THE CHURCH I COULDN'T FIND

Charles Alexander

Description

After a year of searching, Charles and Verna could not find a church, or a denomination, that was very meticulous in restoring some, essential, principles of first century praxis. Consequently, this book offers ways of dealing with the question, “How?” It also provides practical approaches of dealing with the theological questions arising from his major book, Time and the Biblical Bang. This book, on church life, not only restores those early principles, but shows how they can be restored in every church.

Development of five Apostolic principles is encouraged through the practicalities of church planting, and in the context of Group-based churches. Almost, as an aside, the author was used by God in the building of three new churches. Showing why most churches are not biblical or traditional enough, the major emphasis of ministry was not on buildings but on raising effective disciples.

There is a major difference between programme churches, that have home groups, and churches totally based in the home group. People have to change, and so do structures. People need to experience spiritual gifting; structures need to be focused, not in status, but the openness in raising and developing holy and gifted leadership. The focus is outwards- on church planting and meeting needs. Hierarchical, institutional titles give way to a people who are affirmed in spiritual gifting through training, encouragement and accountability. The clergy-centered church must lose its power to a leadership that is capable of being surprised by God.

“Unfortunately, too many contemporary clergy are reticent to let go control of church communities. This book is a challenge to so-called lay people, to lay hold on Spirit anointing in order to become truly, part of the priesthood of all believers.” (1Pet.2:9)

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Charles Alexander

Informations

• Publié par: Toplink Publishing, LLC
• Date de parution: 29 janvier 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781950256372
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Church I Couldn’t Find

How a First-Century Church May Look in the Twenty-First Cen tury
Charles Alexander


Copyright © 2019 by Charles Alexander.
Paperback: 978-1-950256-36-5
eBook: 978-1-950256-37-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Some of the material in this book is revised substance from my former book, The re Must Be Another Wa y.
Unless otherwise stated, all Scripture references are taken THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
Scripture references marked “NRSV” taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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Contents
Acknowledgme nts
Chapter 1: Looking for an Apostolic-Principled Ch urch
Chapter 2: What Are the Basics of Disciple ship?
Chapter 3: Does Your Church Have a Process for Making Disci ples?
Chapter 4: Obedience Brings Surpr ises
Chapter 5: Back to the Fu ture
Chapter 6: Five Non–Negotiable Apostolic Princi ples
Chapter 7: Does the Gospel Change in a Changing W orld?
Chapter 8: Worship: Would The Twelve Apostles Recognize It In Your Ch urch?
Chapter 9: Home Groups: How Apostolic Are They?
Chapter 10: The Group Event—What Really W orks?
Conclu sion
Append ix 1
Append ix 2
Append ix 3
Appen dix 4


Acknowledgments
I am thankful to God for the prayers and support of my beautiful wife, Verna. She was wonderfully supportive in our joint search. Thank you to our fabulous GenX family, Kara, Leah, and Mark for their helpful input and suggestions regarding the latest draft of this book. Thank you to my longtime friend, the Rev. John Briscall, for his gift of encouragement and for his useful suggestions. I am also grateful to the Rev. Ron Cooker for reminding me that this book is intended for ordinary and enthusiastic church members. A deeply felt thanks to churches-especially St. James, Calgary, and St. Mary’s, Metchosin, Victoria. They enabled me to think bigger about praxis principles of the first century ch urch.


Chapter 1
Looking for an Apostolic-Principled Church
“W here shall we go tomorrow, love?”
“I don’t know anymore,” Verna often rep lied.
It was always a Saturday night when we asked that question of each other. We spent well over a year asking the same question, pondering week after week where we were going to worship the next day. After every church service, after reading each church bulletin, and after asking a lot of questions, Verna and I offered each other the same hesitant look. We shrugged our shoulders a lot. We’d stayed loyal to our lifelong denomination all of our lives; were we really looking for another denomination of the church? For years, sure that our vision for a Second Reformation church must be found somewhere, eventually we plodded in new directions. Peter Wagner once described this growing attitude as the New Apostolic Reformation movement “in which the character of these churches are developing around new paradigms .” 1
Now that I have stated part of the problem, I want to share with you that this book is really the praxis (how we do it) for my more theological treatise entitled, Time and the Biblical Bang, from Perspectives of God’s Eternal Nowness . So here we go on the how to and a first century-principled presentation on how and why I was forced into building three new churches because we needed to accommodate fast-growing numbers of pe ople.
After spending most of my working life as a pastor in the Anglican Church of Canada, I retired early. It’s not that I gave up. Indeed, much of my ministry turned out to be of an apostolic and prophetic nature. Indeed, many thousands of seasoned church-goers had been led to new life in Christ. However, the revisionist forces in mainline churches were hard at work. To make a long story short, there were a lot of people who wanted a different kind of church than the one left behind by the twelve apostles. How could it be called an Apostolic Church? Quite deliberately, I did more than my fair share in helping to remedy that situa tion.
Having been graciously affirmed in an apostolic ministry by the people of St. James’ Church in Calgary, Alberta, and later by St. Mary’s, Metchosin, Victoria, I had been very busy. For more than twenty years, this Liverpool lad spent about two Sundays of every month away from the church. The congregation was very happy about that! I engaged in church and clergy conferences and missions wherever I was reque sted.
Just before we entered the task of building a new church at the embryonic community of St. James, Calgary, I came into a further experience of God. It was something life changing, though not quite the same as John Wesley’s Second Blessing . The experience was known as the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I’ll speak of it some time l ater.
After a few years at this rapidly growing church in suburban Calgary, and with John Vickers of Victoria, we brought together a group of western Canadian clergy. And so began the Anglican Renewal Movement in Canada. Subsequently, I began accepting invitations to conduct conferences on personal and church renewal. At my next charge in Metchosin, Victoria, the people also agreed to let me continue in this ministry. Strangely, this congregation seemed to be very happy when I worked for God- somewhere else! Previously, St. James’ Church, Calgary, had come to the point of engaging another two full-time clergymen and a youth worker. The bishop wanted to use St. James’ church in order to give wider experience to clergy. So when I was gone, nobody not iced!
I spent all those years teaching in every region of Canada, in many parts of the United States, and in a variety of places throughout the world. God was doing a “new thing.” (Isa. 43:18–19) He was changing many lives through this Renewal Movement. But changed people are never satisfied with the status quo—not if there are better ways to achieve kingdom purposes. As I soon found out, it’s not all about being evangelical, charismatic or whatever, it’s really all about the kingdom of God. (Matt. 6:33)
In those conferences, people were challenged to see how the Holy Spirit could help us see and do new things in personal and corporate ways. People were excited; the Jesus of history was really alive! They knew Him to be the head of the church in real terms. He inspired them to re-examine how to accomplish the main purposes of His community. I didn’t know it, but in those early days of renewal, we were on the edge of a spluttering grass roots ren ewal.
That was all very good, of course, but I was getting frustrated. The system allowed for this burst of new spirituality, and that was all right with the hierarchical powers, provided that those people didn’t try to force open the bottleneck in the system, which had been occupied largely by clergy-at least from the early third century. The fact is the entire structures of the church needed renewal, beginning with personal encounters with the Holy Spirit, who always leads us to a personal and ongoing relationship with Jesus. (Jn.16:14) The old system actually hindered the effective renewal of the church, from top to bottom. (We began to realize that these systemic problems also existed in every other church denomina tion).
However, in the sixteenth century reformation, the English Church embraced a fair amount of German Lutheranism, but did not go quite so far in the areas of Ecclesiology (how we do church). Neither went very far in the area of Pneumatology. (The life and ministry of the Holy Spirit. These, and other western countries, were in protest of, what had appeared through the controlling, hierarchical Roman Church in their time. Not surprisingly, some consequent revisionists similarly saw the value of accomplishing their agendas more easily through hierarchical and institutional control in what became clergy-centered churches. Both Protestantism and the Roman Church continue in structures never encouraged by Jesus or the Apos tles.
The Reformation of revisionists from mainline churches were the most vocal in their protests against what had become known as orthodoxy. Of course they were! The hierarchical positions that bottled up the free flow of God’s people also provided a perfect vehicle for controlling the church and executing their own revisionist age ndas.
In protest, and looking for more, a number of mainline groups from a variety of denominations grew restless. For about thirty years, in the post, mid-twentieth century, the Renewal Movements had extended arms of love into the far reaches of the church. Not everyone understood it. Some thought renewal was all about raising hands or singing with guitars. The renewal was about much more than individual spirituality or the raising of hands to the rhythm of a gu itar.
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