The Global Church - Part 4 (unfinished)
The
Open Church
Part
1: The millennial
church &
A church in tune with the world
Part 2:
Church networks and global management
Part 3:
The call to global oneness (Jay
Gary and Global Missions)
Part
4:
The
Open Church
Part
5:
Christians in the new
millennium
"Separation" is not welcome in the 21st century church.
The founder and chairman of the
Open Church Ministry (OCM), Jim Rutz, lives in the mountains above Colorado Springs. His
goal is to "bring new life to churches and believers by enabling them to reclaim
three of the freedoms they had in the First Century: pure worship, true sharing, and
free ministry." During his years as a freelance writer, Mr. Rutz wrote for World
Vision, Youth for Christ, Prison Fellowship, the Lausanne Committee and
Intervarsity.
For almost a
decade, Jim
Rutz and OCM has been distributing a promotional audio cassette titled Christianity in a
New Key,
an introduction to The Future Church. It includes statements by well known Christian
leaders such as pollster George Barna, author Gene Edwards, reconstructionists Jay
Grimstad (COR) and Dennis Peacock, Fuller Professor Peter Wagner, Kansas City Fellowship
prophet Mike Bickle, author Rick Joyner and Tom Houston, the professional director for
the Lausanne Committee for world evangelization.
Without identifying individual
speakers, the tape begins with a string of related statements concerning the envisioned
future church:
“God is now moving.”
[What
does that mean?]
“He has been preparing over the
lasts several decades a new kind of Church.”
“In the Church of the future, God
will touch us and turn us into the lions we are supposed to be, and give
us the freedom to serve Him in far wider realms -- the unexplored and forbidden lands of
high spiritual adventure.
“The
whole infrastructure of church bodies has to be changed and prepared to
accommodate great numbers of new converts.”
“We will see in the 21st century
a recreation of a dynamic of the Church that we saw in the 1st century.”
The
tape suggests that this global church will be so attractive to the world that people
everywhere will flock to Christ:
"...
when all of this big stuff, the big prayer movements, the prophetic movement, the
political activist movement, the UNITY MOVEMENT, the whole bit, when all of this
congeals in the next 10-15 years, there’s going to be some explosive growth -
not only in evangelism and personal holiness - but whole countries are going to
change and just come rushing into the Kingdom of God.”
How
does this scenario fit Scriptures such as John 6:65-67? That's where Jesus tells the crowd,
"Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me
unless it has been granted to him by My Father." As a result "many of
His disciples went back and walked with Him no more." His way simply didn't
fit the popular ways of the world.
The well distributed
Open Church audio cassette
closes with these words by David Bradshaw:
“...we’re talking about a revamped worship
service that could transform your people like a cold shower. You won’t have many
spiritual blobs that show up once a week, then vanish. You’ll have people of action,
concerned participants.... Let’s stop playing
church. The time has come to end our 1700 year experiment in spectator Christianity....”
He is comparing his vision of church participation with the old church structure
based on Biblical authority. The new way seems to trade obedience to God's Word for a new
collective vision of "what God is doing." No need
for lectures by a pastor-teacher who has spent his adult years studying the Biblical
view God's will and ways! The Holy Spirit will lead the group to new truths, broader
understanding and higher ground.
Or will He? Can
God's Church be rebuilt by ambitious managers who are trained to compromise?
George
Barna, whose name
was included in the Open Church promotional tape, now has some serious concerns about
worldwide shift toward dialectic groups and home churches:
"...
small groups may be doing more to inhibit peoples’ spiritual growth than to
facilitate that growth. Part of the reason is that, first of all, in most groups, you
have an individual who’s in charge of the group or leading the group who really
doesn’t know Scripture very well. So if they’re leading a discussion or trying to
teach on things, more often than not, what you wind up with is heresy rather than
Christian orthodoxy." [Interview
with George Barna, Part I]
The
new church management systems train group leaders and facilitators to guide the group
toward a politically correct interpretation. Paul Proctor illustrates the mind-changing
process:
"A
group gathers, and has agreed beforehand that each in attendance will ultimately surrender
his or her own personal position on any given issue to the will or 'consensus' of the
group after *processing to consensus* through dialog. In a Christian setting, the
presupposition is that the group's will determines 'the will of God'. The group's
'facilitator', whoever that may be, mediates between sides, be they 'good and evil', 'for
and against', 'republican and democrat', 'liberal and conservative', etc., whatever the
case may be, often instigating heated confrontations between the opposing sides for the
purpose of suggesting compromise as the perfect solution to restore and maintain the peace
and the relationships of everyone involved.
"The
resulting outcome or *consensus* is then re-introduced, if necessary, at the next
meeting for more 'Praxis', more dialog and more compromise until another 'consensus'
is reached. Then the "process" repeats all over again.....and again....and
again until the facilitator's desired outcome is achieved. Over time, the convictions
and concerns anyone may have had originally are processed away beyond recognition or relevance
leaving one and all to accept the facilitator¹s pre-determined outcome as the
consensus of the group. It's no longer a question of what is right or wrong, good or
bad, lawful or unlawful, but rather HOW WE ALL FEEL ABOUT IT.... That's the Hegelian
Dialectic." [Willow
Creek:
Hegelian
Dialectic and the New World Order]
When Bible study members and church groups are freed to
set aside Biblical authority and interpret God's Word
by consensus rather than by the Bible itself, their
understanding of God as well as truth will be distorted. Human nature has always tried
to imagine feel-good gods whose ways match human wants and
illusions. But God says,
"What
right have you to declare My statutes...
Seeing
you hate instruction and cast My words behind you?
When
you saw a thief, you consented with him,
And
have been a partaker with adulterers.
You
give your mouth to evil....
These
things you have done, and I kept silent;
You
thought that I was altogether like you;
But
I will rebuke you...." Psalm
50:15-21