Is the Church Ready to Be the Church? [Part One]

When this year began, I shared some thoughts regarding what I believe this year and this decade signified. I stated how I believed it to be a year for God’s people to become “voice activated”, as this decade, from a Hebraic perspective represents the mouth, that which is spoken, declared, decreed, uttered, or heralded. I mentioned how 2020 was to be a year for the apostles, prophets, builders, and pioneers. I also have spent a considerable amount of time sharing how we are shifting into an age of distinction. Yet, in all that I have spoken about, we are embarking upon a period of transition as a church in a nation that is also in transition.

This plague that has been unleashed has become a moment in time where many people are waking up to things that previously, many chose to remain blind to, while others were blindsided by. It is almost like the days of Pearl Harbor when it was feared that its bombing had “awakened the sleeping giant.”  Many in the nation and the Church are awakening to just how fast civil liberties can be lost and just how easily they are given up for the sake of a perceived danger or threat. 

This threat, perceived or real has had dramatic implication for a nation that prides itself on being “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” A place where Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness have been etched into the very founding documents of this nation, how is it that we could so easily have forsaken the liberties afforded in the Bill of Rights? The very words in the Declaration of Independence are as follows: 

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

This Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in whole is the very document that lays out the “unalienable rights” of “the people” who have consented to live free and to resist any form of government that becomes destructive of the rights of the people. However, it seems that the Church has shuttered to dare to resist. This is odd in a nation which was founded upon Judaeo-Christian principles and doctrines. 

All throughout the New Testament, we find that the Church, as Jesus established it, was to be counter cultural. Jesus said to Peter that upon his confession that Jesus was Christ, that this would be the foundation upon which his Church (Ekklesia) would be built and the gates of hell would not be able to prevail against it (Matthew 16:18). Yet, we are finding that here in this day a season in which the gates of hell are pressing against the Church and the Church seems complicit to let it happen.

As the Church in America and around the world wakes up to just how easily the freedoms of religion, assembly, and speech can be stripped from them, a strategy for ensuring them must be implemented by a Church that will be the counter culture power that was show in the Acts of the Apostles, where it was said, these are the ones “who have turned the world upside down (Acts 17:6)”!

You’ll hear many pastors and leaders who have national platforms quoting scriptures about abiding by the laws of the land and having respect for those in authority, and we should. Yet, these same ones seem to ignore what scripture says about our responsibility as an Ekklesia or representatives of God’s governing body in the earth. If God’s rule supersedes man’s, and if the “governments shall be upon His shoulders (Isaiah 9:6), why is the Church responding with silence? It’s not just because of the calls for social distancing and the push to wear masks.

If this is truly the age of distinction, the year of the mouth, or the decade of difference as Hank Kunneman has called it, then the Church cannot act as a toothless lion stripped of its roar. The Church must be prepared to take its place as the counter culture world changer that is has preached. It won’t be comfortable and the Church cannot rest in thinking that things will work out fine on its own or that we can simply wait on God to work it out. God is waiting on the Church to rise up and be the Church. Is the Church mature enough to unify and resolve to fight? I pray that she is.