Of the churches and the reforming Church
When I shared my recent experience regarding the clash of spiritual kingdoms, specifically the visceral friction encountered when a church elder refuted my diagnostic conclusion that the Church is in a state of deep apostasy, I expected resistance from the institution. What I forgot was the sheer scale of the deception currently at play.
The comments to my video testimony have been varied. Some echo the exhaustion of navigating a culture that demands conformity while silencing the heavy, holy sobriety that marks the true believer. Others urge a delicate, non-judgemental silence, suggesting we must simply love people where they are.
But there is a far graver danger. Many appear to be leaving the institutional system as per 2 Corinthians 6, yet they do so without the required fundamental repentance of Spirit-led sojourn. They drift from the frying pan into the fire, merely swapping an old structure for their own preferred fancies of what church should be. Whether they hold to the errors of egalitarianism, the quenching of the Spirit through cessationism, or the idolatry of ecumenical compromise, their departure is not reform. It is rebellion.
As we have laid out in our confession of faith, below, we are living in a period of church apostasy where the prevailing posture is not humility, but unfaithfulness. We lack the stomach for true, Spirit-led reform, mistaking our own discontent and departures as necessarily being of virtue. I fear that the required heart-cutting is often absent. But I recognise it when I hear it.
Repent on His terms, not your own
The truth remains: being born again is not a caricature or a lifestyle add-on. If your testimony (which concludes that the Church is suffering from a deeper decay than most dare to admit) is met with grating resistance, it is a fundamental clash between the establishments of men and the Kingdom of God.
We must examine ourselves. Are we marked by the sorrowful yet rejoicing reality of the Spirit, or are we settling for the bulletproof certainty of the professional religious, or the unrepentant rebellion of our own making?
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