If ever there was a time to reflect on what to look out for in a leader within the body of Christ, it is now. If for nothing else but to give us a plumb line by which to measure our response to the noise going on around us.
A name is a very important thing. When a people is taken into captivity, their names are changed… to disconnect them from their identity, their generations and the tools to their prosperity and to connect them to their captors. Changing a name is not a light matter and is indeed a tool of spiritual capture and enslavement…
so what is so important in a name that this was among Gods first instruction to man? See before God put man into the Garden of Eden, he assigned names to the larger foundational elements of His creation; He named a thing and in so doing defined its function for all time. The pattern emerges
The prophet Elijah is known for speaking truth to power. The truth is, that things are not well. The fathers have spat on and cursed their children, the children have run away from home and only come back to destroy and take what they were denied in their youth. And here remember I am talking to every parent, every father in the land, every leader who has had people or a people entrusted to them. Take a break from finger pointing and take a long hard look at yourself. Hard conversations need to be had
Was my coming into this world such a terrible burden and you couldn’t bring yourself to admit it? I get it, there’s a way a man is expected to be… but a child always sees beyond the veil of expectations despite the lack of language to express it.
is that belief system really yours or is it what you found and because you have known nothing else it becomes what you identify with? And what happens when you start asking questions? …men wear their titles without their function they simply have no capacity to Pioneer, reveal, advocate for, establish and instruct people who are young in the faith and they are also less likely to shepherd (lead, feed and protect) people in their pursuit to know and experience Jesus Christ for themselves. Without these functions at work, people fall prey to manipulation by the word of God towards further aggrandizing of men. No wonder then that hard questions are frowned down upon…
I was on a small pathway under the cover of scrubby trees between a block of classes and the library, it was my last year of campus and my last attempt at ending the miserable beating of my heart had just gloriously backfired….
It was the end of what had started like normal day. I was clutching the steering wheel hard as my heart fell in what felt like a bottomless abyss. I wondered for a moment, where my torso had melted to because the beating heart just kept falling and falling and falling all 16 kilometres home….
Scott Stapp, Bono of U2 and even the legendary father of Rock n Roll, Little Richards who once identified as omni-sexual now speak Jesus Love. Let go of trying to be good enough and let him take care of that, you, just as you are wondering when next you can hide in the closet and take a drag of that drug, let go of the struggle, If God can work with Little Richards and Brian Welch (Korn), He can work with you through your struggles…
The conversations about sexual identity and how the church chooses to respond is only one of many we are facing now and more that we shall face in the near future. And the only response I can look to is one that is founded on a Jesus kind of love. The Jesus who started a conversation…