KISS

I’ll start with two items from my youth. The first is a song. “The times they are a changin’ There, that dates me straight away! Here are the words of the first verse

Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
And you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

As I was thinking about this blog, the song came back to me and the words of that first verse describe the issue very well. The times are indeed changing. The waters are rising, sometimes imperceptibly, and we – the Church – need to look around. In the words of the song we need to “admit that the waters have grown….and accept that soon we’d better start swimming, or we’ll sink like a stone”

The second link to my youth is an incident from school. Long hair was becoming the fashion for men and School was not happy! One morning at assembly we had a long lecture from the Head which finished with the words “If you wish to keep pursuing your education here, you need to travel light”.

The title of this blog is KISS…….Keep It Simple Saints. The times are changing. We need to be aware. We need to return to simplicity in following Jesus – travelling light in order to navigate the coming season.

The Changing Times

It is interesting that within a month of the start of the Covid drama, in April 2020, politicians around the world were parroting in unison the same message – ‘This is the New Normal. We are not going back to the old normal ever’. Whatever they had in mind with those words, it’s true to say that things have changed remarkably quickly in the last three years. That’s not to say that these changes have appeared out of the blue. The seeds for many of them were sown many years ago. Satan sows seeds, and some of them are quite subtle and take years to reveal what kind of fruit they bear.

In the U.K. a lot of farmers plant a crop called Oil Seed Rape. It germinates slowly in the ground and in early spring from a distance it just looks green. In the later part of Spring it suddenly grows rapidly and around the beginning of May puts on bright yellow seed bearing flowers. All of a sudden the countryside is awash with bright yellow fields and the penny drops. That’s what was planted there!

When I was at school (back in the days of Dylan and long hair) we had lessons where we discussed moral issues and were encouraged to move away from the concept of absolute truth, and to think in terms of adaptable truth, and flexible morals. Entertainment (mostly through television) began a steady and remorseless push at the boundaries. The laws around what could be shown in cinemas and on the stage were relaxed with that assurance that nothing bad would come of it. Look at what’s ‘normal’ now. Pop music from the late ‘60’s onwards brought with it an introduction to the world of the occult for many, and drugs became increasingly popular in this wave too.

In the Church, particularly in academia, Higher Criticism and Textual Criticism continued chipping away at the veracity of the Bible at an accelerating rate. No longer was it enough to say “the Bible says…” All the major teachings of scripture have been questioned and undermined by the ‘new scholarship’ that comes from within the church.

Fast forward to the present and we are in the place where Isaiah 5 v 20 is painfully true “Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter”

Not only is evil called good and darkness called light, but to point that out is fast becoming labelled as ‘hate speech’. I talked with two Church ministers recently who both said that they were far more circumspect in what they said in their own pulpits because of the way things are these days. People are publicly called out and shamed for expressing what used to be the normal point of view even 5 years ago. What looked like an innocent or mildly invasive green crop has flowered with bright yellow flowers that declare “this is the way things are going to be from now on”. We are entering the age of cultural totalitarianism, where the culture imposes its will on all and will not accept differing views.

In the Irish republic, a law is going through the Dáil that will make it an offence to, among other things, be in possession of material that can be regarded as containing hate speech or likely to cause insult. How long before the Bible is considered as material that is hate speech? How long before we see similar laws in our country? There is a culture with unholy roots that is seeking to exert its control over us.

“Admit that the waters around you have grown” as the song says. It has been a long, slow, insidious process. And because it is a slow process, it can be easy to miss the overall significance of what is happening and miss the goal that Satan has in mind. That goal is the neutralisation of Christianity, and as far as possible it’s destruction.

It is said that if you try to put a frog into boiling water it will leap out, but if you put it in cold water and slowly raise the temperature, it will not notice until it’s too late. We just need to be careful that we don’t get ‘boiled’ without realising it!

So, what do we do practically? Retreat into our churches? Quite the opposite.

Think about caravans for a moment – bear with me! When caravans first became popular to tow behind a car to go on holiday they were small, compact, basic but flexible. No toilets or showers – you had to find a site with facilities and mix with other happy campers in the process. Things evolved. Caravans got bigger. They included a toilet, a shower and of course a good living area and tv. No need to go out and mix with others. All self contained. The ultimate in being self contained in the world of caravans is the Static Caravan. Mains drainage and piped water. Central heating. A verandah. Even a little bit of garden at the front.

Insofar as our churches have become like static caravans – “we are sited here and you need to come to us to get what we have” -it’s time for change. It’s time for the small caravan approach – flexible, “we go anywhere, we come to you, we make everything simple and uncluttered”.

It’s time to learn again how to travel light, how to be flexible, adaptable and able to function easily in the face of whatever is coming, be it revival or persecution, or both.

So, let’s look at some of the ways in which we can be flexible, adaptable and able to function easily, as we were always meant to do.

The first thing is to lose our obsession with buildings. I realise that this is an Holy Cow for many, but I speak as a man who has ploughed many hundreds of hours and a great deal of money into altering, renovating and maintaining buildings as a way to facilitate “the ministry of the church”. With hindsight I can see some great construction efforts that have mostly facilitated the status quo rather than being the springboard for any Great Leap Forward. The amount of time, money, energy, planning and resources that go into our buildings is often totally out of proportion to the time that goes into what Church is really there to do.

We have been sucked into accepting a narrative that has been told for hundreds of years; that a Church needs a building. The better the building, the better we think we are doing. We invest thousands of pounds and man hours into a facility that we use for a few hours a week with, generally, little return to show for the effort put in. I speak as one who accepted this narrative for years. The end result often is that we make a static caravan and we make its occupants more static.

The next thing that needs to change I would suggest is discipleship. Discipling needs to be about discipling people to be radical, to be those who stand against the tide and who are able to stand alone if necessary. The discipleship process should be producing men and women who in turn win people to Jesus and disciple them to be radical Kingdom people. Disciples who make disciples. We are aiming to reproduce men and women who are pioneers and not simply followers, or worse still, pew fillers. In Revelation 2 Jesus says “To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations”. 1 Corinthians 6 v 3 says “Do you not know that we will judge angels?”. It seems that strength of Godly character developed in this life determines the amount of responsibility we will carry in the next. Discipleship therefore is far far more than ticking boxes to make sure that people are behaving. We are not in the process of warehousing people ready for the life that is to come. We are in the business of developing and releasing believers to have an explosive effect in a sorry world, now.

That leads me on to leadership. John Piper wrote a book called Brothers we are not Professionals. We have made leadership professional. For Church leaders we do this firstly by insisting on academic qualifications and secondly by paying them a salary. Even if a leader has no academic qualifications, the fact that he is salaried makes him the professional. The Church cannot survive in the future where we may well be limited to functioning in small groups, meeting in homes because of State opposition (because we refuse to publicly subscribe to their ‘liberal’ values) if we continue to see leadership as professional. Leaders will have to be simply men and women who satisfy the norms for leadership laid out in the New Testament.

The two fastest growing churches in the world are in China and Iran. In both cases, most of the leaders are young (under 25) and in Iran the majority of leaders are women. They are not professional, they are not salaried. Their churches are small, small enough to meet in a home. But the key thing is that their churches multiply as believers lead people to Jesus, disciple them forming new churches as they grow. There is no time for requiring academic qualifications,advertising posts, interviewing etc. There is no money for salaries. It’s all a bit like the New Testament experience! Leadership is flexible and mobile.

Following on, we have structure. Structure in the sense of people needs to be flexible and adaptable. New converts need to be rapidly discipled and released. They need to be “turned round” quickly, trained and released as ministers of the gospel (we all are) so that they are self motivating – and space is made to deal with the constant flow of new converts that I believe is coming. No longer will function and leadership be restricted to those who have sat in the pew for years.

Structure in the sense of organisation needs to be far more flexible and responsive too. It needs to be simple, moveable, flexible and impervious to onslaught in the form of persecution or restriction, in the sense that it is self-repairing. Buildings may be a luxury we need to do without.

A word about the division that is appearing in the Church, certainly in the West. We are starting to see a separation of those who hold fast to scripture, and churches that have ‘moved with the times’ and adopted a liberal theology. We are starting to see a distinction between the true church and an emerging false church. This will become apparent more and more as time goes on, but the parting of the ways has started. The false church will keep its buildings because it will be free from state or popular sanction. Not so for us perhaps. The watchword for us is to be prepared now rather than a) suddenly realising things have gone against us …or worse b) we have already been boiled like the unfortunate frog.

The next issue is evangelism. Simply put, this needs to be the normal role of every believer. Training, as part of discipleship, helps (and I mean practical, not classroom training). But from the start, new believers need to 1) have had a life changing experience with Christ, and 2) be encouraged to share it with others. The aim is to reach the lost. The method is multiplication. One reaches two, and those two reach four who reach eight and so on.

There are two more fundamentals I want to look at, meetings and ministry. I am only going to deal with meetings here because the subject of how we do ministry (in the sense of personal one to one ministry) needs to be dealt with separately. That might ruffle some feathers so I’d like people to have read all this first! The next blog will be on ministry and will follow in a couple of days.

So, Meetings.

The Meeting is often seen as the most important thing we do as we come together once or more than once a week. The truth is that every other hour of the week is equally important, perhaps more so because that is when the believers are out among their unsaved community. Therefore, meeting together needs to be a place of encouragement on the journey of expanding the Kingdom. It needs to be a place of training, ministry, hearing and understanding the scriptures, community and worship. Meetings need to be a Station that we pass through rather than the Destination.

We often put a lot of effort into trying to keep the meeting fresh and exciting every time. Instead, it would help if the people were fresh and exciting cos of what they’re doing with the Lord in the week. I think often the emphasis is put on an interesting and fresh meeting experience to encourage the saints, and keep them at least ticking over or hopefully fired up….until next week. If we ever get to be a persecuted church or a church seriously on mission, many of the concerns we entertain ourselves with now will become an embarassingly distant memory as we are fully absorbed in the difficulties and joys of what we are really here for.

Thank you for reading to the end! Hopefully it was helpful and provoked some thinking. In a couple of days I will publish the second part which is about how we minister to people, and where perhaps we are missing the mark. It will be a shorter blog.