How to be an Anus in The Body of Christ without acting like an Arsehole

Now that I've got your attention...

This is something I have been working on for a while, and as with Three Year Old Crack Whores it isn't finished, but there is enough of it to post to gain feedback and opinion. I am actually hoping to expand this into a book, with lots more research of course; and perhaps a new title before submitting it to the resource table at Hillsong. Enjoy, or endure: but leave a comment either way.

I shall continue to add to this as more is written.

It must be possible to be an intercessor without being a pillock. To be an “anus” in the body of Christ without being an arsehole.

It is the vital organs of the body which are the hidden ones. We all know about the concept that Jesus only has the Church through which to act on Earth now, that since his ascension to heaven in 33AD it is we who are “his hands and feet”. We want to be the hands and feet of Christ, to be his eyes and ears, to be his mouth. We want to declare the things of God, to be a voice and a mouthpiece and an amplifier of the Word of The Lord in our day, in our generation.

But it is possible to live without a mouth. It is possible to live without hands, feet, arms, legs, eyes, ears. Okay it isn’t desirable, a man without eyes may be alive, but he’s still blind; but what of the man without kidneys? What of the man with no stomach, or no liver. Such a person cannot live.

My understanding of each of Hillsong and of Intercession in their manifestations in my hearing indicate that each doesn’t sit comfortably with the other. The “Warrior” caste (Christian K’shatria) cannot understand how a church can be as big and as effective as Hillsong without a troop of dedicated “slayers” marching around the building seven times with banners and drums and scripted prayers. Hillsong views all this sort of activity as weird, and unscriptural, (or at least unproven by scripture).

Intercession has many forms, not all of them prayer, and not all of the prayer forms of intercession are “prophetic” or “warfare”. The best description I heard of intercession was “we pray everyday prayers for everyday people”. This was said to me as I began to establish a more “frontal” prayer ministry in Australia as part of my local church – I think it’s true that prayer must be “everyday”, but that doesn’t exclude it from having power.

Similarly at Hillsong Church London I have seen my church not pray for stuff that we can handle ourselves. Not that we are excluding God or doing it “by might, by power, by our own spirit”, but simply that we are acting as “the Church” and doing what God has already told us to do. (Don’t pray for the cold and hungry man at the doorstep; give him a blanket and a cup of tea yourself!) This I have seen as everyday activity for (and by) everyday people: a form of intercession that carries the highest glory to God as it “stands in the gap” and “meets the need” of those who are gappy and needy. God gets the glory because the Church is seen to be doing something, and we get the excitement of being at the chalk-face where God is teaching us how to be like His son.

I have also seen Hillsong Church London pray for the needs of its people, and see those needs met. Needs for visas, accommodation, finance, employment, family “back home”: things that are “everyday” needs for our local church which is made up of young citizens of the Commonwealth on OE. We also pray for the blessing of businesses, for health. And we offer praise and thanksgiving too. Everyday prayers for everyday people: extraordinary people being used by God, but everyday people nonetheless.

So, do these two expressions of twenty-first century Christianity need to be reconciled? In Christ they are, he is big enough as Lord of all to handle diversity within the unity of his Church. But is there common ground, things that can be shared between these groups of faithful believers who want to reach their cities, nations, continents for the Cause of Christ? I believe there is. So, what do we have in common?

1. The Cause of Christ. All forms of “prayer for others” are ultimately without meaning if they do not lead towards the salvation of the lost and the bringing of glory to God. We pray for healings, for leave to remain in the United Kingdom, for blessing upon the workplace so that, ultimately, God is given opportunity to act in the life of an individual to transform him/her into the likeness of His son. What gain a man should he inherit the whole world yet lose his soul?

2. The foundation upon Scripture. Much of what was being revealed to prophetic intercessors in the latter half of the twentieth century came beside scripture: God demonstrating His quality of “yesterday, today, forever the same”. If it isn’t Biblical, it isn’t Christian. (It may be religious, it may even be helpful, but it isn’t Jesus.)

3. Transformation into the likeness of Jesus. A connector between the Cause of Christ and the witness of the revealed Word of God is the testimony of the gospels. “What did Jesus do” gives us an indication of what we should do: allowing for the fact that as the Body of Christ we represent him on Earth today, yet recognising that none of us individually (nor any of us corporately) is actually the Messiah of God. Christ’s greatest act of intercession was upon the Cross at Calvary, we cannot repeat this act neither as an individual Christian nor as the universal Church. Being transformed into the likeness of Christ is not necessarily about doing what he did, but about being as he was. It’s more about “for this purpose” Isaiah 61:1-3 and Philippians 2:5ff than “WWJD: I’m gonna touch some lepers today.”

4. The witness of Church History. Intercession was not invented in the 1960s any more than the power of the Holy Spirit was. Christians have been praying for each other in the mode of Jesus since the first century, and have been writing about it ever since. Paul asks for and offers prayers for the Church. Martin Luther wrote on prayer, as did John Wesley and John Calvin. Andrew Murray wrote a century ago, in South Africa, of the things people are writing about today. Edward Irving and E.M. Bounds wrote at the same time.

Assignment One point Two

Hello.

Here is the second piece from my first assignment. I wrote these in late December, about the time I posted my first entries on Blog Spot: I hope you enjoy them and that you will stick with me to see how my writing develops over the next few assignments.

Thanks for stopping by,

Damien.

Visit...a place that interests you...(300-500 words)
The Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban has the longest nave of any Christian church building in Western Europe. This fact meant very little to me until the day I entered the place by the West door for the first time. I was awestruck, I’d seen nothing like it before, and even now when I wander in as a nonchalant local from time to time I am still taken by the size of this one room and its procession of columns and windows, ending in a vast pipe organ and carved stone screen with brightly painted stone statues of saints and martyrs from St Paul to Martin Luther King.

I am Australian, our oldest church buildings date from the 1820s and were built to look old. St Alban’s was built in its current form in 1077, even the “repairs” date back to the fourteenth century, although there is Victorian mock-gothic as well in some places. The place where I do church is a theatre in the West End, we have no statues of The Virgin, or frescoes of the saints, we have photographs of Freddie Mercury and an enormous LED screen. St Alban’s is therefore quite different to what I have known both architecturally, and as a worshipper.

Recently I attended a pilgrims’ service in the abbey: I was passing by at the time and so went in to look. The nave had been emptied of its thousand chairs, and was filled with people. Children ran around the columns, playing chase-and-hide; older people sat on blankets on the stone floor eating picnic, (it was raining outside), tourists with cameras looked at the frescoes while pilgrims sat anywhere they chose, just watching the scene and resting their feet. The service was lead by the sub-dean, who joked his way through the lessons, songs, and sermon; it was all very light-hearted and welcoming for those who had travelled a long distance to be there, and just as much for me who had “popped in” uninvited.

This is a cathedral which feels more than just a place where Normans used to gather to sing, or monks to chant, or Roundheads to pillage. For me, on that one day when I saw it “in action”, it felt like a church, where Christians would celebrate their common faith in God and St Alban, and where travellers on “the road of life”, as well as the A5, were made to feel as if this was home, at least for a short while. This is not my kind of worship, but on that day it was my kind of Church.

Three Year Old Crack Whores

Hello. I started writing this a few months ago, it's an idea I've had for a while. It isn't finished, but it's begun enough to post as it is in the hope of adding more later. I hope you like it.

I sometimes wonder about the testimonies of those who came to God through something other than Christian parents, and feel kind of embarrassed at my straightforward testimony. Who are these people who were crack whores between the age of three and such time as the coven got them dried out and plugged in to Wicca? Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of the radical salvation story, the tale of how God’s amazing grace has saved many a wretch like someone else, but I wonder whether I have missed out on something along the way.

I was born into a church family, and raised in a Christian one. Soon after the birth of my little brother my family were involved in a potentially fatal car accident, my dad cried out to God “don’t let me die” as our car bashed into three trees and tipped upside down at speed: we four were in church the following weekend and have been ever since. My parents rode “the third wave” in the early 1980s and were a part of various local teams facilitating the visits of John Wimber to Australia; they were part of an inter-denominational Renewal fellowship and took my siblings and me to various “spirit filled” churches, conferences, and rallies in their search for “the more of God”. My father was accepted into theological college in 1986 and was ordained in 1989 to the Uniting Church, my mother accompanying him all the way as his “partner in ministry”, a concept she brought into the marriage after her own Salvation Army upbringing in the presence of married couples as officers of the local citadel. I never stood a chance.

I didn’t know “crack” meant anything other than “broken” until I was twenty-three.

I thought “Wicca” was something you make patio furniture out of.

I had heard that “whore” meant a type of heavy frost, but since I was born and raised in Australia I had no real concept of what “frost” meant anyway.

I never stood a chance.

But now I’m not so sure. I have many friends today who were not raised in church as I was. The kids I knew as a kid, in Sunday School and Youth Group, have all moved on to other places in the world, (as indeed have I), and so I am now mixing with people who had a remarkably different childhood to the one I had. I have yet to meet anyone who was actually a three year old crack whore, but some of my new mates have had very interesting pasts: yet oddly they seem to believe that I have had so too.

I suppose it is easy to make fun of the Church of previous generations, the 1980s look naff both for those who grew up within the world and those blessed to be “in the world but not of it” at the time. I ask you, is David Meece really any cheesier than Bros? Pet Shop Boys or Petra, who’s to say? As a planet we laugh at the big shoulder pads and the status of “power” in the 1980s, just as the redeemed of the land recall with chagrin the trees of the field (which clapped their hands), and that laughing thing from that church in Canada.

I am favoured I think that I got out at just the right time: well set-up by my parents to make the switch from church-culture to God-zone in the early 1990s. I was too shy and buck-toothed for real cynicism, and now that I’m old enough and with a University education I find that I can’t really say much in spite about the old ways as they have made me what I am today, and I’m pretty happy with what I am today.

I am one of the chosen few of my generation who managed to sneak through before the doors closed, I was able to move on in adult Christianity where others of my crew tossed aside the crucifixion with all that other fiction we learned as kids and who became Bohemian and chilled. I’m young enough to be in Generation-X, old enough to know who Kurt Cobain is, (I cried when he died, even thought I thought at the time that Nirvana were a bit self-indulgent). I carry the generationally specific worldview of a Baby-Buster alongside my generationally appropriate Christian hope that whilst our world does suck, there’s still One Above who remains in control. Don’t get me wrong, I’m one of you: born during Australia’s commitment to Vietnam, seven months before Gough was allowed to say “It’s Time” and have the mandate to engage in it, schooled under the threat of Skylab braining us during play-lunch, and studying for my VCEs as the Berlin Wall went the way of Humpty Dumpty. But in all of that I seem to have found what Bono was looking for with the minimum of fuss.

Unlike the testimonies of my peers, when I went looking for myself I put Jesus at the top of my list and found that I had to look no further.

I am reliably informed in song that “The Drugs Don’t Work”. I’ll have to take your word for that as all I tried in my twenties was pub-evening quantities of light beer and the occasional peer-group cigarette. (Both of those did work by the way, and the alcohol still does.) I was never really interested in music as a past-time, the radio existed for one purpose only, Roy and HG, (cos too much sport, truly, is barely enough), and I wasn’t committed enough to purchase CDs on an Austudy budget. As for sects, well the J-Wits would come around occasionally but I’d tell them to bugger off pretty quickly.

So what is it about my background that impresses my “recently redeemed” mates? My childhood, teens and twenties has been efficient in getting me to the age of thirty-five: but it was rather dull compared to the international antics of even the most maudlin of the Londoners I live amongst now. When I ask them about it they tell me that I am “so blessed” (Christianese already, ugh!), and that there is a glow around those who have never really been into the darkness of this planet. (They’ve never read my poetry “Unauthorised Autobiographies, 1991-1995” then, I once wrote a precise Petrarchan sonnet on having a head-cold.)