13 Feb The Body of Christ is Changing
A few years ago I read ‘The Great Emergence’ by Phyllis Tickle. It’s basic idea was that Christianity is changing and she gave reasons for that thought.
In the introduction to the book Phyllis said that it seemed that about every 500 years the Lord had a giant rummage sale, and put everything out on the lawn. It’s like he refurbishes house from time to time and does something new with the Big C Church. Phyllis highlighted how the Church as a collective whole had gone through major adjustments around 500AD, around about 1000AD, and of course the Reformation in about 1500AD. She was suggesting that the Lord is also doing a major rearrangement in our lifetimes.
Here at Peace, this idea is not new for us. John Alley had picked on this thought and been teaching it for many years. Our sense is that feel that the Lord is always about the process of changing His people to be more like Him. However at this particular moment in time, it does seem like there is a major shift taking place.
How we describe it, is that God is changing His church from being institutional, to being relational. There is a lot packed into that one sentence, and it may take a lifetime to get your head around it. Indeed if you feel to reject it as a nothing, then your thinking process into it hasn’t truly started. We who have been thinking about it a long time have realised its a deep well.
Where does the loyalty of the individual pew-sitting believer lie? To Christ of course, but in practical terms it is to their denomination, their institution. Courtesy of that, believers hold their allegiances outside of the cities they live in to the system they belong too, with it’s spiritual colonies all over the world. Yes they love each other, but its the system that is the backbone of the Church.
But the Lord is changing the allegiances of his people to be towards each other. Instead of hearts connecting to a system, they connect to believers near them in the same city or town. Pastors in a city may still belong to a system, but will instead ‘feel’ the sense of belonging to each other, rather than belong to a hierarchy that leads them to bishops in far away places, and people they barely know.
The Lord is bringing his people to belonging from the heart. It means churches in a city or town will not just work together, but love each other and belong to each other.
Phyllis is onto something, but what we have described isn’t exactly what she said, but it shows a number of people are picking up on the threads of what God is doing.
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