Kingdom of God (8) - Multiply and Grow

Many will see the benefits of belonging to a Christian community and want to join. Provided they commit to the ethos of love and service, people will be welcome to join in supporting the others in the neighbourhood, whether they are Christians or not.

These communities will not grow too big. When more are wanting to join than can be absorbed, a couple of people who have lived in the Christian community for a while and understand how it function will offer to go with the people who want to join and help them to get started where they live. The new community in a new neighbourhood will do all the things that are done by the original group.

During the Times of the Distress, shelter communities will emerge wherever there are significant numbers of serous Christians. In many places, this the only way that Christians will survive through the worst darkness.

The Christians who move out of their community to start another will be called apostles. Some will repeat the process several times and begin several new communities. These apostles will maintain relationship with the communities that they have left. This will allow sharing between them. Some communities might provide banking or justice services for other communities.

Each of these Christian communities will be a microcosm of the Kingdom of God. An astute observer will note that the list of activities undertaken by these neighbourhood groups includes the following.

• welfare

• health care

• employment

• courts

• justice

• defence

• banking services

• money

They will be providing everything that modern governments have failed to provide. The difference is that they will flow out of love and service, without any need for coercion.
When the Time of Distress is completed and the Advance of the Gospel gets underway, the number of these kingdom communities will begin to grow rapidly. This new model of living will spread through society in the same way that yeast spreads through dough.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed into about sixty pounds of flour until it worked all through the dough (Matt 13:33).

The Holy Spirit will mix the Kingdom of God through society by moving from community to community.

This and the previous post is a brief glimpse of a huge topic. I will do a series of posts providing more detail round these issues, when I have completed this greater series on Change of Seasons.