I have written many posts about the positive and negative of 1 Corinthians 12.
The Body has Apps
1 Corinthians 12 again
The fascism referred to in the title is the condition Paul is describing when a body part says that because another body part is different then it has no need of it.
Which is basically a humorous idea! It's hilarious. Meant to be.
Because if our own bodies behaved as we do in the Body of Christ, it would be extremely bad news for our existence on earth as an individual!!!
I'm sorry that as yet I have no categorical blueprint as to what the 12 characteristics of the tribes of Israel and the corresponding 12 character traits of the disciples are, so we'll have to work with personal observations of people types in churches as they come to the Lord and DON'T really get to grips with what God is actually wanting to do with them.
For you see, every single one of us is geared to having God live through them to excel in certain characteristics which they are particularly well suited for. But we also know something of darkness. We still have tendencies to carry on living in old now defunct "independent self" mindframes, and in this condition we continue to impose "our way of thinking and seeing" upon other people as if it's a relevant guage of measurement for anyone else.
So how does this work?
The Musician and Creative Fascist
Well let's take me, a musician. Bono of U2 describes it well. We are divas. We love an audience. Because U2 have spent years battering the edges off each other (Except The Edge perhaps), Bono can speak lightheartedly about his tendencies.
You imagine, a musician who writes music and finds that it moves people powerfully. That they love it. That they love you for it.
Now if that's not intoxicating enough, imagine it all hyped up into the stratosphere as God anoints you with the Spirit, to sing songs prophetically off the cuff. To inspire you with songs that you just know you were not capable of writing....or at the very least...not to order. And that these songs are deemed worthy of publishing, or people buying CDs.
How incredible that is! Then add to that that God Himself. The God of the Universe has determined that praisers and worshippers, musicians, creatives....like the Tribe of Judah....GO FIRST.
So take this into the independent self realm, and you begin to understand how the first worshipleader, Lucifer himself....gets it so wrong....completely oversteps the limit....and all his musical followers do the same.
Now imagine a whole generation like ours who God chooses to bring forth a new revelation about worship and praise through. The calling is legitimate ofcourse....BUT THE FASCISM ISN'T.
And so in this very day and age God is having to counteract this very fascism.
The Be all and End All of Church is not worship in the form of singing songs. Worship is huge, and it is the subject of my new worship series. But that which God is bringing forth in his Church concerns the birth of His Son into every area of life.
There is however a natural filter system in life for musicians, creatives and prophetic people. Quite often they are inept at many practical sides of life and this is constantly pointed out. The other thing is that outside the context of meetings and listening to music, music as a subject is nearly irrelevant, especially in a country as leftbrain as England is.
Finally, have you ever heard a musician or prophetic character talk naturally? Everyone else talks normally in a linear fashion. They say what they mean and build their conversation in easy to follow stages.
Someone like St John in his gospel represents this other type of person. They talk in parallel all at once. It's like having 5 completely different ideas land in the same sentence at the same time!!! It's as though while a normal person has a normal fuel feed to his head, the creative has a huge thick fuel lead which in turn within it has five separate pipes, and people are meant to be able to follow this simultaneous gush of information. Well, it may work in poetry, or in sung poetry, like Suzanne Vega, or Shakespeare plays, or in prophetic utterance, but it sure as anything won't get you far at Tescos!!!! So this helps counteract Musician Fascism enormously!!!
The Teacher Fascist
In a leftbrain culture this has come to mean a leftbrain articulate person who can string together ideas in a logical fashion, even when they shouldn't be. And they impose this on other Christians.
They are really necessary so they are found in all areas of learning, including outside of pure education , in work environments, and the media.
Just as the musician is undergoing a role redefinition in the third level, so will the role of the teacher.
Daniel Yordy and I have already observed this some 30 years ago, so we are not saying anything strikingly new, it's just the rest of the church didn't know the third level exists so it comes as news to them.
In a Greco-Roman based world, teachers have a clearly defined leftbrain template. The Hebrew perception of teaching was far more rounded, as is understood in the Eastern world ; for it has to do with wisdom, or application of knowledge, and deep and penetrative insight into who we are as humans. In a secular environment where we are more or less understood to be thinking machines with no spiritual element , or if this is acknowledged it is more or less assumed to be part of the substratum of the same brain machinery, so much of what the Holy Spirit, who has come to lead us into all truth teaches, largely by revelation, is absolutely meaningless to Westerners.
Sadly in the first two church worlds, three, if you include the secular church world,
Level 0....cultural Christianity by philosophy
Level 1 ...the evangelical world
Level 2...the pentecostal/charismatic Christian world
teaching takes this sole leftbrain form.
Probably the extreme form of ludicrousy is when the Catholic Charismatic Renewal at Ann Arbor, followed by John Wimber in his dicipleship manual, tried to reduce teachings on the Holy Spirit-filled life to a Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil format, eminently titled
Living in the Spirit Seminars.
Some measure of this was repeated through Selwyn Hughes teaching seminars.
I must stress, as in the modern day Alpha Courses which have penetrated traditional UK churches so effectively, that ALL of these courses have served a real function and were reflective more of where the church was at at the time. But overall it IS A FORM OF FASCISM to which the third level church, or mature version of church is not CALLED. It's passing the GRECO-ROMAN mindset right through what is really a totally NEW CREATION that has never been truly seen on the Earth in any fulness....
A Body of multinational believers ALL IN UNION with their Saviour, expressing Him through spirit,mind,will,emotions, and body.
The Teacher already has his come uppance in recent years as the discoveries in brain research have begun to weaken their domination over the Body of Christ. Frequently, and rightly, they are observed to be "anal" in their attention to the minutest detail. Now in some cases this is important, because of the phrase "the devil is in the detail". But teachers don't seem to be fitted with an off switch. They seem to have poor empathy skills, concerned primarily with getting their teaching across, whether anyone is even mildly interested or not.
Very rightbrained individuals and also very empathetic individuals who are also quite poor at articulating to any complicated degree, have suffered over centuries from teachers, who have been given way too much prominance in place of other humble souls who have got on for years helping others and serving them.
The Evangelist Fascist
I have yet to meet an evangelist who has the vision of the Body of Christ.
Paul Noble may be the nearest in recent years who has both, and in time past, I felt that Stan Warren of Emsworth had some perception of both. Stan was to have gone off with his wife to the Australian Inland Mission but a Divine Encounter with some traffic and a hospital bed for both of them arrested their plans, and they came to Emsworth and submitted into learning about how the Body of Christ really operates under the teaching and impartation of Ian McCulloch, Ed Miller and Jorge Pradas.
You see, neither David Hathaway,Morris Cerullo and Rheinhard Bonnke seem to "get" what the Church is?
Just about all the evangelistic people on Facebook I talk with have the same problem.
Their understanding of the Church is completely fascistic. It's somewhere to tuck their new converts so they never have to bother with them again, while they go out and blast new converts in.
Well, honour where honour is due. Unless the gospel is preached how are people going to hear? And evangelists up until now know that most churches develop this insular, navel-gazing approach, and never actually reach people, so you can understand their total frustration.
My frustration ,and I think it's born from God's own heart, so it is also His frustration is that
EVANGELISTS DON'T PREACH THE GOSPEL.
They preach forgiveness.Now Jews used to preach forgiveness too, all while killing Jesus. Forgiveness represents approximately one tiny third of the gospel message.
Some are actually starting to understand that God IS ABOUT RECONCILING the world to Himself
since that is what HIS SON HAS ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED.
But that also falls short of the whole picture.
The whole picture MUST INCLUDE what went wrong in Genesis 3, and how completely and effectively the Cross has met that problem head on. I haven't yet met an evangelist who gets that to anywhere near the level that Norman Grubb defines in his lifelong faith resume here:
So evangelists in their current form are relics from a first and secondlevel church period, that manage to get the seed of Life into someone's heart, but really don't have the first clue what they just did, a bit like a sixteen year old who gets his hapless girlfriend pregnant, and they both stick the newborn child in some social adoption programme, to be raised impersonally and without any clear identity to who they are....which is ofcourse the church as organisation ...or as pile of unrelated bricks...which is the format we have on the streetcorners the world over.
So ofcourse evangelists become quite fascistic in their almost robotic, military herding style of scooping as many unsuspecting individuals into the herding pens as possible.
MOST EVANGELISTS HAVEN'T A CLUE THAT THEY ARE BIRTHING JESUS CHRIST IN AN INDIVIDUAL, THAT WERE THEY ACTUALLY TO GROW PROPERLY WOULD BE MORE THAN ABLE TO REPRODUCE CHURCHES OF THEMSELVES ALL OVER THE GLOBE WITHIN ONE GENERATION.....
there is a catch....
you actually need to have revelation about what all the New Testament letters are on about and not just head knowledge learned in a factory farm like
YWAM
or SEMINARIES
or Alpha Courses....
The CARING FASCIST
This is the social justice person gone mad....gone to the nth extreme.
There's a whole load of these on facebook. They are people who rightly, are frustrated at being totally overlooked in churches by imperious teachers and pastors, who, paid tithes, swan around in arecognised way in the communities, whereas often the people quietly getting on with Kingdom caring and pouring out themselves for others, are unfunded, poorly articulate themselves, and are often just taken for granted.
So, in reaction, they in turn become as fascistic in their approach to helping people as other ministries are in their areas. In the carers favour I have to say that the Bible says nothing about pastors or single figureheads heading up local churches. This is pure human invention and has no part in God's Melchizedek Church.
There are elders in God's church by virtue of knowing who they are in God, and being "elder" in the faith until the others around them become elder in their faith!
There are NO hard and fast guidelines to supporting or not of ministries. If you are being greatly used for a time, then you are going to find it hard to hold down a normal job....but perhaps things will steady out, or God will call you aside, and you can get some normal sort of employment again. Everything is fluid. St Paul went to virgin areas and wouldn't let any of them say that they paid for the gospel in any way....he completely funded himself, particularly in the early founding stages of a work.
Back to Carers.
Now I have some authority to say this because I have been a musician in many forms of God's church in the 70s and 80s, and twenty years ago felt to lay the whole thing down....partly to learn the third level, but more directly to learn that Chris Welch is Chris Welch. I was beginning to get an identitiy that was too wrapped up in the creative or prophetic things God did through me....but had to learn whether God never does a thing like that through me again, I am still God's Chris Welch. He in me is my identity and that is enough.
Most carers types I have met are doing their stuff for mixed motives. Some part of it is naturally "them". That is, as God created them. Some part of it is just works. They are driven to do something in a church system which largely exploits this in order that the pastors or church leaders can then "look more successful" as a church.
These sort of folk are the worst...oh especially when they are evangelistic as well.
They are the worst form of Salvation Army types.
But they also exist in most churches.
There will always be these tensions between all the different functions in the Body of Christ. Jesus Christ seems to have formed His church with the need for masses of Cross experience just to interrelate as His Body.
All kinds of tensions were running beneath the surface in the Gospels as the disciples learned to live together.
You even had Judas piling the pressure on when Mary "wasted" a whole years wages in perfume on Jesus feet. That money could have been given to the poor Jesus. (Then it hints that his real motivation was that he was the treasurer!!!)
Carers will always be putting pressure on to meet the very real needs of folk. In God this is right. When it's not God though it's a false fascism that ties up the rest of the Body who should be really getting on with what God is doing through them.
The LEADER/SALES/ADMINISTRATOR FASCIST
Now in any bunch of people leaders emerge.
They just think on a bigger organisational scale.
I was going to do a whole post just on this alone two years ago but never got around to it.
I was going to call it the QUARTERMASTER SYNDROME
This is an identifiable type that profit from other's hardship. In Dad's Army it was the spiv type character who always knew where the bargain offers were. Monetarily these people always station themselves in between supply and customer. It's a natural entrepreneurial streak. This would be the person who got the Quartermaster position in the services. They'd be in control of who got what.
On the large scale the 13 luciferian dynasties have positioned themselves at the gateway of all the main areas of our international dealings....education,monetary,political, artistic, etc etc A secretive council of 300 rule the entire world behind a glassfrontage of people we know, like President Obama, and our English politicians.
In any church the prophetic seems to fall foul of leadership.Leaders, as I said are the invention of God, because they have this natural flare for administration which works extremely well when you have a whole group of people trying to assert their own rights and needs.
One of the worst aspects of leader fascism is this FEEDBACK LOOP they get themselves into.
It works like this:
God honours leadership
God put me here
I am honoured
What may actually be happening is:
God has honoured this person as leader
I must submit faithfully to this leader
I get my identity in the reflection that comes from my relationship to this leader
He/she is honoured
Prophetic people who get their self-identification more from their quest for absolute truth
are a real pain to leadership fascists, because they seem quite rebellious, and don't seem to be
honoring that "very serious honour bestowed me by God Himself".
So instead of realising and honoring God in their own innate flare for getting a handle on the larger picture, the leader fascist sees everyone else through his own distorted lens of whether they have as much ability in leading. The ones who don't ofcourse are in some way lesser.
In other words the leader fascist measures everything by the size of pyramid of which he is the peak.
This is particularly dodgy in first and secondlevel churches.
Why so?
There are many very successful churches numerically on Facebook. There are many leaders who are experiencing great and encouraging additions to their flock. I have had leaders really looks down at me and calls into question my own "fruit". But I look straight at them and say "Yes, but have you actually ever spelled out John 6 to your own congregation?"
Ofcourse no first and secondlevel church have, they simply haven't had that revelation yet. This is the territory of the "exposure of the independent self"....and it is the one all fascist leaders back away from because it is not faced in their own lives.
To conclude then, there is ONLY ONE LIFE going on in the Universe. God. Who is self-giving Love.
If we live one iota outside of this Life expressing itself through us, then those assets which are our natural strengths and abilities start crossing the borderline that enters into a form of fascism. And it is this very fascism that hinders the Body from building each other up, and instead dissipates the power and the glory of the Body into the fractured mess we see today, with various relics of different very real moves of God distributed on every street corner.
"You DO NOT DISCERN THE BODY OF CHRIST ARIGHT. For this reason many of you are sick and some have already DIED."
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