Chris Welch
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UK pastor/apostle - How're you right now doing church, Chris ?· Like
Chris Welch Failing on every level of your score sheet...just like Jesus at the cross
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Chris Welch As I said...now is exactly like it was in 1973- 4 in Amersham when my Dad was asking me the same question.
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Chris Welch Although it seems weird talking like this...anybody remember 1975 and 6? The Kansas City Shepherd's Conference, the Lakes and the Dales Bible Weeks...and the angels? And the reports of angels in the Yorkshire Press? I tell you I don't mind failing at all!!!! LOL
I was recalling 1973 and 4. Marcus Roberts had had a significant encounter with USA Christians from Gene Edwards' Galeta fellowship. I think he met some in Falmer University Brighton, then he exhuberantly shared some of Watchman Nee's material with us. I have shared the effect of Graham Pulkingham on Amersham Baptist Church in what was quite a wry encounter of two species.
Graham Pulkingham grabbed our attention because the Fisherfolk came almost direct from Houston to do a week at our school, Dr Challoner's Grammar School Amersham.
But also Graham's talk to the church really got our notice. It was the anointing with which he stated the Church is the Body of Christ. It had the same cutting edge that Jesus did when He stated to Nazareth Synagogue: " Today is this scripture fulfilled in your midst."
I have shared of the 1970s origins of the church Marcus and I eventually ended up in. Long before we arrived Jorge Pradas had challenged the charismatic prayer fellowship that met once a month in Emsworth: "Are you a fellowship or are you the Church?"
It's specificity of believing.
So yesterday I was recalling the same kind of lull that we are in now, but 40 years ago. Then it seemed things changed like a whirlwind two years later. The Dales Bible Week pinned some of us
to the wall. It was in a cow's shed in Harrogate Showground The irony wasn't lost on us as Ern Baxter led several thousand of us in the prayer of Mary....Lord I don't understand but be it unto me according to your Word.
Now we can articulate what we were doing.
It was specificity.
It was believing in our heart and confssing with our mouth that Jesus Christ, the same awesome Jesus Christ was being born in us. We were believing ON HIS LIFE.
In genesis 3 Adam believed OFF his life in a titanic act that still affects us.
He began believing in the lie of the independent self.
By being specific and nailing our colours...we are in fact reversing history,
History is being reversed on the fulcrum of the New Creation in Christ.
Therefore if any man is in Christ he is become a new creation, the old has passed away and the new has come. Our active believing on everything Christ did IS THE VICTORY THAT OVERCOMES THE WORLD.
If we become passive, if we like Peter on the waves, start to consider for a moment what on earth am I doing? we will sink. This is not the victory.
THIS IS THE VICTORY even our faith. But we can pray, Lord help my unbelief.
Adam and Eve's little movement of reaching for fruit was VAST.
The Jesus Move taking their first corporate steps to nail their specificity to the mast was VAST.
And this is our believing.
STILL.
And now more defined through Norman Grubb after the book Yes I am.
I am Jesus Christ in his Chris Welch vinebranch form going on.
I don't build stone churches.
I don't seek to continue any tradition of man
I don't owe any man that task.
I am a free man in Christ.
But it IS the faith of Jesus Christ operating in me.
And now, as we have received the eyesalve of Revelation
we see God as the source of the ONLY LIFE in the Universe.
We can perceive a corporate derived life....since the devil
himself lives by God's life as well, but has twisted it in on itself
as a self for self life....so yes we see a derived life....
but now we keep our single eye open for what God is doing
with me, with everyone.
Willing and working for His good pleasure.
This is the New church.
Life itself.
We are not building oldstyle churches, oldstyle meetings.
We are telling you how you can live God's Life, the only real life
today in you. Sure we will gather as we eventually did in great numbers
40 years ago.....and when we gather it will be more specific than at any time since Adam. For now we are at last grasping what gathering in His Name means.
(Original Facebook post)
It took three whole generations for God to get His package of stuff into Abraham Isaac and Jacob and then this was rolled out into a "Family" Nation. But this in itself was still quite an outer form of what He was going for.
As I wrote this morning, on a huge scale, the Jews were used to bring in the Outer Court ministry. That God existed. That God wanted to bless and heal. That God was Father and wanted a relationship with a people. But it was Jesus whose job it was to introduce the next big stage. As we can see in history the last 2000 years has been a very mixed affair. Church has been incredibly like the Jews knowledge of God, with people more caught up with Law than relationship.
God is continually replanting and pruning His work. One way to think of Church history is as a "transition" between Law and Spirit. it began free , but even in Acts we can see seeds of religion wanting to take the church captive. The church itself has gone into the ground and died.....the first fruits of resurrection have happened with Luther's rediscovery of salvation by faith....and gradually more and more has been restored. Having done Holy Place Christianity for 100 years God is taking the whole of His church into the most radical transition yet. We enter individually into a crisis that is like Romans 7 crashing in on us. Everything that we knew, thought, felt we owned is going up in smoke in an experience of the altar of incense.
If you like the forerunners were the 12 apostles who had to learn they couldn't do Christianity. It's a horrible time for our flesh, but we start to get our new identity.
Now if we thought charismatic churches were an improvement on evangelical churches....well that's nothing to the difference between what's coming now.
I went through this type of transition 40 years ago in Amersham. We knew we had more light, but everywhere was just denominational churches. So we withdrew for a few years refusing to play the Christian game and sure enough the Spirit sent in amazing men , mainly from America, who raised up the last generation of churches.
These are now wearing thin, and the Spirit is currently brooding to bring forth something completely new. Probably like Jesus and the disciples, it won't even look like church...it'll be more like living together.
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