Becoming the Church that Jesus comes back for - part 2
From a podcast by Kairos Connexion
John McGinley is the executive director of Myriad, which has a vision to support the planting of thousands of churches led mainly by lay people, and author of Mission Shaped Grace and The Church of Tomorrow.
At a 2024 Kairos Connexion conference, John spoke, in 2 parts, on becoming the Church that Jesus comes back for. Part 1 of this talk is here. For the first section, John spoke on something of the challenges of what the Church has faced and still faces. In the second section, he goes into what he's seeing and what he's sensing God is leading us into. Here are some excerpts from part 2:
It's really important that, as we reflect on where we are today, that we don't miss the fact that God has been teaching us a lot of things along the way. And so we've got cell church, missional communities, fresh expressions, micro-church, and many other things that God has taken us on a journey with. What we thought though, was that they were the destination and they were the silver bullet. And they weren't.
It wasn't that God wasn't working them. He was at work in them and through them as Jesus took his own journeys, but we are continuing to journey with him into more of what he's teaching us. I really believe the Lord is going to move powerfully in our nation. And those lessons will then begin to get reframed in the move of His Spirit. We're wanting to go where you want to take us Lord, and that's what he needs in his Church before we move powerfully by His Spirit.
I think the work the Lord is doing is not so much a reformation but a re-founding of the church on Jesus. I think he's bringing us back to first love. It's that simple devotion. We don't know what the future is going to look like. We don't know how to get there. That strips us of being overly confident about being able to plan everything and do everything in our own way and just repeating what we've done in the past.
It is a gift because it brings us back to that deeper devotion - fixed on Jesus - Him being enough, and the simplicity of just encouraging others to follow Him and to know Him. And in us, acknowledging that we haven't got everything right and that we're needing the Lord to teach us and lead us. That humility creates that place of dependence upon him.
I'm astonished in how much I was dependent on my own gifting and how little I was dependent on the Lord. And yet he is the one who is the one thing that we have to offer this world. And yet, I was so lacking in confidence that I could access him, follow him, allow His presence and power to move through me, that I would do my stuff instead of his stuff.
Deeper devotion and dependency are something that He is going to mark the Church that he wants us to be as we go forward. Part of the reason for that is that there is no well worn paths into the future. We haven't been this way before and that creates that dependency but we also have to understand that the prophetic is so important as we are going to be led by the Holy Spirit and by divine revelation, rather than just by our own good ideas.
The more that we can place ourselves in that position, the more we will be free for the Lord to lead us. Each of our journeys will be unique and what somebody's called to do in one place won't be the same as what somebody is called to do in another place. And so we need that leading of the Holy Spirit and to prioritise that.
I think that the way in which strategy works in this in this era is that we get a big vision of what God is doing. But day by day, we just look for the next step. Lord, what are you showing me? It takes me closer to that vision. But the gap between that next step and and the fulfilment of that vision is too great for me to work out. So I live with the unknowing and the dependence on the leading of the Holy Spirit.
I live in a upper middle-class village. I'm trying to reach people for Jesus. I walked around that village saying, "Jesus, I don't know how to reach people like this. I don't know how your kingdom is going to come." I thought things would happen really quickly. Didn't happen at all. So I'm just praying for two years. "Lord, you are Lord of this village, you are Lord of these people's lives." I bless every house. I pray for change of the spiritual atmosphere. I tear down every demonic stronghold I think is over our village. We now have a little afternoon congregation. But the way they've come to know Jesus has been through me following the leading the Spirit and others doing the same.
A month ago, I met a lady at a function who is married to a high court judge. She told me she was having treatment and I said I would pray for her. A few days later, in a dream, I see myself praying for healing for her and declaring this sickness will not end in death. So I sent her an email about the dream and asking if I could come and pray for her. She says yes, immediately. So I go around. I discovered that very day she had decided that her body couldn't cope with it anymore and she was going to have to stop chemotherapy. So she was without hope. My email lands on that day. I then say it would to be good to pray with you when your husband's home and we do this together. I prayed for her and she had a profound encounter with the Lord. I don't know she's healed yet but her and her husband have come to know the Lord.
Friends as we go forward, because there are no well worn paths, there are new patterns of leadership. So much to say in this but I think a number of key things. The first one is that we look good in teams. We need patterns of relationships. And in those teams, we need to share lives, and we need to live life together. If we're not modelling that, at the heart of our churches, I really believe that we won't see that reproduced elsewhere. And so you have to address that.
Do you find the people that you're cool to be with or do you find the people who are ready to respond to the thing God is doing, and you invest in them? As they grow and as they testimony, they will then share that with others. And so I really encourage you to invite people into something new and to see who responds.
In the New Testament, unqualified people led and they were kept safe by people with experience and qualification who oversaw them. This is how we empower others, and the primary pattern of church and relationships. I think God is wanting to restore his family as fathers and children, mothers and children - restoring that intergenerational relationship between the experienced and the inexperienced. Our experience releases, adds and keeps them safe, but not in a formal structure, but in relational dynamic within a church.
When we go on mission as a family, as an authentic community, when people come to faith, they are already held in the relational dynamic of that community. The thing that broke me was when I read John 13v35 where Jesus said, "And this is how everyone will know that you're my disciples by the way you love one another." And I realised that the way I've done ministry, nobody in the world ever saw us love one another. They saw us love them. We did lots of social action and caring for people. But if they came on us on a Sunday, they didn't see us love one another.
So how do we make new disciples? We include them in our community. What are those communities look like? If you do nothing else, please eat together. It's the thing that God is using more than anything else - just sharing food together, and others can join in with that in a really inclusive way. Second thing is where I see the small communities reproduce. The thing that marks all of them is that there is a supernatural element and it's difficult to to say that it's not the supernatural. They are willing to be obedient to the leading of the Spirit to give prophetic words and additional context to pray for the sick and to see people come to know Jesus.
This is the place where people get healed, where their family relationships get restored, where they are held in relationship and community. And I think it is going to look something like that as we go forward.
Listen to the full podcast here.
See also the blog: Contrasting 'Church as we know it' and 'Disciple-multiplying movements' - 1
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From a podcast by Kairos Connexion, 23/07/2024