The Church must transcend Christendom and herald Christ alone, or else

In the combination of Diane Langberg and George Campbell Morgan we have the expounding of a biblical truth: God will move forward of any of us or our cherished institutions the moment we or they stop serving the divine purpose.

God will not languish in the mire with us.

God will not stand idly when we’re
committed to twiddling our thumbs.

Nothing is more important than the divine purpose, and no matter how much we say we’re committed to God—individually or corporately—the Spirit of the Lord is inscrutable, separating soul from spirit to dissect every heart’s motive from all stated intentionality.

We only need to step back from the Bible to see the truth that is laid out for all to see.  Get out of one book or the other.  Look at the whole corpus.  God will not be used.  What did God do with Israel when they stopped serving the divine purpose and served other gods?

God swept them aside.  And God will sweep the current church aside, if and as necessary, to deploy the divine purpose for this era.  We have seen this in #ChurchToo, and within Australia, we’ve had a Royal Commission into institutional responses [and lack thereof] to historical child sexual abuse.

And there are other issues spotlighting the role of the church today, even as our relevance is questioned, and our existence is threatened.  Just think about how readily secular organisations are doing the work of the church, and without Christ!

Diane Langberg herself has postulated that trauma is perhaps the greatest mission field in the 21st Century.  The key word there for me is mission.  This statement is not so much about simply serving the traumatised but serving them so well they’re converted to fresh revelations of Christ such that they are delivered and healed to the extent that they evangelise the world.

We stand at the doorway of an incredible opportunity—not for us!  But for God.  For God to heal a land we’ve made corrupt by putting our power before the ministry of reconciliation.

The church has failed of recent times for the same reason whenever the church and the people of God have always failed.  We fail when we fail the purposes of God, and that can only happen in one situation.  When we put ourselves, our ideals, our power, our motives, and the here-and-now rewards we covet, before God.

That’s right.  It’s not rocket science.  The biblical pattern is there for all to see, and a first-year seminary student knows it all too well.

If only we will turn from our wicked idolatry—of making the church an end in itself; where leaders are protected above all else; when the pockets of the coffers are lined to the point of luxury; when little boys and girls are abused, including the poor, the depressed, the triggered and traumatised, the vulnerable in sum—that God will heal our land.

God is repulsed by our demands that we be blessed when we’ve grown fat off the vulnerable.  God says, “Enough!” when we cry foul for lack of church growth when we’ve refused to reconcile with those who say they’ve been abused.  God must get sick of our prayers when we neglect the basic needs of those we serve who are right in front of us.

God cannot bless those who are committed to their idols.  It is only a church that confesses and regularly repents of its idols that God will use.

We stand at the cusp of a great era for the church if only we as a church can see and choose now to serve the multitudes who have been harmed by the church.

The reality is Christ’s true Church will never be crushed, but that’s not supposed to make us complacent and ambivalent.

We can take great comfort in knowing God always wins.  And we should take even greater comfort when we do things that manifest radical love and promote things that magnify the truth.