Church in Transition

1 John 2.....what is the " young man state" about? In natural life it is the necessary transition stage between child and adult. In the Spirit it is as well. Childhood in faith is the awesome realisation that salvation is not by works but by faith and we take our baby steps in this new.realm of believing in our heart and confessing. In Acts people.were baptised.in the Spirit immediately, they'd already had lots of.rudiments just by being Jews. Raised in the leftbrain West it is often some time before.we get baptised in the Spirit.

The young man stage is where we are building our new hearing mechanism. Faith comes in two stages, by hearing and hearing comes by access to the Word of God.First we have to have our inner hearing dug out. "You have dug out ears for.me"
It is where we are confessing what we see in the Bible is now true of us. Based on the victory that is already ours. "You have the victory".
This is called charismatic or Word.of.Faith church.
You have one single pastor still just like Catholicism, and evangelical beliefs.
It doesn't matter what we do in the first two levels of corporate faith, we can do no other anyway.
In the Holy Place even the shewbread is cut up in 12 bits because nobody can take the whole thing yet.

But in the thirdlevel everything matters.
Ephesians 4 is a good description of how thirdlevel church works, but by then you have many ministries under one roof with real Christ stuff. There is nothing in the Bible anywhere about one pastor. Only elders plural. When they went out on missions....even apostles.....they went out as twos minimum to demonstrate fellowship, how anointing works in the Trinity, and not the Zeus model of power we know in the world system.
In the thirdlevel we.are all about keying others into the Melchidisek order, hearing Christ for themselves, psalm 123, and learning Galatians 2.20 living.
The Father level which is Union, they who know /are fused with Him who is from the Beginning.
In a leftbrain culture, Brian Zahnd, Justin Abraham ,John Crowder stick out for " talking about mysticism"
But from the moment we pray to a God who is Spirit we are engaging outside what the leftbrain is familiar.with. So Gnostic and mystic..... can be good can be bad.....it depends on the Spirit we are.fellowshipping with.

John Crowder

1 Corinthians 12 addresses a city where pagans were already accessing spirits....now they had to do the same sort of things but keying into the one Holy Spirit that declares Jesus to be Lord.

Justin Abraham

To a balance brained community, nothing is mystic. But we are not there yet. Right now, even the young man stage of 1. John 2 is considered quite off the wall, and nobody knows there is a third stage of growth.


Brian is quite similar to the London leaders in the 70s. In my opinion he knows what he is leaving. He was w hugely successful pastor of an American megachurch. But I am convinced he will express himself more directly the more he catches the thirdlevel message of Union.