Sunday

Two Tabernacles

One of the most fascinating situations in the Bible is never described. It happens during the latter years of David’s reign, say from 2 Samuel chapter 7 and onward.

Years before, David had finished conquering all of his enemies, and his people had rested from war. David had finished building his palace, and all this happened before he discovered Bathsheba’s midnight rooftop bathing habits.

David himself is experiencing something of a personal revival, and he has just brought the ark of the Lord into the city (from Obed-Edom’s house in the suburbs).

This season of history fascinates me intensely, and I believe that it’s a metaphor for where the church is today.

The House of Worship

In that day, the Tabernacle of Moses (also known as the Tabernacle of Meeting) was installed on the hill of Shiloh a good day’s walk from Jerusalem. It encompassed a whole campus of highly ornate tents covering several acres. It was the only place where the entire nation would go to worship, and they went there by the thousands. The Levites and Priests taught the Law, the sacrifices were offered there: sin offerings, thanksgiving offerings and all the rest. Offerings and sacrifices were received from the people in the form of gold, silver and animal sacrifices.

The Tabernacle was a big spectacle: there were gold and silver and bronze and embroidery and bright colors everywhere.

Shiloh had become a noisy place. The crowds of people brought their own noises, and everywhere was the noise of the sheep and birds and oxen that were brought for sacrifice, interrupted by the businessmen selling more animals for sacrifice.

Over all that was the music. Ah, the music! Choirs, trumpets, harps.

The air was filled with fragrances. The animals brought their own odors of course, but the sacrifices and offerings filled the air with the smell of barbecue. And when they lit the incense, the smell of spices filled the air.

Services for thousands of people were led by priests decked out with linen and jewels and fancy robes and sometimes fancy hats. It seemed that the more important you were – and all the leaders were important – then the fancier your vestments were.

The entire nation was commanded by law to come together for a national party three times every year, and when it happened, the crowds swelled from the hundreds or the thousands to the hundreds of thousands. Every hotel room was booked solid for weeks, every restaurateur made a healthy profit when the festivals came to town.

Imagine an NFL football arena ten miles outside your hometown, and then imagine that it was a legal requirement that the entire nation attend regularly. Now imagine that your team is in the Superbowl in that arena three times a year, and that Disney and MTV co-sponsor the halftime show. The cheerleaders, the news media, the coaches and officials: what an amazing spectacle!

The people didn’t gather for worship at the Tabernacle of Meeting in rebellion or selfishness; their goal was not spectacle. They were in fact obeying the commands of the Lord, commands about when to worship, how to sacrifice and what to teach. The leaders were installed by the command of God, for all that the hands that anointed them were the hands of men. This worship service was established by God, and it was perpetuated at His command by His blessing. They were obeying the freshest revelation that they had. 

They only lacked one thing: God’s presence, the Ark of the Covenant, was no longer there. Other than that, they pretty much had everything going for them.

The Presence of God

The Ark itself had been moved into the city of Jerusalem, and it was now residing in a pup tent in David’s back bedroom. For the next several years, until Solomon took it back to the Tabernacle of Meeting in Shiloh, David and his household worshipped in that spare bedroom. David re-assigned some of the Levites from the Tabernacle of Meeting to his own back bedroom, to the new tabernacle there.

That little tent would soon be known as David’s Tabernacle, and nobody really knows exactly what it looked like. It might have been set up in a private garden rather than the back bedroom, and we’re only assuming that there was a pup tent over the ark, simply because “tabernacle” comes from “tent” in their language. Knowing how David delighted in honoring God, it was probably a very nice pup tent. And if David danced foolishly (and half naked) during the public journey of God’s presence to his back bedroom, then how must he have worshipped in that back bedroom? I’m guessing that “with abandon” applies.

The significant point was that the Ark – and therefore God’s presence – was no longer hidden behind layers of ceremony and religious bureaucracy. Suddenly, for the first time since the Burning Bush, God was immediately accessible to His people.

Based on how much the Bible describes David, I imagine that the king spent a fair bit of his time in that back bedroom worshipping. Because the head of the household was a worshipper, some of his household learned to worship: I can see the head butler and the assistant cook waiting until David was through, so they could get into that bedroom to get their turn on their faces or dancing in the presence of God.

The remarkable thing was that Heaven knew of David’s Tabernacle. I suspect the place was as popular in Heaven as it was on earth: finally, there was a place where God and man could come together, finally there was a man who was passionate about God’s presence. Generations later, when David’s Tabernacle was broken and abandoned, God promised to restore it. God doesn’t often promise to restore the things that man makes.

Tabernacles and the Twenty First Century

In Acts 15, Peter reminds the people of God’s promise in Amos to restore the tabernacle, David’s tabernacle.

We live in a day like the day that David built his tabernacle. The Bible describes our day as “the last days” (heck, everything since Acts 2 seems to be part of “the last days”) which is the time for David’s Tabernacle to be restored. And we’re seeing that happen.

Heaven is committed to this kind of worship, and this is the pattern of worship that makes God happy: people coming directly to God, coming freely and joyfully, without the pomp and circumstance of the Tabernacle of Meeting, without the religious trappings of the grand ceremony and tradition.

We live in a day where there are large and prestigious and prosperous gathering places on the hilltops, in the public places. They’re in the media and in the eyes of the nation, and the people go there by the thousands to perform the rituals and offer the sacrifices and be trained by the religious authorities of the nation. They have the professional musicians, the professional speakers, the professional media technicians. The ceremonies are moving and the messages are relevant and uplifting. Thousands come to a faith in Christ through these tabernacles. They are obeying the freshest revelation they have. 

They lack only one thing. The presence of God is not in them.

I am not opposed to mega churches, or to Sunday-morning gatherings in general; I repeat: I’m part of one, and I like it. These are not “ungodly abominations;” they are not sacrilegious and they are not (by and large) the work of the flesh, that is, they are not monuments to self or pleasure or our own righteousness. But they’re not following the presence of God (I remind you: there are exceptions to everything I write in this blog!).

These churches carefully following plans laid down by godly men and women, whether that’s the vision of the founders, the vision of the pastor or the directions of the board of directors. They’re doing their best to be what they think a church ought to be. They’re following the law as they know it.

But David’s tabernacle is not about following the Law. In fact, it was completely outside the Law. The Law required the Ark of the Covenant to stay in the Tabernacle of Moses. David was working outside of the law, outside of the rules that God had established for worship, outside of the Tabernacle.

But it is David’s Tabernacle, not Moses’, that God likes best and that He promises to restore.

Tabernacles and Me

The big deal is that this demonstrates God’s heart! God, it appears, prefers passion to legalism, intimate worship to religious conformity.

This isn’t about location. I’m not lobbying for Believers to escape from their churches and limit their worship of God in their back bedroom. Location means pretty much nothing in this context.

What I’m saying is that going to church is not the thing that God respects. I’m lobbying for Believers to worship God passionately, intimately. I don’t really care if you and I worship God in the big gathering or the little one, as long as we passionately worship. The goal is getting crazy for God’s presence. The goal is worshipping with abandon, holding nothing back. The goal is letting nothing and nobody get in the way of our worship, whether circumstances, other worshippers or church leaders.

The reality, however, is that that we often can’t worship that way in our Sunday morning gatherings. When we’re there, we often (and often appropriately) need to conform to cultural standards of the place. If we were to dance in church like David danced, many church congregations would freak out. Everyone else in the building would focus on us, not on God, and that’s not as it should be.

But we must worship. We must worship in abandon. We must be passionate. We must find a time and a place we can be foolish with. We must find a people we can worship among, who won’t be distracted by our passion, because they’re lost in their own.

We must worship passionately.




A New Apostolic Reformation: On the Government of Apostolic Ministries.

I am privileged to know several young apostles and their apostolic ministries. For the past several years, I’ve been studying apostles and apostolic groups or apostolic ministries, and it’s being an interesting study. It seems that God is raising up more young apostles in this season than any other time in perhaps the past few centuries.

Nearly all of the ministries formed around these new young apostles follow the same governmental pattern: the apostolic leader carries the vision for the group, and is – functionally if not legally – the sole director or elder in the group. (It’s interesting that the ministries of more seasoned apostles do not seem to be limited to this model.)

Actually, this is clearly a biblical model for apostolic government: the ministry of Jesus followed that pattern: one leader (Jesus Himself) carried the vision, and everybody else (the multitudes, the 72, the 12, and even the 3 favorites) both submitted to His leadership and supported His agenda. I’ll comment on the relevance of this model in a moment, but for now, I’m just pointing out that this is the pattern that young apostles fall into: “I have the vision, and every one else gathers around that vision and supports it.” It’s not the only model, but it has been the most common so far among the young apostles I know.

In reality, the New Testament shows us several other models for the government of apostolic groups. Here are some that I’ve identified:

· Team Ministry: The Team of Two. For the majority of his travels, Paul traveled with another apostle. At first it was the team of “Barnabas and Paul” which before long became “Paul and Barnabas”. Later, Paul traveled with Silas and Barnabas traveled with John Mark after their famous argument. The point is that these ministries were led not by an apostle, but by two apostles working together, a model still virtually unheard of among today’s young apostolic ministries.

· Team Ministry: Apostles and Others. Nearly every epistle in the NT begins and/or ends with greetings from a variety of people who traveled with Paul. When Peter brought the gospel to the gentiles, he traveled with a group. In fact, most of the journeys in the Book of Acts are written in the first person: “When we did thus and such….” Author and doctor Luke was part of the traveling team. I notice that the team model was often led by two apostles working together. This team model of apostolic ministry is not completely foreign among the ministries of modern young apostles; it’s exciting to see young apostles today raising up others, taking others (both younger and older) with them as partners in ministry.

· The Apostolic Council: Jerusalem. Described in Acts 15, and led by the apostle James. Apparently, this group worked by consensus – at the least they discussed things quite a bit before they arrived at a community decision of some sort. There was a leader of this council (James), though the biblical record suggests that he was perhaps more facilitator and spokesperson than leader over the council; I observe that he doesn’t even speak until everybody else was through talking (Luke called it “much dispute”), and his declaration was clearly based on the testimony of Paul and Barnabas rather than his own thoughts. The rest of the group were not merely followers and supporters of James’ ministry, but were a council of “apostles and elders”. I’m waiting for the 21st century institution of the apostolic council, though it appears Peter Wagner is already working that direction.

· Solo Apostolic Ministry: Apollos. It seems that much of the ministry of Apollos was solo; he appeared to generally travel alone. He’s not always recognized as an apostle, and his fruitfulness isn’t as well documented in the NT as apostles using other models: I’m not sure this is a model to emulate.

· The Apostle and Prophet: A model that is not uncommon today is an apostle teamed with a prophet; I can’t find a NT example of this team – though I note that the apostles Barnabas and Paul were called out to be apostles from a group of “teachers and prophets” – however the model is supportable by teaching in Ephesians and other places. Often, the apostle-and-prophet combination today shows up in married couples, but not often when leading a team of other anointed ministries. (Bethel Church, in Redding is one exception, though they don’t talk about it.)

· The Apostolic Father: Sometimes, we see the apostle as a father. If you read any of John’s epistles, you can hear the fatherly tone of his ministry. I don’t often see this in young apostles; though the “fathering” is often a part of their ministries, often it seems to come from other members of their leadership teams.

· The Apostle and his Disciples: As mentioned before, this was the model of Jesus and the boys: Jesus set the agenda and the pace, and the boys tagged along; they were followers and servants. If they agreed with Him, they were affirmed; if they disagreed with him, they were corrected, but they were not invited to lead. For the record, Jesus functionally repudiated this model at the end of His ministry: He promoted them from servants to friends, and then He submitted His will to theirs and committed Himself to – at least in a measure – to following their decisions in matters of the Kingdom. (Yes, I know: Jesus never abdicated His role as Son of God, but He did elevate the boys out of their servant role to partnership; face it: until His death, Jesus was the only Christian on the planet.)

I understand that the current movement (which some are calling a New Apostolic Reformation) is young and therefore is not yet mature. I’m expecting that as the movement matures, we’ll begin to see more of these 20-something and 30-something apostles making use of more of these models, and no doubt developing new ones beyond these. That will be an exciting day: as the new generation of apostles begins to walk in maturity.

The Failure of Christian Street Festivals

I recently attended a major Christian street festival.
I was embarrassed.
Don’t get me wrong, it was well produced; it wasn’t a two-bit “guy on a soapbox” preacher with a cheesy “sound on a stick” PA. These folks had very good bands on a real stage with a professional sound system and it really sounded good. The administration was tight: the right supplies and the right people were in the right places at the right time. It was a well done event.
Christians often get that one wrong in street festivals: we often look stupid because we can’t handle the simple tools of a basic public event. When we’re in the public eye, when we’re speaking to the community at large, we need to use the vocabulary and the technology that speaks to the community, and we need to use those tools with a basic level of competence that they can respect. It doesn’t do to speak Swahili when talking to Vietnamese neighbors, now does it?
This festival got the technology right, and that was a nice change. But they got the festival completely wrong.
Let me describe it this way: Sometimes when I have a day off, I like to relax, and sometimes “relaxing” means lying on the couch in my boxer shorts and a worn out t-shirt eating nachos and reading a paperback novel with an unshaven face. Or I may wear my grubbies, and my closest friends or my family are welcome to come to the house and hang out with me; we’ll eat chips and slurp Pepsi and talk about the game in our grubby clothes. In the privacy of my own home and with family or close friends, it’s appropriate to hang around in clothes that we wouldn’t generally wear out in society.
But when I’m going out in public (to go to the mall, to work, to a restaurant…), I try to remember to put on decent clothes. I don’t particularly like to dress up, so I may wear Levis and a t-shirt without holes, or if my bride and I am doing something together, I’ll probably wear a button-up shirt with Dockers, and real shoes. I really don’t feel comfortable in public in my skivvies; in fact, if I showed up in the grocery store in my boxers, I’d embarrass both myself and anyone who saw me.
But that’s exactly what most Christian festivals do. We the church are in public, but we’re dressed for the casual environment of our homes. We’re in public in our skivvies.
What do I mean?
The bands that come out of our churches pretty much always play worship music; that’s all they (we) know. The world doesn’t “get” worship music. That’s for ourselves in privacy, not for public display. In fact worship is supposed to be all about intimacy, and intimacy doesn’t really belong in public.
Often enough, we have “intercessors” scattered around the park or plaza where we are. I don’t know how to say this any way but blunt: intercessors are weird. They accomplish miracles, and I’ll be the first in line to ask these weird brethren and sisteren to slap hands on me and pray, but that will be in private, away from the public eye! Come on, have at it, but do it in private! Waving our hands and yelling weird stuff to an invisible God is going to get in the way of anyone outside the cultural clique of the Pentecostal church.
Worst of all, when we speak to the crowds – when we do that thing we call “preaching the gospel” –we’re speaking in a whole other language. We shout about being “washed in the blood” and “repenting” and “worship.” Even people who deplore “Christianese” very often use it when they preach; I suppose it’s nerves. We’re communicating the most valuable information in the universe, and we might as well be speaking Swahili. I can’t help but think that it’s a complete waste of time. No, it’s worse: it confirms the world’s judgment of the Church: we’re out of touch, we’re an irrelevant culture, like Mennonites or Hasidic Jews: meaningful only to ourselves. We assure them that there’s no reason to listen to the Church.
Our public gatherings are increasingly irrelevant to a world that is growing more distant from their Christian roots. It reminds me of fat guys in their tighty-whities in the grocery store: Ewww! I did not want to see that!
On the other hand, I can see two different kinds of public gatherings that could have real legitimacy:
The first is where we the church get together to do church business, and we acknowledge publicly that we’re not even attempting to talk to the people on the outside. Maybe we need to repent for something, or make prophetic declarations or whatever. That’s fine as long as we acknowledge that this is something private: “You’re welcome to watch if you want, but this isn’t about you; this is about us.” That, from my perspective, is occasionally appropriate. It’s like newlyweds kissing in public: if you stop and watch, it might be embarrassing, but we understand that newlyweds do that kind of stuff, and it’s OK.
On the other hand, if we’re going to try to communicate with the world, we need to speak in their language. Worship probably isn’t the right music; we need to learn how to sing about joy or friendship or love and maybe include stuff about how God thinks about us, and we need good musicians. We need to sing to the people, which is exactly opposite of a worship service where we’re trying to lead their singing to a God they may not [yet] know.
By all means, have intercessors at the street festival! But if they can’t act “normal” (defined as “not drawing attention to themselves”), then keep them in a dark room, out of the public eye. Open the door every once in a while and throw in fresh meat to keep them going, but don’t show them to a world we’re trying to communicate to; they won’t understand, and they don’t need to.
And for Heaven’s sake, please can we learn to speak English? The drunks passing the bottle on the other side of the meadow don’t understand “the blood” or “the Lord told me” or “get saved.” We’re speaking Cantonese among people who only understand French.
I am not, by the way, trying to dismiss power evangelism. I understand that people who experience the power of God are far more likely to listen to an explanation – in English – of why they’re suddenly shaking or why their back doesn’t hurt for the first time in years. But do it in a way that works for them, not for you.
Yeah, there are the odd exceptions, when God clearly directs. He told Ezekiel to wander around nude for a year and more: God’s as weird as His intercessors sometimes. But let’s not do the naked thing – literally or metaphorically – unless He clearly instructs us to. Gets a mite drafty in the winter.
This festival that provoked this rant broke almost every rule: the worship was great for the members of the Christian clique; the intercessors moaned and shook and shouted; the prayers prayed from the stage were thick with frightening shrieks and shouts and the brief “gospel message” was indecipherable, except to the “blood bought Saints of the Lamb, hallelujah, bless God!” If this had been behind closed doors, it would have been a fun time. For the blood-bought believers anyway
One old guy watching from the trees summed it up pretty well as he set his joint down long enough to put on headphones to drown out the preacher: “Are you with these wacko’s? I just don’t get why they’re here wrecking our park like this!”
And that’s all we did. We were in public in our underwear, talking to the passers by in our own made-up language. The onlookers saw and were embarrassed for us.
I wept for the loss of another opportunity to speak to the community.

Friday

Covenant And Control

The Bible is full of examples of covenants: 314 times in one translation. In fact, the Book itself is divided into two Covenants, and the two Testaments that describe them: Old and New.

In the church today, we use the term “covenant” sometimes (in some circles more than others) to describe our relationship between individuals, and between individual congregants and the congregation of which they are members.

Covenant is an agreement, at a heart level, to walk together. Biblical covenants are divided into a small handful of standard models: a marriage covenant, various covenants between God & His people, covenants between a king and his people, and specific covenants for a specific task. Biblically, covenant exists primarily between God and man, or between man and man.

In fact, the only place where an individual makes a covenant with a group is for rulership (anointing a king), and that does not have a NT parallel.

So when I join myself with a congregation, I can make a covenant with them according to one of these models; I can submit myself to their pastor to rule me as a king (probably inappropriate in the days of “the New Covenant”), or I can forge a covenant with individuals in the congregation (including the pastor), but there doesn’t seem to be any Biblical model for a covenant between me and a congregation, between an individual and an organization or a group. On the other hand, apart from the “church of the city,” the individual congregation is not a Biblical concept, so it makes sense that there is not a Biblical model for a covenant with a less-than-Biblical concept of a congregation.

In some ways, we treat our churches like we treat our favorite sports teams: we want ours to be “better” than the others, and we are offended to one degree or another when someone leaves our workplace, our favorite team, our church, to join with another “team” across town (or in the case of pro sports, across the country). We whine about free agency in pro sports because it encourages players to leave “my team” to join another team that more aligns with their goals (usually financial goals). When someone leaves my church to join another one, we talk behind their back. I know one church: when one family left his church to join with another, the pastor of the church they were leaving called up the pastor of the church they went to and demanded to know why he allowed that to happen!

We apparently feel we own them. Honestly, while I feel some sense of ownership towards the Seattle Seahawks, I don’t really own them. When they traded Percy Hawkins away a few months ago, some of us took that personally and indignantly. And that attitude is encouraged by sports pages and by the NFL, but the reality is that I’m not even a part owner: the owner continues to be billionaire Paul Allen, and he doesn’t answer to me! The real issue – if I’m a Seahawks fan – is that I miss his receptions, and that will be true whether I’m a Seahawks’ fan or the head coach.

My friend, and covenant partner, Todd recently explained to several of us in our church that he has been feeling God’s call to Mike’s church on the other end of town. I will really miss him: he’s come to mean a lot to me, and I have loved watching God work in Todd’s life. But I don’t have any more right to hold on to Todd than I do to Percy Hawkins: I’m not the owner or master of either, and that’s true whether I’m just another “member” or the “head coach.” God is Todd’s owner, and if He’s really calling Todd to cross pollinate with Mike’s church, then I am responsible to be excited for both of them!

We’ve developed this mentality that “my church” has some level of ownership of me: that if I leave this congregation for that congregation, somehow I’m being disloyal, to which, I say, “Balderdash!”

Sure, it’s possible that someone leaving my church is flaking on God and on me, that he’s just decided to forget his friends and become self-centered and find something that makes him feel happier. People change churches for those reasons and others all the time in this town, but those don’t count: these “shuffling sheep” probably weren’t ever “a part of” in their past church, and they won’t be significant contributors in the new one; don’t worry about them.

One day, God may bring Todd back to “my” church. But ultimately, God is the one who said “I will build My Church and the gates of hell will not stand against it.” Todd’s trade may have been orchestrated for Todd’s good, or for Mike’s, or for the good of others in that congregation; He probably does not orchestrate Todd’s life for my convenience.

There are two issues here: covenant and control. If I’m in a covenant relationship with Todd, then it doesn’t matter if he’s attending this church, or the one across town: we have a commitment to each other that transcends issues like “this makes me feel better.” But if I try to control Todd’s choices – whether I’m his pastor or just another member of the congregation – then I’ve moved out of covenant relationship into a controlling relationship, and that would be a serious problem.