Quote:
Originally Posted by aron
When looking at the above statements and the ideas they represent, I had to ask, "Where, in all of this, is Jesus Christ?" I see the potential for a fixation on "getting church right" to the exclusion of the reason the church is supposed to exist. As if proper nomenclatures and allocating deputy authorities would bring the kingdom nigh?
Where is Jesus, here? He's reduced to a generic "Christ" who's "for the Body" and "for the church" and "for the work" and so forth. Even though we proclaim on Sunday morning that Christ is the all in all, a danger here is having organizational models and efforts that essentially reduce Him to a one-dimensional bit player on the scene, useful only as a referent point to validate ideas of "church" or "work" or "ministry".
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I believed all their spiritual talk about
"getting church right," i.e. the recovered church, the ground of oneness, the testimony of Jesus, the one body of Christ expressed in localities, yada, yada, yada, until they started using that same talk on me and the GLA LC's. That got me thinking about what we are actually hearing from Lee and his hand-picked successors.
"Where, in all of this, is Jesus Christ?" He was gone. He's been long gone for quite some time. I could tell by the lack of joy, the lack of love, the lack of answered prayers. I could tell by all the suspicious talk, the whispered backbiting, the obvious innuendo from the pulpit, the sleeper cells in our midst which would activate upon hearing certain code words from the ministry. I could tell because we had become everything we condemned Christianity for being.
We had become "them," and now they were better off than we were. What goes around, comes around, as they say, and all those curses which we had heaped on them, were now coming home to plague us instead. We were more divided than they. We were more Christ-less than they. We had more dead objective doctrines than they. Our meetings were more predictable than theirs -- so much for the liberty of the Spirit, which we always boasted in. We had quenched the Spirit long ago, perhaps in some distant "storm," as we were made to believe.
We always were told about the work of the "enemy," coming in to damage us. The enemy would disguise himself in "ambitious" men, men who wanted to overthrow the ministry and God's New Testament Economy. Actually we created our own "enemy," fabricated like a bogey man to divert probing eyes from the truth, to create a diversionary smokescreen until a story could be made up to keep us in blinders.