Kingdom Come!
The kingdom is organized and ordered by the King.
He has blueprints for building. He has schematics for body building. He designs the bride’s adornment.
The motivation and licensure for most ministries is illegitimate. The blueprints do not call for this design. Leaders build outhouses that have not site preparation in the blueprints of the kingdom simply because they wish to have their own space.
Overt individualism remains the main reason we have so many churches, not assignment. The assumption that more churches means more kingdom reveals how little we understand kingdom and kingdom culture. It also reveals that we have nearly lost the kingdom meaning for “church.”
“Out of place” is our most common cause of paralysis in the body. “Out of alignment” is our most common cause of structural failure in the building. “Off the shelf” is our most common cause of adornment malfunction in the bride.
You should ask yourself if the ministry of which you are part is legitimate and not measure legitimacy by size or popularity. You need to rethink the basis upon which ministry is founded. Consider the stinking thinking.
Stinking Thinking
Our assumptions are based upon individualism and odd ideas about how God thinks. Even though we have Bibles so we know who God is and how God thinks, we insist upon applying what we learned at the latest conference on church growth instead of Scripture.
In fact, most churches exist for all the wrong reasons: financial income for a preacher who wants to preach, avoiding accountability by starting your own church, or “I don’t know who to do anything else but preach because I’m a preacher’s son or daughter.”
If the illegitimate works suddenly dropped off the map in one day, and all the leaders illegitimately leading them were properly prepared and positioning in building, body, and bride, a kingdom reformation and renaissance would start happening immediately! Billions of dollars would become available that are wasted every month. New structures of kingdom would be built that fit the blueprints and site preparation of intercessors and warriors. It would be the greatest shift in history.
I don’t believe the government should issue preaching licenses. None of their business. John Bunyan was in prison for preaching without a license. However, I do believe the King puts license plates on vehicles of ministry in His kingdom, and driving around with a license is a breach of protocol.
I was part of a ministry for a short time, very dysfunctional in the extreme, and the leader says, “I start this ministry so my son could have something when I retire.” Go figure how that kind of stinking thinking becomes possible in church!
Get Out
Some leaders – many of them – get sent out as a means of simply dumping them on the world because they no longer fit in the schematics of a church they have been serving. Worse, when real leaders mature in a house, they come to a place at which they are a real problem because they challenge the existing or emerging leadership, and the internal politics produces winners and losers. So, they are given a “Get Out of Church” card.
In the kingdom, leader are sent to an assignment, not away from a political contest they lost.
Where are they to go? What are they to do? They have a kingdom calling, so they attempt to establish something, usually just like what just spit them out like the bones of a fish being eaten by a cat.
They start a ministry with people who seem to have the same thinking, people who can’t seem to fit anywhere else, or people who vagabond about and light upon this or that for a season.
This is all illegitimate! This doesn’t even resemble kingdom. This is so dysfunctional a child can see it is wrong. But, we continue doing it as if it is part and parcel of the entirety of church-anity we have produced. We can twist verses of the Bible into meanings that make angels have convulsions, just to legitimize our silliness.
We do not prepare and position for the sake of kingdom Ecclesia. We simply feed our little fish bowl for appearance and display hoping to get a big bigger each year, hoping to do with church what a neophyte believer can do on a personal level, adding enormous staff as event planners and people managers as if this is Ecclesia.
We build a strange landscape of buildings that have no response to one another at all, even have antagonistic relationships, and we call all of them “church.” We are obviously looney tunes! And, we need to stop doing this immediately!
We argue about the size of church, model, method, means, message, and men of church without understanding what church is!
A Way Forward
Kingdom leaders do not build churches. They build leaders. Jesus builds Ecclesiae. Kingdom leaders establish kingdom and kingdom culture for ever-increasing kingdom conquest.
So, a region is impacted by then influence of kingdom when someone with a mandate arrives with a blueprint. This person is sent by the King, recognized by other leaders, and sent to something, not away from something. What we have invested in for training should become the very thing we do as leaders: close down the seminaries and start one in the region where you are sent. Invest yourself in leadership development at every level. Begin with intercessors and worshipers, and the leaders will begin to form right in front of your eyes. Then, position them as bricks in the building, body parts in the body, and adornment for the bride, to function as kingdom leaders doing the work of ministry.
If you are sent to a region without blueprints, find the blueprints leaders there (you won’t ever be sent by Jesus to some place that has no blueprint leaders.) Work with the blueprints to produce your part of the building, body, and bride.
If you go and “get people saved,” you will populate kingdom with babies and create a nursery to care for them. Even if you fill the nursery with a million people, you will have only produce a system to take care of a million babies. You will not have expanded kingdom culture.
