A PROPHETIC VOICE!

The Church (Body of Christ) must be ever mobile, fluid, renascent, bubbling, creative, inventive, adventurous, and imaginative as Jacques Ellul so clearly points out in his work, The Subversion of Christianity. Church leadership must work hard to continuously create a culture of new beginnings. It must resist the primal urge for order, structure, organization, fortification and institutionalism because, once it reaches that point, it becomes the beginning of the end—a culture of endings instead of beginnings.

Resist this primeval, instinctive temptation with every ounce of breath that is within you. Otherwise the love and passion will slowly leak out and you will be “held captive by the structures of another day.” Following is a quote from “The Forgotten Ways” blog which speaks for itself.

“We never have expected to hit upon that final stable structure. This is important for a church to understand, for when it starts to be the church it will be constantly be adventuring out into places where there are no tried and tested ways. If the church in our day has few prophetic voices above the noise of the street, perhaps in large part it is because the pioneering spirit has become foreign to it. It shows little willingness to explore new ways. Where it does it has often been called an experiment. We would say the church of Christ is never an experiment, but where that church is true to its mission it will be experimenting, pioneering, blazing new paths, seeking how to speak the reconciling words of God to its own age.” It cannot do this if it is held captive by the structures of another day.”—Elizabeth O’Connor….Call to Commitment.

The church today has few prophetic voices, I fear, and those “daring few” are being drowned out by “the (oppressive) noise of the street,” Ah, but its nothing new. Ask Martin Luther, William and Catherine Booth for starters. Ask Samuel Logan Brengle, another prophetic voice from the past, and his response will be as follows:

“The Army is so thoroughly organized and disciplined, so wrought into the life of nations, so fortified with valuable properties, and on such a sound financial basis, that it is not likely to perish as an organization, but it will become a spiritually dead thing if love leaks out”—from Brengle’s book, What About the Future of The Salvation Army?