All I can tell you is I was born into an incredible situation. OK not aristocracy. But because both my parents were physics teachers at a time when teachers were paid well, and at a time when it was not at all normal for women to go out to work....we were well off.
Maybe having material needs met, and the awesome privilege of being in one of the last FREE Grammar schools in the UK that regularly pushes its people into the top universities, while all the rest of such schools are feepaying....
Maybe for this reason, with all outer bases covered,....I began really noticing inner emptiness.
I had thought Christianity was true but methodism had well instructed me that none of it was true, so by 12, having over achieved at school, I became a nihilist, an atheist.
And I plummeted.
Stephen Fry talks about his Black Dog and depression.
I was so depressed. I never did quite as well at school. I couldn't honestly see the point. Just getting a job, to have a house and wife, and then die seemed utterly utterly pointless.
BUT I AM AT LAST REALISING THAT GOD MEANT ME TO FEEL DESPAIR. HOPELESSNESS. TO ENGENDER A DEEP SUBTERRANEAN CRY.....
I am not a special person. I am really ordinary. I like sex. I like food.
I like seeing new things......I like having money to spend...(what was that?) I am not specially spiritual. Yes, I am like lots of artistic creative guys...tend to see stuff from the inside out...but probably around a quarter of the population are like this.
But for some reason....in a set up that Frank Viola identifies as the
CRY OF LONELINESS in ADAM or
THE CRY FOR DELIVERANCE of the Israelites in Egypt...
God set up my circumstances early
to answer my desperate desperate 12 year old heart...
and POWER ME EARLY into the Jeremiah 31 experience of the New Covenant....of KNOWING HIM....
not knowing theology
not knowing theories
knowing GOD HIMSELF from my insides....
so that from 12 onwards at least I have walked my 1 John 2 external life in tandem with my internal life.
Now Jesus managed to do this without sin....and as we crash more and more into His life...by our failure....HIS OWN LIFE IS THE SAME AS OUR LIFE....IT IS JESUS CHRIST LIVING AS A CHRIS WELCH, OR WHOEVER.....
But still
But still..... for Jesus as for any human vessel of God's Life...
our human experience is the same....
We feel like we are running short....
Our externals seem to get a bit tight....
Don't think this was any different for the Son of God....He was born that way.....in very tight externals....a manger....no room at the inn.
When Jesus looked up to heaven in exasperation several times in the gospels and said..... "How long must I be with this generation of unbelief????" Don't make light of this....
This is life not being how you think it should be....and if you listen in the Spirit you can hear the intensity Jesus felt this....
It was God again inside Jesus Christ being the intercession for MORE of HIMSELF on EARTH.....
GOD CHANGE THIS!!!!!!
Later Jesus vocalised this as....
"You have no idea how constrained I am to want to send fire to the earth" Now a carnal thinking evangelical interprets this as....
Boy...how much I am looking forward to send the fire of God down and consume people in fiery judgment!!!!
But as with all things....be it rebuilding the Temple in 3 days
or a "greater than Solomon, or Abraham or David" is here....
Jesus was speaking on a Spirit level here.
He was always about His Father's business which is to have a God Dwelling Place on earth....
not bricks , but humans....
so the word fire here relates to spiritual fire
the fire that judges and rids us of the Adamic inheritance
the purging fire of God
the altar of incense in the HolyPlace just before the Holiest Place.
The Baptism of the Spirit and Fire always had to do with the end goal.....
I will make of your "enemies" a footstool
a Mature Man
a flesh and blood embodiment of the Mercy Seat with the three forms of Word inside, overshadowed by Shekinah glory.....
So the Driver.....be it the intense loneliness of Adam for a mate, which was only so we could also feel God's intense yearning for a mate.....
So the Driver for deliverance, which was the intense cry of the Israelites in a negative Egyptian situation....
so the Driver....for a vast harvest white with golden grain...is the need for evangelism, of a mankind looking for answers....which leads us to cry to the Father.....send forth ministries PLEEEEEASE, dynamite out ministries (is what the Greek actually means)...
Yes the Driver for all these things is the external pinch of things being too tight to mention....
WE NEED MORE
WE NEED CHANGE
and our insides feel the pinch.
So yes I am very ordinary...but by setting up my circumstances God had already anointed me by 13, with friends we had run groups of Christians by our teens, i was being headhunted to run the Christian Union at Exeter after my first year there....
my worship songs and music were being used....
i was already into what would be the equivalent of David's adultery crisises at age 20.... only to be followed by Kevin Prosch, Mark Stibbe, countless Morris Cerullo related power ministries....
and Ian McCulloch (below) prays for me in this condition in Emsworth in 1978, not really having a clue what the Spirit was praying through him. "Lord, do a quick work in Chris "....
Well the quick 9 year work, neither looked outwardly quick...
nor looked like a "work"....
but anybody defining King David's life at the time wouldn't have described it as that spiritual either....divided into 3 horrible classes of crisis....AND ALL LONG AFTER THE ONE THING THE WORLD KNOW HIM FOR...KILLING GOLIATH....
1. Saul chasing after him with his entire army
2. David sleeping with a man's wife and sending him off to the frontline to murder him
3. David being chased around by his own son Absalom
None of that looked in anyway promising....
So as things unfolded for me...none of it even registered on Ian McCulloch's scale of reference, to even know if his prayer had been answered. He may have been renewed by the Spirit, but Ian's entire life experience had been the son of a Brethren missionary, only to become a Brethren missionary to Argentina himself.
Like Terry Virgo, Bryn Jones, Gerald Coates, john Noble, Barney Coombs, and now selfconfessed to by David Tomlinson writing so effectively as he did in his own biographical "The Post Evangelical"
none of us.....and I say that as a teenager that also used to pray for people to be converted and baptised i the Spirit....
none of our generation in God even knew there were three stages of growth in 1 John 2. We thought 1 John 2 was purely about the three natural human growth phases.
So even when Ian McCulloch summoned all the church elders to "call me to order" in Emsworth church....these things are always secret affairs....(not to embarrass the people concerned)
even when stating the date I had to "repent" by
and even when I supernaturally appeared to the minute some 60-90 minutes into the service to silently "take " my judgment....
to be given over to Satan.....
as Brethren based people like doing after the pattern of Paul....
all so strict and tight and to the book....first address someone singly, then take some elders, then address the whole church......
as this all unfolded in a charismatic church setting, there was nothing in Ian McCulloch's experience thus far that could have ever prepared him for what was happening in front of him....
even though he had personally prayed over me
"Lord Do a quick work with Chris....."
Their generation has some faint inkling about Romans 6 to 8, but they never lingered long in these scriptures...only the 8th chapter like any good charismatic....
Their generation, if like a good Brethren Teacher, they actually covered the Tabernacle...as Ian did....
then they always stopped at the Holy place....they had no clue beyond the candlestick....
so there Ian was....
staring at one of the first of a pioneer breed of thirdlevellers in the UK....but Ian ofcourse didn't ...couldn't know what he was looking at....
Yet God had framed his life perfectly thus far to be the man to raise such a church in the UK to pioneer what a real church is....
a church that actually obeys Ephesians 4 and 1 Corinthians 12-14 when it gathers.
But a bit like Moses and the promised Land....God said to Ian....
Thus far and no further.
This is even more ironic when you consider that it was Ian McCulloch who had felt called to lock himself away in a caravan to seek God for was it one month????40 days???
Anyway Ian began as a result to minister on GLORY.....a subject unheard of up to this point, to describe anything here on earth before Jesus comes back or we die.
Since 1984 it has become commonplace to hold "Glory Conferences".....but surely Emsworth 1984 conference must count as one of the first in a CHURCH VISION setting!!!!
So yes....as is the case on much of Facebook to this day
most of my 2500 friends cannot put these two seemingly disparate things together.....
IN THE HOLIEST PLACE
is a box of gnarled twisted grain acaciawood (humanity) clothed with gold inside and out and containing three forms of mature WORD
and this connects with the superstar, whammy zappy Holy Spirit whan bam thankyou maam....power and anointing of God's Throne overshadowing in the form of Shekinah....
but the chief priests couldn't see the connection either between
a smashed up Nazarene with a crown of thorns and 39 whip marks....and 40 days later a man ascending to heaven in a glory cloud to take up his place as Lord of Lords.
Who has believed our message?
And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
2 For He grew up before Him like a tender [a]shoot,
And like a root out of parched ground;
He has no stately form or majesty
That we should look upon Him,
Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.
3 He was despised and forsaken of men,
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
And like one from whom men hide their face
He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
as Isaiah 53 says....like a root out of parched ground;
THIS IS THE HUMAN WALK IN GOD ENGENDERING THE CRY AMIDST TOTAL FRUSTRATION AND LIMITATION
WHICH AS PRIESTS OF THE MOST HIGH GOD BRINGS FORTH THE QUANTUM CRIES AND CHANGES IN THE EARTH TO OUR TIME SPACE WORLD.....
THIS IS THE SECRET HIDDEN FOR AGES OF HOW WE GET TO FULFIL THE ORIGINAL COMMAND TO ADAM
Go, multiply, fill the earth
AND SUBDUE IT !!!!!!
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