Reset

Many people are saying that life will not be the same when we come out of the Coronavirus lockdown. They are saying that we will not go back to the way we were. They are looking for a new normal.

I am not sure that this hope will be fulfilled. I doubt that four weeks is long enough to change deeply ingrained habits. I am not sure that staying at home for 5-6 weeks will bring about deep change in our lives. When the lockdown finishes, I suspect that most of us will rush back to life as it was before we were shut at home.

My father grew up on a farm during the Great Depression. His father died just when the depression was taking hold. His mother struggled to feed and clothe her five children and keep the farm going through a serious drought and the depression years. She worked hard to earn sufficient income from selling livestock for pitiful prices that prevailed so she could keep paying the interest on the mortgage, at a time when farmers all around were failing and being sold up and left homeless by the banks.

That experience scarred my father and changed his life in a significant way. Throughout his life, he would never go into debt. He would not buy anything unless he had saved the cash to pay for. When he was a farmer, he would never borrow seasonal finance from a stock firm, even though it would have helped him develop to his farm quicker, because he had seen these firms taking over all of a farmer’s income to cover their debt, and giving the family an allowance of few pounds a month to live on. The children of these farmers often had no shoes to wear to school.

I suspect that this experience produced more fear than faith. His faith was a dogged determination not to be overcome by fear, which is not really the basis for launching into something new and bold. It was later in life when my father had an overpowering experience of the Holy Spirit that he became a man of faith with boldness to do new and radical things for God.

A really traumatic experience over a long period to time can really change a person. However, I am not sure that five weeks at home can bring about that kind of deep change.

The problem is that being shut up at home with nothing to do encourages passivity. When there is nothing to do, it is easy to get comfortable doing nothing. There is nothing to do but wait for the season to end. This passivity does not gear people up to go into action and do something new when the lockdown is complete.

Life will change dramatically for some people, but these will be forced changes, not chosen ones. Many of those who have lost their employment or had the business they own fail will have their lives turned upside down. But that is nothing new. People have always been losing their jobs. Businesses have always failed. Only a minority of new businesses get beyond five years. The difference in the next few months is that vastly more people will be losing their employment or experiencing the failure of their businesses.

They will do what people have always done when they experience these disasters. They will cut back hard on their spending and search for a new job. They are unlikely to rush out and do something new in their social or religious life because they will be focussed on trying to restore their income.

I believe that the greatest prompter of change is the Holy Spirit. Deep change in our communities and our societies is far more likely to come through his work, than through a few weeks of inconvenience while stuck in our homes.

I don’t know how much the Holy Spirit has been moving in people’s hearts while they have had free time at work away from home. I am sure that a few have been pressing in and hearing him speak in their lives. But if people are filling in their spare time with hours of Netflix, he may not have been able to speak and move as he would like. What happens after the lockdown depends on what the Holy has been able to do. During the rest of the year, we will see if he has been able to move in the lives of his people and stir them up for his new normal.

When Jesus wanted to bring radical change in Judea, he formed 70 disciples into pairs and apostled them (sent) out in the surrounding towns and villages (Luke 10:1-11). In the current situation, God will do a new thing through people with an apostolic calling. What happens in the future will depend on how much the Holy Spirit has been able to prepare people to be apostled into new things for Jesus.

Church Reset

Many people who are widely recognised as prophets (Lana Vawser, DC Lake, Anita Alexander, Kris Vallotton) are saying that God is calling a “Reset” for the church. I witness with this call, but I am worried that none of them are saying what they mean, or what God wants to change.

When I think of the word “reset”, I think of a factory reset of my smartphone. It is a drastic action, because it solves problems, but you end up losing a lot of stuff that was precious. I have only done it once when I was really desperate. Therefore, I presume that a reset will mean radical change for the church, and that much of what seems important to us will have to be let go.

The prophetic people are talking about a change in governmental authority, but they are not very clear about what that means. Maybe they do not know what it means themselves, but it often seems like a different group of people controlling the church. Or Christians leaders controlling civil governments.

The prophetic people are saying that God is giving new blueprints, but I do not see the new blueprints anywhere. Maybe they do not have them yet, but it is confusing, because a call for change needs to tell people how they should change.

I sense that despite the call for a reset, most Christian leaders are only interested in tweaking the existing church model. I do not detect an appetite for serious change, even amongst followers who “like” prophetic posts. No one is willing to give up the pastor-executive model of leadership, driving to church on a Sunday, sermon-centric discipling, which make the modern church what it is and move to a relationship-based way of following Jesus. Despite all the talk about the Kingdom of God, I sense that no one really believes that the Kingdom of God can come in fulness in our time, or how that would happen.

I seem to be on a different planet. Forty years ago, when I started as an enthusiastic young pastor, the word I received from the Lord was Hebrews 8:5.

See to it that you make everything according to the pattern shown you on the mountain.

Two or three years on, and frustrated that things were not happening as I had hoped, I realised that I was just doing what other churches and pastors were doing. I had not bothered waiting to get the pattern/blueprint from God on the mountain.

So, I put everything aside, and began seeking God and studying the New Testament to see how the church was meant to function. What I discovered was radically different and utterly challenging, but I got a strong sense of what Jesus wanted the church to be. It cost me my job and my house, because I could not continue in a role which was not part of Jesus plan.

I published my insights in a little booklet called the Bride of Christ in the early 1980s. It had a great reception, mostly by word of mouth (because this was before the time of the internet). In a short time, the 2000 copies that I had printed were sold out. But nothing really changed. I then realised that readers had enjoyed my critique of the church, but had not understood the alternative blueprint that I was describing. So I rewrote the book to make the pattern much clearer and called it Being Church Where We Live. The Lord told me to leave out everything critical of the existing church and focus on sharing the vision, which I did.

The response has been interesting. The book is radical, so I expected criticism. Yet not one person has come to me and said, “What you have written is not consistent with the scriptures”. I do not expect to be right on everything I write, but not one person has said, “I agree with a lot of what you wrote, but I think you have got that bit wrong, or missed this thing which is important”. No one has even said, “I believe that God is saying something different” or even “What you describe will not work”. Instead, the response has been almost total disinterest.

So I have to conclude that most Christian leaders and their followers are not really interested in making serious changes to the way that they do church. They prefer to stick with the pastor/executive model and going to church on Sundays. I presume this is why the blueprints for the reset are missing.

I realise from working on numerous IT projects over the years, that most people just want the new system to do what the old system did. They can’t visualise how new technology could change the way that they do things to make their work more effective and more efficient. Most IT projects fail to deliver their potential, because they get stuck on replicating what was done in the past, because people cannot visualise how things could be done differently and better.

This seems to be the situation in the church. Very few people have the ability to visualise a church different from what they know. This is where we need prophets to share a radically different vision for the church. And then we need radical leaders, who will give up the security of what they know, and are comfortable with despite it not working, and have a go at something different.

I don’t expect people to follow my way. I know that my version of the pattern on the mountain is not perfect, or complete. I would be quite happy if followers of Jesus found a different way of changing and pursued that. What I struggle with is complacency about the status quo. It is clear that what the church is currently doing is not working as it should, and is not viable through a crisis, so we urgently need a different way of being church.

I wish that there were many prophets and other people sharing their understanding of “the pattern they have received on the mountain” and different blueprints to stir up people who cannot see beyond the what they have now. And I wish that more people were willing to have a try at something really different. The future of the church depends on it.

Having to shut down church services to prevent the spread of coronavirus has been a wake-up call for the church. Paul people are talking about a new normal, but I worry that when the current crisis is finished, mortgage and salary commitments will force leaders back into the existing, but inadequate, model of church.

When I was young, I thought I was part of a radical generation. I realise now that we were probably deceiving ourselves. I hope the rising generations are truly radical and bold enough to take up the challenge to be the church that God needs to win the world for Jesus and establish his glorious Kingdom.