Every now and then I have a conversation – face-to-face, by e-mail, or by phone – with individuals who have been in “Church Leadership” (perhaps for many years), but who have now left the Institutional Church, out of a positive conviction that that is not God’s “way ahead” for them. Sometimes, however, in such conversations, I sense what I would describe as “a tinge of regret – for lost opportunities”. These good people have once had some kind of specific teaching
Over the seventeen years since I first started to write about the possibility of a viable Christian lifestyle outside the Organised Church, I have been asked many questions, both by fellow “outsiders”, and by earnest churchgoers. Among those that have come from churchgoers, there is one line of questioning that has been more frequent than any other. It goes something like this…
All through my Christian life – both when I was part of the Organised Church, and now that I am operating outside the Institution – I have been hearing this heartfelt cry. It comes almost exclusively from three groups of people. Firstly there are working people who have become very pressurized by the demands of their jobs. Secondly, there are the mothers of young children, who find family duties pretty all-consuming. Finally, there are senior citizens, who have ever-decreasing energy, and often have a selection of ‘aches and pains’ that hinder them from doing as… read more →
WHO, EXACTLY, IS THIS LONG (BUT IMPORTANT) ARTICLE FOR? A cry that has been reaching my ears over the past few months, from a number of different directions, is a cry of alone-ness from many individuals and couples who would now call themselves ‘recruits of the Replacement Army’. An encouraging number of people are saying to me that they accept the general line of teaching in my recent book, but they long to be part of a group of believers who think and act along roughly the same lines.
The Worthy Desire To “Rise Above The Ordinary” as a Christian.
There is a sense in which my book, “The Remarkable Replacement Army”, sets out to discover a biblical lifestyle, for the years ahead, that would be within the reach of ‘ordinary’ Christians. In days gone-by I often used to feel that many Christian preachers and writers were aiming at turning us all into people like the Apostle Paul – ‘super-heroes’ of the Faith – which I felt was somewhat unrealistic…
