moved out in faith.Faith can seem for a good while all you need. Loren saw that Jesus had sent out disciples and he was also aware of the multiplication factor of sending out people who train and send out people. Unlike Navigators Loren believed in the baptism of the Spirit and taught the two fold gospel of repentance and being filled with theSpirit.
YWAM always supported locally established churches, so it was never anti church, but as an evangelist Loren wanted to keep things simple and just see many many people all over the world born again, and thought what better way to do this than utilise young people's passion, energy, ability to freely communicate and before they got bogged down with life's baggage. He even pioneered a Discipleship Training School or DTS which he likened to Jesus training the disciples to go out.
So, 50 years on, is there a problem? So much about YWAM is great. It was the first evangelistic organisation that I know of that openly espoused the baptism in the Spirit, although even that got somehow tampered with in some of the nations.
Samantha Paradinha: Yeah, I just respect that he left the A of G to even try. I read a very small book about it way back when. They cast out devils and then had to do it all over again in the next village. Those kids did some noble works.
Loren has the faith and boldness to step out that St Peter had. Maybe that King David also had.
There are similarities with King David.
Two things.
Remember David hit on this really neat idea of automising the ARK carrying process with bulls and a new cart. he had seen it work very well when the ARK went AWOL in the enemies territory. But when the cart hit a bump on a threshing floor, Uzzah put out his hand to the Ark to save it and perished instantly.
Secondly, David got all enthused about building a Temple for God. The prophet came back to him with a very key prophecy ....no you shall not build a house for your God....He shall build a house for you.
YWAM is both a new cart enthusiastically constructed during an absolutely dead period of Christian world history....1960s, and it is also an attempt at building God's Kingdom for Him.
If Loren was Jewish (which ofcourse he maybe....many great Christian leaders are) YWAM would be the gospel of "I AM the God of Abraham and Isaac"
The true gospel of the Lord is I AM the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." What I call the three level gospel of 1 John 2.
YWAM is the gospel of Jesus on the first day of your Christian life. Repent, be baptised in water and be filled with the Holy Spirit. Basically....Abraham's Faith and Isaacs water wells with a baptism in water as a covenantal step of obedience of you signing your signature on the bottom of God's Covenant.
But God's gospel is a bit different. Those baptism in the Spirit Rivers become in the third part of the gospel Mighty Rivers of Living Water deluging out of your innermost belly. I can see why people would get confused....mainly because there aren't that many thirdlevellers. or certainly in my 1970s conversion period there weren't.
Nobody told us that Jesus eating us out of house and home would lead to being invited round His Place and beginning to live from all His resources . This is the real meaning behind I stand at the Door and Knock...if any man hear my voice and open the door I will come and eat with Him (and He's quite hungry) and HE WITH ME.
Most Christians are still living from their own resources still....including their old identity they had before they were Christians.
The point of a good thorough 2ndlevel training in God is to allow who you thought you were to totally fizzle and burn out so that God can establish you in the Galatians 2:20 reality.....It's JESUS wrapped up/entwined in your spirit as your SOLE LIFESOURCE who is living your life. Christians who don't know this dealing give themselves away the moment they start to talk. They also....and Loren was among these....call us navel gazers.
Jesus never allowed His disciples a period of NON MINISTRY. Ministry can accelerate you into realising you have nothing!!!! MInistry also has the advantage of being DECLARATION of WORD.....calling that which is not seen as though it is so. So for this reason Jesus chivvied the disciples into ministry.
Remember Jesus said phrases like....when He saw that the Lord's Presence was there to heal....He prayed for everybody and they were all healed. Well the disciples were fast tracked into discerning the heavenly protocols.....seeing what the Father is doing at any point and getting in on it.
So if Loren is rushing young people into ministry is there a problem? In one sense it is an acceleration. The only problem is that currently so few people in the world realise there is a third level, realise there is a total, and I mean total LIFE exchange that went on at the Cross. So hardly anyone ever experiences any Christians who speak with that heavenly authority that literally comes from the Throne itself. Listen to THY KINGDOM COME by Ern Baxter....linked on my blog.
THis is the nature of thirdlevel ministry. It has its own FIRE right within it. You get singed just listening. This is the authority with which Jesus spoke and fools people immediately because their idea of authority comes through pyramids of men with certificates and gold chains and badges with dragons and other heraldic demons on. They simply can't compute how ordinary looking people can have that much authority.
GOD's DIVINE MEANS is not DTS. It isn't a YWAM organisation. God's DIVINE MEANS is thirdlevel church. Like the first one in ACTS 2. 12 elders totally broken in the Lord, knowing Jesus was their sole Life and consequently fully in love with each other, BUT NOW also totally drenched in the power and love of the Holy Spirit standing before a crowd who all had their GOBS wide open....
saying 2 things.....THIS JESUS THAT YOU ALL CRUCIFIED...and they had.....
And .......DO YOU WANT SOME???????
Ephesians is the total mechanical engineering blueprint of what thirdlevel church looks like....how you accelerate through....and how the armour is constructed within your being as you pass through this particle accelerator called PROPER CHURCH. It has nothing to do with anything we see today...and you can understand why Loren got so cheesed off and formed YWAM. But the problem is....like David's New CART....it isn't God's Protocol...it's cheap and plastic by comparison and planet EARTH is worthy of the REAL and ROYAL version....
The CHURCH of the LIVING GOD run in the MELCHIZEDEK ORDER.
Saturday, 2 May 2015
John 17- the Vision of the " Church Visible"
Basilia Schlink studied psychology at a very key time in Germany's history and world history. But precisely because she was a born again Lutheran espousing all aspects of evangelicalism including sharing Jesus on the streets she was immediately perceived in Europe as something close to a Southern States Bible thumper with no brain. This is the power of assumption and the great power with which the devil mind controls every man woman and child on earth. Here's some truth. 
Like Bonhoeffer Nee and many other greats she was so.far into Christ's life she was way beyond anything in America. She openly taught similar to Norman Grubbs Romans 6 to 8 message in her community and created one of the first living communities to share life.together in that level of.belief. In the book Realities and my very own eyeballs you will see that they were actually materialising bits of early Romans 8 in their end of the Universe in Darmstadt. Here's a key....the Gates of Jerusalem, the book of Romans individually and the book.of Ephesians corporately are a cycle.If you conclude the cycle then you get reproduction and on a grand scale. The reason evangelists have such a hard time is two or threefold.....they only carry two-thirds of the gospel and are working with an Ishmael church that likewise never completes God's Word and is a half built Tower and thirdly hidden Masonic activity works ceaselessly to undermine everything they do and laugh mercilessly at the half built towers. If we conclude the cycle then like a lady fertilized in her ovulation cycle....pregnancy Just HAPPENS.....NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!!!Roll on the Word and Spirit Church prophesied by Wigglesworth .....one with all Jerusalem's 12 Gates up and running.
So precisely because of her psychology studies and her advanced spiritual revelation Mother Basilea Schlink was one of the first in the evangelical world to be aware of the broad outlline of mindcontrol over nations through media and locally through focus groups and methods such as Sensitivity training and Silva mind control formation. It was very hard for us 16 yearolds to stomach in 1974 but what she had already picked up in the Spirit was the yellow brick road of the masonic plan to take over every aspect of life. She would not have known Mengele and the rest were shipped to America by James Bonds Ian Fleming....ready to continue the mind control studies there as shown in Shutter Island (Dicaprio+Kingsley). She would have known some of the Nazi psychology professors by name and studied their more openly published material. Erin Rothschild actually knew Mengele as a father figure as did many of the psychic soldiers in the Montauk project. See Miles Johnstons Youtube Bases series.
Jesus called 12 disciples. HE DIDNT DO WHAT NORMAN GRUBB DID.....which was the evangelical notion of having a seminar once a year and then trying to work it all out individually.
He called forth His Church by the Spirit, spoke Light, and waited for the nuclear fallout between the disciples, when He then spoke more Word. That's why Jesus way of doing things takes 3 years and Norman's way of doing things takes 70 and counting. The church is the Woman that gives birth to the Manchild.
Who is the church? The new Jerusalem compacted together.then scattered when her time is come.
The Union message of people who have read Norman Grubb is OK but it isn't really a Union message.....why? Until it's a full-fledged John 17 or Full Body message it's like masturbation for beginners. The Church is what God is after and the Church reproducing according to the woman and the manchild of Revelation 12 is what He shall get......manifesting now to powers and principalities the manifold (as in full spectrum....visible and offvisible) wisdom of God.
God ignores Romans and jewish Chief Priests. They were the wrapping paper.
No Jesus FIRST CHURCH was the blueprint for all time.
Daily ministry and sharing of lives for a very short period then SCATTER packed with INNER WORD. Very similar to YWAM but with the third part of the gospel of 1 John 2 in which they ignore. People now are like rape victims.
Have you ever tried talking to a rape victim about marriage?
Well people are like this whenever you talk about Church.
Church ISN'T what you have in America. That is called a circus with a ringmaster.
Church isn't what we have in England. That is called a lecture in a mortuary.
So when I use the word Church or called out gathering of the saints according to Hebrews 13.11-13 I am talking of something like YWAM except with mature ministries. People compacted together BY THE LIVING PROPHETIC WORD...."the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy"
Why? If you are all going to be related to the HEAD continually...you'd better be joined up with the Head in the Melchizedek Order to begin with.
Peter's two main Words were....I will make you a fisher of men and upon THIS ROCK (a pun on Peter and His inward seeing of God come in the flesh in Jesus).
If you don't build on the apostolic and prophetic WORD for you, you end up building the disasters called churches in the States and the UK on every street corner and totally acceptable to every freemason Lodge in the world. You can sit there for hundreds of years. You can then sell your building off as a mosque or carpet shop....but one thing you will never have achieved is Revelation 12....and the Woman gave birth to a Manchild and was chased off into the wilderness.
IF YOU ARE A CHURCH RAPE VICTIM...GET HEALED>>>THEN STUDY WHAT JESUS ACTUALLY SAYS ABOUT HIS CHURCH in a locality.
The gospel is a CHURCH WORD.
Please don't read that in your leftbrain.
Here is the leftbrain meaning of that phrase.
The word gospel is a word only used in the context of Church.
No wash your ears out and i will begin again.
The Word of Christ in the gospel is ALWAYS in RELATION to Jesus BUILDING HIS BRIDE in the EARTH.
Any idiot can get saved.
Any idiot can press through Romans in his own life to find Jesus as HIS LIFE.
NO the real CATCH 22 is that there is ONLY ONE JESUS and HE IS A FAMILY JESUS who builds local reflections of
RICH POOR
ALL NATIONALITIES
ALL CULTURAL EXPRESSIONS
ALL AGE GROUPS SIMULTANEOUSLY
THOSE CLEVER IN THEIR LEFTBRAIN BEING MADE WISE IN THE SPIRIT as WELL AS THOSE WHO ARE THICK BEING EDUCATED FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A BALANCED BRAIN WAY BY THE BEST TEACHER THERE IS.
These local reflections of the TRINITY AGAPE LOVE are called churches and unlike the ISHMAELS on the present streets...they are BORNE OF GOD'S WORD and are pressing into the fulness of 1 JOHN 2....all 3 stages of Growth spiritually and in corporate form as described in Ephesians. In short like nothing we have ever seen on earth in our lifetime.
Saturday, 7 February 2015
A Good Foundation
In hindsight these were all restricted learning environments which covered no more than Romans chapters 3 to 5, or the first two stages of growth in 1 John 2.
The FIRST HALF of the "young man stage" of John's letter is still the favored popular end of the gospel. We see something similar in Jesus own ministry. A lot of people forget that Jesus laid His glory aside. He WAS A NEW LINE whose Seed was directly of God, but He, like Adam was a Man, who had now been baptised in the Spirit. Beginning with one sentence under anointing in hometown of Nazareth, He was learning as He went.He could learn from no rabbi about being baptised in the Spirit, so He was learning it all Himself. But in order to take people through in the Spirit, Jesus announced further clarity of revelation in John 6 and everyone but the most committed left.
To be fair to Jorge Pradas's Bible Houses to the extent that they followed the patterns established by the thirdleveller Edward Miller, they really were to a measure places of Deliverance for all of us.
But almost universally this fact is also true.
The man in charge of Bible House.
The people running YWAM
Just about 99% of all current churches have no clue what they enter into in seeking to bring forth people in Christ.
Everyone without exception is naïve about Genesis 3 thinking at the same time that they know everything about Genesis 3. Just as no man can ever understand childbirth, nor any woman who has never been through it herself, in the same way unless you have been part of your own “bearing of the ManChild Jesus Christ” in your own body, you have not a clue of the deliverance you need from the Old Creation and your own departure from Genesis 3.
The TRUE MANCHILD DEMANDS HIS OWN FORM OF CHURCH, HIS VERY OWN WINESKIN. Church as it is now is like a flimsy cardboard model that has very little true significance in the Spirit of God.
As Paul says our works shall all be burned and that which endures shall have been tried as through fire.
I am getting very tired of people saying to Rich Novek, myself, Daniel Yordy, Annalize Mouton and many others of us here
“You are more unpopular than we are.”
“You don't have many people liking your posts.”
“When are you going to do something?”
“Why don't you preach the gospel?”
Here is the truth God speaks over us no matter how it looks to the eyes. And it is the very same message God the Father would have spoken over the tiny group of 12 and a few hangers on.
Isaiah 55 “Shout for joy, O barren one, you who have borne no child;
Break forth into joyful shouting and cry aloud, you who have not travailed;
For the sons of the desolate one will be more numerous
Than the sons of the married woman,” says the Lord.
2 “Enlarge the place of your tent;
[a]Stretch out the curtains of your dwellings, spare not;
Lengthen your cords
And strengthen your pegs.
3 “For you will spread abroad to the right and to the left.
And your [b]descendants will possess nations
And will resettle the desolate cities.
4 “Fear not, for you will not be put to shame;
And do not feel humiliated, for you will not be disgraced;
But you will forget the shame of your youth,
And the reproach of your widowhood you will remember no more.
5 “For your husband is your Maker,
Whose name is the Lord of hosts;
And your Redeemer is the Holy One of Israel,
Who is called the God of all the earth.
6 “For the Lord has called you,
Like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit,
Even like a wife of one’s youth when she is rejected,”
Says your God.
7 “[c]For a brief moment I forsook you,
But with great compassion I will gather you.
Church as it is now
is like a flimsy cardboard model
that has very little
true significance in the Spirit of God.
The truth is we don't need that many people, what we need is people who have genuinely received the Seed of Jesus Christ through us or others and have become fullgrown. There is only one Jesus Christ however the outer form looks.
Anybody can preach a religion that saves them from some future hell, or even lead others into the exciting baptism of the Holy Spirit. Just these features on their own are enough to create mutlitudes of excited people who create a culture that is infectious for others to join......but none of this was actually what Jesus Christ was doing. What He was doing as we see when Peter blurted out You are the Son of God, and He came back with “Upon this Rock, this perception of God in flesh, will I build My Church.”. was teaching people to become as little children and completely relearn the whole business of life, but this time as God living His life as you in your form.
No church is doing this. And this is why we are impatient with you. You can accuse us as much as you like, but you are not doing what Jesus called us to do. The foundation you are building on is a little bit of Jesus superimposed upon the foundation of man, or the whole Genesis 3 lie.
Sunday, 11 January 2009
A Third Level Approach to Ministry III
Continuing the series that looks at how we do the whole thing of "Ministry" as the present Body of Christ.
To quote Gerald Coates from nigh on 40 years ago, "radical" means concerned with the root.
If the root of how we do ministry is a bit off, then like the Tower of Pisa, it doesn't get better the further up we go.
Me and the present setups
After all my postings you are probably aware of the slightly schizophrenic nature of this blog. On the one hand I want to encourage any good, God-raised up vehicle that gets people from a to b in Christ. If there are colleges that are being used to ground people in the Word of God. If there are networks or families of churches that are continually planting out here and abroad. If there are evangelists,especially signs and wonders evangelists bringing in a harvest of new people to Christ, and from there into existing churches.
My problem is this word "vehicle".
Since being with Graham Pulkingham and the Fisherfolk I saw a kind of prototype Kingdom.
A prototype self-replicating Body of Christ. A Body that was birthed in the intercessory pain of Joel. The priests before the altar. Of Graham on a crypt floor for 3 months (read his book in my book list)surrounded by a broken neighbourhood...that neither wanted his church - nor could see anything else in life than the struggle to just survive. Nobody in my hearing has ever used the word "vehicle" about Graham Pulkingham and the Fisherfolk Community.It wasn't a vehicle. It was Christ in their forms.
Here was faith. Evangelistic faith....even willing to come into Dr Challoner's Grammar School Amersham, fresh over from Houston Texas. But here was something else too. Here was a covenantal love between everybody. That was more than duty. There had been some dying and resurrecting...as in Jamie's last post . In Song of Solomon the younger sister is berated for being like a Tower....not having the well developed breasts of Faith and Love.
If we do not have well developed faith and well developed love...
our evangelism contains a lot of hoopla, a lot of brow-beating, a lot of pressure...
The thing is... the gospel is real, folks. We can do some dying and resurrecting. What resurrects is not us, but Christ...in all His unique fragrances and oils. People know on their insides that we have been with Him. The truth is actually far deeper. The truth is He has eaten us for lunch!!!
He never was really that interested in our lives before knowing Him. As clever as we may have thought we were. Whatever we were we really do count as loss. Cos when you've had tasters of Him radiating His Life out through you....such that every one in the room becomes a little irradiated themselves....well why would you ever go back?
So this is my problem
with large networks like Salt and Light, like New Frontiers,and all the many others out there
are they what I have described...the self-replicating Body of Christ
or are they just machines...just vehicles? It was never in Gerald Coates' heart to create a vehicle. But is this in fact what we are left with? New carts for the glory of God. Instead of the poles in my parable.
This is what prompted this post
Obviously I was struck over the weekend by the frankness of Dan's post on Life on Wings. But this is what hit me forcibly yesterday afternoon. And this is nothing to do with Dan.
There is a breed of person who remains in the academic world all his life. Like CS Lewis. Or let's take a Mr Smith. He does all his schooling. He goes to University. He does a Phd, then becomes a teacher in a school. Then out of 30 or more pupils, maybe one or two do likewise. So there already you have 2 generations of pupils that have perpetuated an academic life to perpetuate an academic life.
My point is more subtle than to say we perpetuate academic life, academic study of the scriptures...to forever be replicating just knowledge of the scriptures. Perhaps that is the preserve of the evangelical churches. No my point is a continuation of the last ministry posts.
What our networks perpetuate is a 2 level gospel of forgiveness and moving in the Spirit. The vision of faith (the God of Abraham and his faith walk) and the vision of the Baptism in the Spirit (the God of Isaac and his wells) but nearly nobody reproduces the Life Change or Name change which is hidden in the phrase "seek the Face of the God of Jacob" And it is this last revelation that changes a believer into an oozing Christ stick like Graham Pulkingham. It is this final element that meant the Israel history could start rolling. Via the 12 sons....and we know the rest.
And it is this final level that makes Ed Miller, and Mother Basilea Schlink stand out like Lighthouses in the sea of other ministries. Because, through doggedly seeking God themselves, they both found it,taught it and radiated it. And something similar was coming through Mother Theresa, who for 40 years did nothing but seek God....then when she was called to India she went as "Christ as her". She knew her identification, to use Jorge Pradas' phrase.
The model of Salt and Light under Barney Coombs, and Terry Virgo's New frontiers, and Morris Cerullo's God's Victorious Army , and Rheinhardt Bonnke's ministry schools, and YWAM's Discipleship Training Schools are wrong. They are 2 level affairs, with built-in add ons to try and make up for the deficiences. And to go back to the academic example. This insufficiency is perpetuated throughout the generations. At what point do people learn to live in the real world as "Christ as them". Then perpetuate that. At what point do people see right into the problem of Genesis 3:5, so they can correct it. They don't. So a shallow 2 level Christianity is forever perpetuated.
As I've described before about the Word being like a suspended orb(see comments section of this post)....in the end, when I listen to folk I'm not listening just to their words or their message, I am looking to see if the orb of God's Presence is suspended within what they are saying. This will make more sense if you read the passage again. Because English ministries have little or no knowledge of the 3 part Way of God
You get a limp and flaccid 2 part version
You get sound-ish docrine, but no Presence
You get add-on ministries like "Celebrate Recovery" in Derby church because of the insufficiencies in the original gospel....which leaves people still bound in their particular brand of sins, as I was.Worse than this by the way....at least 3 or 4 of the young people I was in Bible House with are dead. Many more are divorced. Already. I think it's important you read to the end of this post. I am not speaking out of lightweight experience.Perhaps now you can understand where I am coming from with 1st and 2nd level churches
The struggles that Dan describe this weekend are treated by the 1st and 2nd level churches as a brief abberation, as a slightly embarrassing interlude in the running of network churches. This is the tone of one of the Salt and Light church people when describing Todd's difficulties of 2005...let alone his more recent difficulties. It hasn't yet hit the Network churches that THIS IS THE GOSPEL. Everyone plays down these seeming abberrations...but this is Romans 7...this is the Psalms experience David is going on about. This IS how we decide in a safe universe to make a change on the inside of us. This is no human decision. This is a miracle. This isGod doing something at last...when all else failed.(Read Corrie Ten Boom) While we lean on the ultimate victory of the Cross 2000 years ago....this is us making it ours. It is debilitating...read Maurice Smith's 20th Century Pilgrim. It is embarrassing...especially to the pull yourselves up by your bootstraps brigade. But you see, those ones are not fully born again yet. Grace is not active in them yet. Their eternal destiny may be sealed....but God is not just about people's eternal destinies...He wants to get Christ up and running in me and you too...just like all those "top shelf" Christian bookshop people.
Like Watchman Nee. Like Corrie ten Boom. Like George Verwer. Like Madame Guyon. Like John Bunyan who describes all this in incredible detail in Pilgrim's Progress. And no, the order in his story is not wrong. It's you and your churches that are wrong.
Network churches build warehouses of Christians they don't know what to do with. They celebrate two out of the three feasts. Passover and Pentecost. And then they make Tabernacles into a reiteration of Passover because it has a Day of Atonement in it. see Joseph Prince.
No. No. No. Atonement is where it is in the sequence for a reason. If you are established in Passover and Pentecost...and you know His love and His forgiveness and His Presence....on the basis of that grounding He can begin walloping you like a teenager...to conform you into His sonship...to make you into an adult...a Co-worker with Him. Rather than looking at David in an embarrassed way...poor thing...he went through such stuff in the wilderness with Saul and that.... you've got to see that THIS IS THE WAY OF GOD. It's not something God is embarrassed about either.
To conclude I prophesy this with reference to our previous chats recently about Israel.
When the Church gets the revelation about Jacob...and the Name change
When the Church gets the revelation about The Day of Atonement
In that day we are going to provoke the nation of Israel to jealousy
And in that day we will see with our own eyes
A True Day of Atonement
The two houses being made as One (At one-ment) with their God and with each other.
Both flawed and floored by the grace of God in equal measure...that NO MAN MAY BOAST.
Selah
To quote Gerald Coates from nigh on 40 years ago, "radical" means concerned with the root.
If the root of how we do ministry is a bit off, then like the Tower of Pisa, it doesn't get better the further up we go.
Me and the present setups
After all my postings you are probably aware of the slightly schizophrenic nature of this blog. On the one hand I want to encourage any good, God-raised up vehicle that gets people from a to b in Christ. If there are colleges that are being used to ground people in the Word of God. If there are networks or families of churches that are continually planting out here and abroad. If there are evangelists,especially signs and wonders evangelists bringing in a harvest of new people to Christ, and from there into existing churches.
My problem is this word "vehicle".
Since being with Graham Pulkingham and the Fisherfolk I saw a kind of prototype Kingdom.
A prototype self-replicating Body of Christ. A Body that was birthed in the intercessory pain of Joel. The priests before the altar. Of Graham on a crypt floor for 3 months (read his book in my book list)surrounded by a broken neighbourhood...that neither wanted his church - nor could see anything else in life than the struggle to just survive. Nobody in my hearing has ever used the word "vehicle" about Graham Pulkingham and the Fisherfolk Community.It wasn't a vehicle. It was Christ in their forms.
Here was faith. Evangelistic faith....even willing to come into Dr Challoner's Grammar School Amersham, fresh over from Houston Texas. But here was something else too. Here was a covenantal love between everybody. That was more than duty. There had been some dying and resurrecting...as in Jamie's last post . In Song of Solomon the younger sister is berated for being like a Tower....not having the well developed breasts of Faith and Love.
If we do not have well developed faith and well developed love...
our evangelism contains a lot of hoopla, a lot of brow-beating, a lot of pressure...
The thing is... the gospel is real, folks. We can do some dying and resurrecting. What resurrects is not us, but Christ...in all His unique fragrances and oils. People know on their insides that we have been with Him. The truth is actually far deeper. The truth is He has eaten us for lunch!!!
He never was really that interested in our lives before knowing Him. As clever as we may have thought we were. Whatever we were we really do count as loss. Cos when you've had tasters of Him radiating His Life out through you....such that every one in the room becomes a little irradiated themselves....well why would you ever go back?
So this is my problem
with large networks like Salt and Light, like New Frontiers,and all the many others out there
are they what I have described...the self-replicating Body of Christ
or are they just machines...just vehicles? It was never in Gerald Coates' heart to create a vehicle. But is this in fact what we are left with? New carts for the glory of God. Instead of the poles in my parable.
This is what prompted this post
Obviously I was struck over the weekend by the frankness of Dan's post on Life on Wings. But this is what hit me forcibly yesterday afternoon. And this is nothing to do with Dan.
There is a breed of person who remains in the academic world all his life. Like CS Lewis. Or let's take a Mr Smith. He does all his schooling. He goes to University. He does a Phd, then becomes a teacher in a school. Then out of 30 or more pupils, maybe one or two do likewise. So there already you have 2 generations of pupils that have perpetuated an academic life to perpetuate an academic life.
My point is more subtle than to say we perpetuate academic life, academic study of the scriptures...to forever be replicating just knowledge of the scriptures. Perhaps that is the preserve of the evangelical churches. No my point is a continuation of the last ministry posts.
What our networks perpetuate is a 2 level gospel of forgiveness and moving in the Spirit. The vision of faith (the God of Abraham and his faith walk) and the vision of the Baptism in the Spirit (the God of Isaac and his wells) but nearly nobody reproduces the Life Change or Name change which is hidden in the phrase "seek the Face of the God of Jacob" And it is this last revelation that changes a believer into an oozing Christ stick like Graham Pulkingham. It is this final element that meant the Israel history could start rolling. Via the 12 sons....and we know the rest.
And it is this final level that makes Ed Miller, and Mother Basilea Schlink stand out like Lighthouses in the sea of other ministries. Because, through doggedly seeking God themselves, they both found it,taught it and radiated it. And something similar was coming through Mother Theresa, who for 40 years did nothing but seek God....then when she was called to India she went as "Christ as her". She knew her identification, to use Jorge Pradas' phrase.
The model of Salt and Light under Barney Coombs, and Terry Virgo's New frontiers, and Morris Cerullo's God's Victorious Army , and Rheinhardt Bonnke's ministry schools, and YWAM's Discipleship Training Schools are wrong. They are 2 level affairs, with built-in add ons to try and make up for the deficiences. And to go back to the academic example. This insufficiency is perpetuated throughout the generations. At what point do people learn to live in the real world as "Christ as them". Then perpetuate that. At what point do people see right into the problem of Genesis 3:5, so they can correct it. They don't. So a shallow 2 level Christianity is forever perpetuated.
As I've described before about the Word being like a suspended orb(see comments section of this post)....in the end, when I listen to folk I'm not listening just to their words or their message, I am looking to see if the orb of God's Presence is suspended within what they are saying. This will make more sense if you read the passage again. Because English ministries have little or no knowledge of the 3 part Way of God
You get a limp and flaccid 2 part version
You get sound-ish docrine, but no Presence
You get add-on ministries like "Celebrate Recovery" in Derby church because of the insufficiencies in the original gospel....which leaves people still bound in their particular brand of sins, as I was.Worse than this by the way....at least 3 or 4 of the young people I was in Bible House with are dead. Many more are divorced. Already. I think it's important you read to the end of this post. I am not speaking out of lightweight experience.Perhaps now you can understand where I am coming from with 1st and 2nd level churches
The struggles that Dan describe this weekend are treated by the 1st and 2nd level churches as a brief abberation, as a slightly embarrassing interlude in the running of network churches. This is the tone of one of the Salt and Light church people when describing Todd's difficulties of 2005...let alone his more recent difficulties. It hasn't yet hit the Network churches that THIS IS THE GOSPEL. Everyone plays down these seeming abberrations...but this is Romans 7...this is the Psalms experience David is going on about. This IS how we decide in a safe universe to make a change on the inside of us. This is no human decision. This is a miracle. This isGod doing something at last...when all else failed.(Read Corrie Ten Boom) While we lean on the ultimate victory of the Cross 2000 years ago....this is us making it ours. It is debilitating...read Maurice Smith's 20th Century Pilgrim. It is embarrassing...especially to the pull yourselves up by your bootstraps brigade. But you see, those ones are not fully born again yet. Grace is not active in them yet. Their eternal destiny may be sealed....but God is not just about people's eternal destinies...He wants to get Christ up and running in me and you too...just like all those "top shelf" Christian bookshop people.
Like Watchman Nee. Like Corrie ten Boom. Like George Verwer. Like Madame Guyon. Like John Bunyan who describes all this in incredible detail in Pilgrim's Progress. And no, the order in his story is not wrong. It's you and your churches that are wrong.
Network churches build warehouses of Christians they don't know what to do with. They celebrate two out of the three feasts. Passover and Pentecost. And then they make Tabernacles into a reiteration of Passover because it has a Day of Atonement in it. see Joseph Prince.
No. No. No. Atonement is where it is in the sequence for a reason. If you are established in Passover and Pentecost...and you know His love and His forgiveness and His Presence....on the basis of that grounding He can begin walloping you like a teenager...to conform you into His sonship...to make you into an adult...a Co-worker with Him. Rather than looking at David in an embarrassed way...poor thing...he went through such stuff in the wilderness with Saul and that.... you've got to see that THIS IS THE WAY OF GOD. It's not something God is embarrassed about either.
To conclude I prophesy this with reference to our previous chats recently about Israel.
When the Church gets the revelation about Jacob...and the Name change
When the Church gets the revelation about The Day of Atonement
In that day we are going to provoke the nation of Israel to jealousy
And in that day we will see with our own eyes
A True Day of Atonement
The two houses being made as One (At one-ment) with their God and with each other.
Both flawed and floored by the grace of God in equal measure...that NO MAN MAY BOAST.
Selah
Thursday, 4 December 2008
A Third Level Approach To Ministry II : Twinklers
Prodded a little by Lydia Joy losing her grandfather I wanted to continue this summary of thoughts on how the 3rd level changes everything we ever thought we knew about ministry.Maurice Smith calls mature Christians twinklers (see my book list).While others may age less than gracefully, with a growing cynicism, twinklers twinkle more!! Their eyes just give the game away. And you just know. You know they know Him in whom they have believed.
Without a powerful experience of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, a Christian seems to take several decades to become a true twinkler. Whether Protestant or Catholic, they are people of prayer and the Word. The slight snag is by the time they are twinklers, it is nearly time to go home...and they are severely restricted by limitations of age, mobility and possibly other issues.
So Youth With a Mission, Morris Cerullo, and Rheinhardt Bonnke hit on another system. Give the people of God an experience...a powerful experience coupled with a lot of training on the life of faith...and send them out to turn the world upside down!! In a way this is what happened on April 6th 1972 to all of us in a little corner of Bucks,England. And it seemed for a while we did turn our corner of things in Amersham a little bit upside down.But here is a snag. Youth With A Mission, Morris Cerullo and Rheinhardt Bonnke call this making twinklers. (Well they don't...but they call this sending workers out into the harvest). It is and it isn't. Let's return later.
For New Frontiers and a whole host of other networks of new churches, this is insufficient, so they believe in yoking developing ministries to local church situations over months and years. Possibly sending people to a more formal type of Bible College, be it run by their family of churches or some other institution that holds an evangelical position. Unless these new ministries are exposed to a radical Holy Spirit anointing either directly, as in Rob Rufus'case, or through other ministries...the tendency is always to settle back into "sound teaching of the Bible" but with little power and little miraculous fruit.Both approaches I would call the twin sides of the second level.
So to recap:Firstlevellers, by dint of continuing in the faith, continuing in prayer, continuing in the Word, continuing with the ups and downs of fellowship life, may well after decades and decades ...if they don't duck out... find themselves twinkling.
Secondlevellers will experience a baptism in the Holy Spirit, be introduced to the reality that Christianity is in fact supernatural in manifestation, be then driven back into a hunger for the Word, and a fresh hunger to experience fellowship together with other Christians, but this time at this new supernatural level . The growth arc will probably be shorter than in the first case. But if our experiences in the UK are anything to go by, we are still talking somewhere between 1 and 3 decades even moving pretty quickly before anyone even approaches twinkler status. And again there is absolutely no certainty that people will press right through. For this reason Paul writes "Do not harden your hearts as the Israelites did in the days of rebellion in the wilderness."
Firstlevellers know how to get others into a born again experience.
Secondlevellers get people born again and baptized in the Spirit. As I have mentioned before, in the year of 1972, at the age of around 14(Christine is one year younger), both she and I in our respective areas of the UK were doing all this. Now this for many fellowships would mean we had arrived. Well, here we are at age 50, and we still haven't. Because you see there is a 3rd level of growth.Without a vision, the people perish. Without even a sketchy understanding that there are 3 distinct growth stages, people all over the world in the Body of Christ are floundering around. You've got people like Amy, (see Amy's blog) who have probably been compliant for years in their church system...thinking that that would amount to something, confusing 2nd level churches with the raw real deal of the anointed Living Body of Christ. Ofcourse in parts it is....but the 2nd level stuff contains other ingredients as dangerous and poisonous as the worst plant foods that you could ingest.So Youth With A Mission, Rheinhardt Bonnke, David Hathaway, Morris CerulloAlso New Frontiers, and all the other 70s and 80s like networks, be it under Terry Virgo, Alan Vincent, Gerald Coates,Barney Coombs and so on and so on....are all (probably unwittingly and out of anxiety to get the job done) doing the Body of Christ a huge disservice....Why?Because they are calling the 2nd level a mature ministry and as the world instinctively knows...it isn't.
Because they are not raising the people's sights and expectations to believe that Jesus is faithful to complete the work in us to make us fit and able fathers who reproduce after our kind.We either believe in the power of His Word to raise us up as fit ministers ....or we don't. And if we don't, we help God along a little with more programmes, and training procedures and conferences.....
when what people need to understand is
How Genesis 3:5 works
How Jesus came to destroy all the works of the Evil One
How He came to lay the axe to the root.
What root? The religious system? The 2-bit secondlevel structures the grace-bloggers are railing against? Terry Virgo? Nope Nope Nope The axe is laid against us? Every flipping last second of the day we are not living from the reality of what the Cross has won for us. We don't need to go around looking for others to single out.Every little second we catch ourselves living the Genesis 3:5 "Just independent me"lie...we needDan Bowen, Amy, Sheila, Lydia Joy,Matt Daelon,Jamie,Leonard...to prophesy back to us..."Hey you...you are now Christ you...you have no separate existence...to believe that is to fall back into sin again, and to give life again to something that since the Cross can never have life again...the old Adamic hubris life of the devil himself lived through mankind.The people I have listed as Missions and New churches above...the YWAMs etc they need to be preaching according to the models in scripture. And I have never, I repeat never, heard anyone of them preach according to these lines.
Model 1. Jesus For 30 whole years He did nothing apart from grow in the understanding of how life works. He grew in knowledge and wisdom. Carpentry. Just learning to believe who He was. By faith. No flash stuff.Then was baptised in water and the Holy Spirit. Had the quickest 2nd level in history in the testing in the wilderness. That's because his personal foundation in God as a normal person for 30 years meant He could skip most of what we've had to go through in the 2nd level. Then straight afterwards He began to operate in the 3rd level. Two fold: Declaring War on the Devil in the territory allotted Him by the Father:Israel. Secondly: to raise up father ministries like Himself in just 3 years. All this while also preaching and teaching the Kingdom to 1. outsiders 2.believers and closer disciples and 3. the 12 apostles to be.
Model 2: The 12 apostles They were Jews. They understood the 1st level basics. That God is sovereign. That we give our life over to Him, expressed first in water baptism. That He alone can forgive our sins and make us new. They entered into an early prototype 2nd level, where although not knowing a born again experience yet, nor a complete baptism in the Spirit....from pretty early on they were sent out to chase the devil off God's Earth with power to heal,deliver and forgive sins.This shows us that at one level Morris Cerullo, Terry Virgo,YWAM and all are correct. As long as there is at least one 3rd level ministry...not everyone needs to be a 3rdleveller before embarking on mission trips.(There was only one Graham Pulkingham , but many in the Fisherfolk team for example)It shows us also, as we found on 6th April 1972, and again in Lakeland Florida this yearThe Power of the Baptism in the Spirit is put in context: as a tool for preaching the GospelThis is absolutely Terry Virgo and Morris Cerullo territory. And is accurate.Secondly, if you want people to grow fast...you expose them from early on in doing the work of the Kingdom with power. Even if that carries a high risk tag...as we saw with Todd Bentley. I am so glad that Jesus - knowing all about how sinful I was - still allowed me to lay hands on folks at 14 and get them filled with the Holy Spirit.Jesus came at the disciples with love, but also slicing stuff off them with His prophetic use of the Word...such that in only 3 super intense years they were ready to launch the Kindom for real at Pentecost. But as I've taken time to point out again and again in these posts, in Acts 2, they'd already gone through their 2nd level...which almost left them totally devastated...so when the Spirit came in power, they were 3rd Levellers....fit and able to father the first ever church at Jerusalem.All ministries that I have grown up with are totally wrong in equating our entrance Baptism in the Spirit with Acts 2.Morris Cerullo is wrong if he implies that at the end of one of his Schools of Ministry, as wonderful and life transforming as they are.....if he equates that with what the disciples were put through over a 3 year period. Rheinhardt Bonnke is wrong. You can't quite level the same at New Frontiers....in fact if anything they are too slow by Jesus standards....or they again call maturity what is not maturity....not like Acts 2 at any rate.
Model 3. Paul As one untimely born. Filled with the Spirit from the word go. But NOT given Holy Spirit wings to then go off straight away and turn the world upside down. (Morris Cerullo take note)Praise God that everyone hated him, or was cautious about him. He might be converted, but he'd been responsible for many deaths...one was specifically named: Stephen, the martyr. So there was no way he was going straight out on the road. Norman says Paul spent 3 years in Arabia. Gene Edwards says he spent several years in the Antioch church. Two things happened. He received from heaven during this period his gospel. Everyone has to have their own gospel.Divine revelation from Jesus Himself. It's not so we all start our individual cults. There is only one Jesus. And only one gospel. But Jesus has to make it our gospel. He has to write it in us. So we become living letters read by men.After 36 years I have a gospel. As we start preaching the stuff that is actually in the New Testament , and not the 2 level stuff we've been preaching for years...there is no reason why we cannot (in Jesus) raise up local bodies that grow believers in similar time periods to Jesus. In fact we have something that Jesus never had: we have the Holy Ghost Growing Machine - The Body of Christ . So this was the second thing that happened to Paul : that which was now in him was being worked out and recognised by this early example of a Gentile Church. This Jesus will make Himself known to others in our surroundings through us. Our gifting will be perceived.
As we look out at many weary faces who have been faithfully attending charismatic churches now for 30 or 40 years....it is sad to now say, there is in fact no reason why it had to take this long. The good side of our history is that the Terry Virgos, the Gerald Coates rushed in to fill the vacancies to provide good, solid, faithful and sacrificial leadership. Listen, Terry actually came to minister to us in Amersham instead of being present at the birth of one of his children. People only get born once!!! How sacrificial was that!
On the bad side, virtually the entire leadership in our country never knew that a 3rd level existed, let alone how to minister it. So ofcourse as they hit us with verses from John 15-17 about bearing fruit, and unity, and as we all sink in condemnation, because largely these things are not so in our networks...........little did we know that none of these things are really possible til we hit the motherlode of the 3rd level. Think how disastrous the disciples were in their 1st three training years. Forget unity. Forget pure fruit. They were arguing who was the greatest. Who's DA BISHOP!
In this post I have not even covered the question of Bible Schools. The writing of Jesus gospel inside us so we become Living letters is such a profound work....that without a proper release of the Spirit can take a whole 7 decades as I began saying. There is no possible way apart from a wave of Holy Spirit Revival Power,Revelation, and supernatural deliverance , (which by the way, on many occasions has swept through Ed Miller's Bible schools)....ordinarily there is no way on God's earth that a Bible school be kitted out with what it takes to move a man or woman out of the deep deep delusions of selfhood into the 3rd level in the 2 or 3 years usually allotted for the task.
I believe, as a fulfilment of what Jean Darnall, and Harry Greenwood, and other renowned prophets prophesied into Emsworth, I believe I was a part of a prototype wave of ministry training as God will refine and hone in the future. I believe the Bible House model of training which came through Ed Miller and then Jorge Pradas, are much closer to the biblical model. Where everyone leaves everything to come together to:
seek God together
learn what it is to live and work as the Body of Christ together
to be dealt with at a very deep level
and to teach also the things it was not good at:
teaching us to minister in Power together as teams
teaching us Norman Grubb's insights as to the true nature of the human condition in Genesis
teaching us what it means to walk as Christ in our individual forms
and at this level of insight -how to live together in love and the Presence of God
So what is the difference between that and a monastery or nunnery?
It's more dynamic,prophetic. People come together until a specific work has been established amongst them. Like Paul and Barnabus they are recognised in ministry, called out by God, separated for specific tasks. It's all the things New Frontiers wanted to be, but never had the tools for. It's organic. Our Bible House began around a house church in new Brighton Rd Emsworth, but moved into 20 acres of property as the church vision grew. It's less programme based...more based around the expanding Word and gifting of some rather dead individuals.
That is , individuals who have so caught this thing about being dead in Christ, they themselves are the programme!!! Like Mother Basilea Schlink, Graham Pulkingham, Richard Wurmbrandt,Watchman Nee,Witness Lee....every time they open their mouth they cause irreparable damage to people's insides!!!
In short they have become Twinklers of the First order!
Without a powerful experience of the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, a Christian seems to take several decades to become a true twinkler. Whether Protestant or Catholic, they are people of prayer and the Word. The slight snag is by the time they are twinklers, it is nearly time to go home...and they are severely restricted by limitations of age, mobility and possibly other issues.
So Youth With a Mission, Morris Cerullo, and Rheinhardt Bonnke hit on another system. Give the people of God an experience...a powerful experience coupled with a lot of training on the life of faith...and send them out to turn the world upside down!! In a way this is what happened on April 6th 1972 to all of us in a little corner of Bucks,England. And it seemed for a while we did turn our corner of things in Amersham a little bit upside down.But here is a snag. Youth With A Mission, Morris Cerullo and Rheinhardt Bonnke call this making twinklers. (Well they don't...but they call this sending workers out into the harvest). It is and it isn't. Let's return later.
For New Frontiers and a whole host of other networks of new churches, this is insufficient, so they believe in yoking developing ministries to local church situations over months and years. Possibly sending people to a more formal type of Bible College, be it run by their family of churches or some other institution that holds an evangelical position. Unless these new ministries are exposed to a radical Holy Spirit anointing either directly, as in Rob Rufus'case, or through other ministries...the tendency is always to settle back into "sound teaching of the Bible" but with little power and little miraculous fruit.Both approaches I would call the twin sides of the second level.
So to recap:Firstlevellers, by dint of continuing in the faith, continuing in prayer, continuing in the Word, continuing with the ups and downs of fellowship life, may well after decades and decades ...if they don't duck out... find themselves twinkling.
Secondlevellers will experience a baptism in the Holy Spirit, be introduced to the reality that Christianity is in fact supernatural in manifestation, be then driven back into a hunger for the Word, and a fresh hunger to experience fellowship together with other Christians, but this time at this new supernatural level . The growth arc will probably be shorter than in the first case. But if our experiences in the UK are anything to go by, we are still talking somewhere between 1 and 3 decades even moving pretty quickly before anyone even approaches twinkler status. And again there is absolutely no certainty that people will press right through. For this reason Paul writes "Do not harden your hearts as the Israelites did in the days of rebellion in the wilderness."
Firstlevellers know how to get others into a born again experience.
Secondlevellers get people born again and baptized in the Spirit. As I have mentioned before, in the year of 1972, at the age of around 14(Christine is one year younger), both she and I in our respective areas of the UK were doing all this. Now this for many fellowships would mean we had arrived. Well, here we are at age 50, and we still haven't. Because you see there is a 3rd level of growth.Without a vision, the people perish. Without even a sketchy understanding that there are 3 distinct growth stages, people all over the world in the Body of Christ are floundering around. You've got people like Amy, (see Amy's blog) who have probably been compliant for years in their church system...thinking that that would amount to something, confusing 2nd level churches with the raw real deal of the anointed Living Body of Christ. Ofcourse in parts it is....but the 2nd level stuff contains other ingredients as dangerous and poisonous as the worst plant foods that you could ingest.So Youth With A Mission, Rheinhardt Bonnke, David Hathaway, Morris CerulloAlso New Frontiers, and all the other 70s and 80s like networks, be it under Terry Virgo, Alan Vincent, Gerald Coates,Barney Coombs and so on and so on....are all (probably unwittingly and out of anxiety to get the job done) doing the Body of Christ a huge disservice....Why?Because they are calling the 2nd level a mature ministry and as the world instinctively knows...it isn't.
Because they are not raising the people's sights and expectations to believe that Jesus is faithful to complete the work in us to make us fit and able fathers who reproduce after our kind.We either believe in the power of His Word to raise us up as fit ministers ....or we don't. And if we don't, we help God along a little with more programmes, and training procedures and conferences.....
when what people need to understand is
How Genesis 3:5 works
How Jesus came to destroy all the works of the Evil One
How He came to lay the axe to the root.
What root? The religious system? The 2-bit secondlevel structures the grace-bloggers are railing against? Terry Virgo? Nope Nope Nope The axe is laid against us? Every flipping last second of the day we are not living from the reality of what the Cross has won for us. We don't need to go around looking for others to single out.Every little second we catch ourselves living the Genesis 3:5 "Just independent me"lie...we needDan Bowen, Amy, Sheila, Lydia Joy,Matt Daelon,Jamie,Leonard...to prophesy back to us..."Hey you...you are now Christ you...you have no separate existence...to believe that is to fall back into sin again, and to give life again to something that since the Cross can never have life again...the old Adamic hubris life of the devil himself lived through mankind.The people I have listed as Missions and New churches above...the YWAMs etc they need to be preaching according to the models in scripture. And I have never, I repeat never, heard anyone of them preach according to these lines.
Model 1. Jesus For 30 whole years He did nothing apart from grow in the understanding of how life works. He grew in knowledge and wisdom. Carpentry. Just learning to believe who He was. By faith. No flash stuff.Then was baptised in water and the Holy Spirit. Had the quickest 2nd level in history in the testing in the wilderness. That's because his personal foundation in God as a normal person for 30 years meant He could skip most of what we've had to go through in the 2nd level. Then straight afterwards He began to operate in the 3rd level. Two fold: Declaring War on the Devil in the territory allotted Him by the Father:Israel. Secondly: to raise up father ministries like Himself in just 3 years. All this while also preaching and teaching the Kingdom to 1. outsiders 2.believers and closer disciples and 3. the 12 apostles to be.
Model 2: The 12 apostles They were Jews. They understood the 1st level basics. That God is sovereign. That we give our life over to Him, expressed first in water baptism. That He alone can forgive our sins and make us new. They entered into an early prototype 2nd level, where although not knowing a born again experience yet, nor a complete baptism in the Spirit....from pretty early on they were sent out to chase the devil off God's Earth with power to heal,deliver and forgive sins.This shows us that at one level Morris Cerullo, Terry Virgo,YWAM and all are correct. As long as there is at least one 3rd level ministry...not everyone needs to be a 3rdleveller before embarking on mission trips.(There was only one Graham Pulkingham , but many in the Fisherfolk team for example)It shows us also, as we found on 6th April 1972, and again in Lakeland Florida this yearThe Power of the Baptism in the Spirit is put in context: as a tool for preaching the GospelThis is absolutely Terry Virgo and Morris Cerullo territory. And is accurate.Secondly, if you want people to grow fast...you expose them from early on in doing the work of the Kingdom with power. Even if that carries a high risk tag...as we saw with Todd Bentley. I am so glad that Jesus - knowing all about how sinful I was - still allowed me to lay hands on folks at 14 and get them filled with the Holy Spirit.Jesus came at the disciples with love, but also slicing stuff off them with His prophetic use of the Word...such that in only 3 super intense years they were ready to launch the Kindom for real at Pentecost. But as I've taken time to point out again and again in these posts, in Acts 2, they'd already gone through their 2nd level...which almost left them totally devastated...so when the Spirit came in power, they were 3rd Levellers....fit and able to father the first ever church at Jerusalem.All ministries that I have grown up with are totally wrong in equating our entrance Baptism in the Spirit with Acts 2.Morris Cerullo is wrong if he implies that at the end of one of his Schools of Ministry, as wonderful and life transforming as they are.....if he equates that with what the disciples were put through over a 3 year period. Rheinhardt Bonnke is wrong. You can't quite level the same at New Frontiers....in fact if anything they are too slow by Jesus standards....or they again call maturity what is not maturity....not like Acts 2 at any rate.
Model 3. Paul As one untimely born. Filled with the Spirit from the word go. But NOT given Holy Spirit wings to then go off straight away and turn the world upside down. (Morris Cerullo take note)Praise God that everyone hated him, or was cautious about him. He might be converted, but he'd been responsible for many deaths...one was specifically named: Stephen, the martyr. So there was no way he was going straight out on the road. Norman says Paul spent 3 years in Arabia. Gene Edwards says he spent several years in the Antioch church. Two things happened. He received from heaven during this period his gospel. Everyone has to have their own gospel.Divine revelation from Jesus Himself. It's not so we all start our individual cults. There is only one Jesus. And only one gospel. But Jesus has to make it our gospel. He has to write it in us. So we become living letters read by men.After 36 years I have a gospel. As we start preaching the stuff that is actually in the New Testament , and not the 2 level stuff we've been preaching for years...there is no reason why we cannot (in Jesus) raise up local bodies that grow believers in similar time periods to Jesus. In fact we have something that Jesus never had: we have the Holy Ghost Growing Machine - The Body of Christ . So this was the second thing that happened to Paul : that which was now in him was being worked out and recognised by this early example of a Gentile Church. This Jesus will make Himself known to others in our surroundings through us. Our gifting will be perceived.
As we look out at many weary faces who have been faithfully attending charismatic churches now for 30 or 40 years....it is sad to now say, there is in fact no reason why it had to take this long. The good side of our history is that the Terry Virgos, the Gerald Coates rushed in to fill the vacancies to provide good, solid, faithful and sacrificial leadership. Listen, Terry actually came to minister to us in Amersham instead of being present at the birth of one of his children. People only get born once!!! How sacrificial was that!
On the bad side, virtually the entire leadership in our country never knew that a 3rd level existed, let alone how to minister it. So ofcourse as they hit us with verses from John 15-17 about bearing fruit, and unity, and as we all sink in condemnation, because largely these things are not so in our networks...........little did we know that none of these things are really possible til we hit the motherlode of the 3rd level. Think how disastrous the disciples were in their 1st three training years. Forget unity. Forget pure fruit. They were arguing who was the greatest. Who's DA BISHOP!
In this post I have not even covered the question of Bible Schools. The writing of Jesus gospel inside us so we become Living letters is such a profound work....that without a proper release of the Spirit can take a whole 7 decades as I began saying. There is no possible way apart from a wave of Holy Spirit Revival Power,Revelation, and supernatural deliverance , (which by the way, on many occasions has swept through Ed Miller's Bible schools)....ordinarily there is no way on God's earth that a Bible school be kitted out with what it takes to move a man or woman out of the deep deep delusions of selfhood into the 3rd level in the 2 or 3 years usually allotted for the task.
I believe, as a fulfilment of what Jean Darnall, and Harry Greenwood, and other renowned prophets prophesied into Emsworth, I believe I was a part of a prototype wave of ministry training as God will refine and hone in the future. I believe the Bible House model of training which came through Ed Miller and then Jorge Pradas, are much closer to the biblical model. Where everyone leaves everything to come together to:
seek God together
learn what it is to live and work as the Body of Christ together
to be dealt with at a very deep level
and to teach also the things it was not good at:
teaching us to minister in Power together as teams
teaching us Norman Grubb's insights as to the true nature of the human condition in Genesis
teaching us what it means to walk as Christ in our individual forms
and at this level of insight -how to live together in love and the Presence of God
So what is the difference between that and a monastery or nunnery?
It's more dynamic,prophetic. People come together until a specific work has been established amongst them. Like Paul and Barnabus they are recognised in ministry, called out by God, separated for specific tasks. It's all the things New Frontiers wanted to be, but never had the tools for. It's organic. Our Bible House began around a house church in new Brighton Rd Emsworth, but moved into 20 acres of property as the church vision grew. It's less programme based...more based around the expanding Word and gifting of some rather dead individuals.
That is , individuals who have so caught this thing about being dead in Christ, they themselves are the programme!!! Like Mother Basilea Schlink, Graham Pulkingham, Richard Wurmbrandt,Watchman Nee,Witness Lee....every time they open their mouth they cause irreparable damage to people's insides!!!
In short they have become Twinklers of the First order!
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