What does it mean to be apostolic movements?

What’s common in such exponential impacting movements?

Movement thinking = every believer has the potential for world transformation.

That’s the only way to explain what’s happened in China, when the people of God get to play because the clergy were taken out of the way.

This is latent in us, waiting to be recovered.

We are living in ‘The Age of the Unthinkable’

We have to think like revolutionaries again. We’ve been too complacent and need to think like movements. Across Europe, we’ve seen what happens when the church doesn’t.

LEADERS ARE KEYS

Max DuPree; ‘The first task of a leader is to define reality.’

So, you as a leader set the idea for your people to lock or unlock them. You have the keys of the kingdom! (The Pharisees didn’t use them).

How we see things matters immensely.

We all have paradigms. Reality streams at us, our paradigms help us screen them.

Church has a Christendom paradigm. Paradigms shape the way we see. Choosing one deselects the other. The renewal of the church is first of all a reimagining. We need to dethrone Constantine as the emperor of our imaginations!

The church is on the back foot in every western setting as a result of that thinking. We need to rexamine 4 things.

1. Our Christology
2. Our Discipleship
3. Our Mission

4) Our Structures

1. RE:JESUS 

Christology lies at the heart of the renewal of the Church.

If we’re ever unsure what we’re about- we must always go back to HIM. Christianity must manifest Him. cf. Kinnaman & Lyons – ‘Unchristian.’ People think the church doesn’t look like Jesus. If the church isn’t on about what he is on about – what are we doing?!

To the degree we get Jesus wrong, we create a toxic religion that produces

William Temple: ‘If your conception of God is radically false, the more devout you are, the worse it will be for you, better you be an atheist.’ 

It’s not so much that Jesus is like God – it’s that God is like Jesus.

Andrew says, ‘show us the Father!’ Jesus says, ‘I am the manifestation of Him!’

We are CHRISTian people. If we don’t reflect who he is, our legitimacy is in question.

We must radicalise to missionise!

We need refounding. To go back to our founder.

If you have buttoned up your shirt wrong, you have to undo, then redo again. What do we need to redo?

Are people looking at us and seeing Him?

This is a point for calibration.

X – M – E

Our Christology determines our Missiology which forms our Ecclesiology.

Our problem comes when our Ecclesiology comes to incorporate Jesus into itself. We make Jesus like us and domesticate him. Most churches = only about 2% care about mission.

Jesus has been subverted out of his own religion (Jacques Ellul). A lot of people are coming to church and not finding the Nazarene there.

Jesus and religion don’t mix!

Christianity minus Christ = Religion (what he came to save people from!).

The Pharisees had a lot to commend them. Loved scriptures and searched it. Believed in miracles. Prayer. Identity. Tithed.

AND they were the people most responsible for putting Jesus in the cross.

AND they were most like us evangelicals.

The closest party to what Jesus stood for were most responsible for killing him.

Religion kills us.

What would happen if Jesus came to your church?

Would we kill him again? Or run him out of town?

Pharasaism is a disease of faith. We need to be saved from that.

We re-create God in our own image.

The most common image people have of Jesus – is exactly what he wasn’t! He was divine/ordinary. People think he’s anglo-saxon, spooky, glowing, carrying lambs and cuddling kids or a bearded lady, with his sacred heart in his hand. No wonder people run from him. Who’s going to charge for him? Or he’s just the buddy who wants to take you as you are rather than calls you to die.

Dallas Willard says most of us think Jesus is a nice guy, but not very smart.

So – write down everything he says about money. Then go to the financial adviser and ask what he thinks. Who you will you follow?

We choose the financial adviser and end up with a false god.

We make him like us, to affirm what we think and believe.

Who’s the real Jesus?

He’s so much more than what we’ve made Him!

We are entering into a new day, when the church is going to be in the midst of huge crises, we have to do an audit on this question: Do we really reflect Him?

You’re not Jesus – if you think you are, take your pills. But let’s look like Him.