Friday 8 April 2016

Stay Out of Control?

Movements that really move have one extraordinary feature in common - they feel like they are out of our control!

But do we have the guts to let them continue in this out of control way, or would we rather ... well, err ... control them?

Our tendency is to organise, to regiment, to ensure quality (or adherence to doctrine etc. etc.) ... but all these might actually stifle the movement rather than continue to fan the flames. Worse still, that might mean stifling a mission move of God.

I was reading recently about the Spirit moving in a muslim-majority context, bringing people to faith as only the Spirit can. It added up to a movement that felt like it was out of control. Some responded by forming churches, procuring buildings, holding services. That introduced control, regularity, ensured things were 'right'.

The churches even acted as beacons, shining lights in an otherwise spiritually impoverished land. Thats good you might think, but with the hindsight of a few years it was clearly less effective, less dynamic, 'less God' than the original movement.

Remember going viral is the opposite of containment. Gathering as church is for sure Biblical, but buildings with fixed patterns of services ... hmmm! Maybe the latter inadvertently becomes containment, though of course no participant would have ever wanted that!

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