It’s been awhile! 2022, a year for the future church to become the present day church!
On any normal given day, my attention is given to a multitude of thoughts, activities and people. So much so that it becomes necessary to ask myself “what should I be focussing on today”? Some days it is easy to focus but other days I find myself all over the place; dreaming, imagining and sometimes simply wondering during the day! The same process happens when I am considering what to blog on. There are a number of topics I want to explore, and sometimes it actually hampers me in writing. After much back and forth this year, I decided (with a nudge from Father) that I needed to focus on topics that will bring about the Ekklesia change that I wrote about last year.
To kick-start our creative juices and to get people onto the journey of Ekklesia, or Kingdom mindset, I am going to start off this year with a series called Future church now. The idea is simple; what is it that we need to do, what thoughts do we need to think and what actions, collectively, do we need to take today, in order to take the church of the future and make it the church of our present day? Hopefully, as we explore this topic in the coming weeks and months, we will be able to discover the adjustments, both in our thoughts and actions, that we can make now, that will reach into our collective future and make it our reality now.
Firstly, before I start, allow me to remind you that when I write or say the word church, I am speaking with an understanding that church is not what happens on a Sunday morning. It is not simply a community getting together and enjoying a good time of worship and a preach or two. Or even a prophecy or a conference. It is the agent by which God brings or establishes His Kingdom on the earth; it is the Ekklesia, ruling within the gates of culture, within the nations of the world. If you have not read my series on Ekklesia, I encourage you to read it before you read this post!
To position this series, I want to start off this introduction by exploring the ability that God has granted those with faith, to reach into mankind’s potential future, to grab hold of what we see and to make it our present day reality. Put another way, it’s the ability that His children of faith have to not only see what the future carries, but to determine when that future happens.
In order to do this, I would like to examine two people whose experiences speak to this. The first is King David and the second is Jesus’s mother, Mary. For the sake of time I am not going to go into detail here (happy for you to email me if you wish to delve deeper) but we see in both David’s life and Mary’s life, experiences that indicate they saw a future state, and through faith pulled that into their existence.
In Psalm 10, David wrote that the LORD said unto his Lord, “Sit here at my right hand, until I make your enemies your footstool”. David acknowledges that Yahweh had said to David’s lord to sit next to Him on His right hand. Who was David’s Lord? In acts 2:29-36 Peter explains how David foresaw Jesus and that psalm 10 was speaking about Jesus. Jesus was David’s Lord!
The reality is David didn’t just see this happening in the future, but chose to believe and live in the reality of Jesus in his own day. He lived in the freedom that the future life, death and resurrection of Jesus would bring. Let’s consider the impact of David’s faith and decision. Consider that David was not judged for acting as a priest and sacrificing to God (Saul was judged by God for presuming to do the same). David was not put to death for ordering the murder of Uriah. The punishment under the law for murder was death. David instituted a worship environment that was not based on having to go through the law inspired steps of the tabernacle that Moses set up. Rather it was an environment that allowed worshipers to approach God in grace and included gentiles! David in general displayed a walk with God that was different to the Old Testament style and was very much based on a relationship with his Lord.
In John 2, we are presented with the wedding of Cana where Jesus does His first miracle and turns water into wine. This in itself is a series, but the point that I want to bring out is that Jesus first refused Mary’s request and said that it was not His time. Mary refuses to adhere to the timing of God, reaches into the future in faith and makes that present moment the correct timing. Take a moment to ponder this! When I first saw this, I got pretty scared…this miracle was not in God’s original time table. Mary, exercising her faith, made it the original time table.
There are many more scriptures and themes that I would like to include here but unfortunately it is not the focus of this series. It is simply meant to introduce the concept that as His children it is our privilege and responsibility to step into our potential and like David and Mary, stand in the place of faith and seek for the future we see, to become the now moment.
In the next post, we will delve into what I believe the future looks like for His Ekklesia in the hope that we may start exercising faith and start fashioning the future church now.
Till next time
Ant
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