Over the past 15 years or so, the central core of my ministry calling has been on the Internet. While it did get off to a rough start, here we are after those many years with a viable virtual parish. This parish has been my primary calling from God.
That will change. The convictions of my heart tell me that this virtual parish will take a back seat to something else soon. Indeed, I have a vision telling me that there will be a meat-space community of faith that will become my central pastoral burden. That same vision indicates that some of you will soon be involved in new heart-led communities of your own. That was the thrust of yesterday’s post: My teaching has been aimed at preparing some of you to get involved in starting a covenant body where you live in meat-space. I’ve had a prophetic vision telling me that the context of our daily lives will be changing as social and political changes come in fairly rapid order very soon, and those changes will manifest in souls ready for harvest.
Granted, for some of you, this virtual parish may continue to be all you have for heart-led fellowship. You won’t be neglected; you can always get hold of me personally via email, phone and text messages. I’ll still be your elder and acting pastor. However, the amount of time I devote to this blog will reduce. That will change the frequency and length of my posts. There’s no way to avoid that.
But the legacy of what I’ve already written here should still be available. God alone knows how, but I look back over the things I’ve posted and it seems I’ve reached a strong level of consistency. I suppose it won’t ever be complete, but the teaching seems to have come together into it’s own form of logic based on moral discernment of the heart. When people poke at it by asking questions, I have no trouble seeing how it all fits together like a living thing in its own right.
That’s what your religion should be. It needs to live, to form a driving force that stands when you fall. It’s your living covenant with Christ. It has to be wholly your own or it’s not worth sharing. You can’t carry around my religion as a proxy, because it becomes an excuse not to know Christ personally inside your heart. But you can refer to my religion as an example of how to approach Him.
In a private exchange with Brother Jay, I noted that the library of the Ancient Near East (ANE) was actually people. While they had written documentation, their most important records were inside the heads and hearts of people, and the languages of the ANE were structured to preserve and transmit moral narrative. That this was their primary intellectual pursuit. The precise details of the story might vary just a bit between any number of people who witnessed a single event; that’s normal enough. But the same person might feel compelled to tell the story differently in different contexts because what mattered was the moral impact, not the precise details. They did understand facts and precision, but it wasn’t always important in their narratives. Their whole intellectual orientation was on moral significance, not the factual events.
That’s because there was a fundamental assumption that it was utterly impossible to establish historical events with any great precision; they could not have embraced the notion of objective reality. They would snicker at such a juvenile concept.
So if you read the comments attached to my previous post, you’ll discover that I’m not worried about someone somewhere managing to do levitation. Their seemingly unnatural powers don’t change my faith and my mission in Christ. Maybe it was real and maybe it was fake, but it won’t matter. I wasn’t there, and who can say what I might have experienced if I was? What matters is that I know God’s calling and mission on my life. I know what prophecy is for me, and I’ve tried to teach how I do it. Someone somewhere can issue their own conflicting prophetic revelation and it doesn’t bother me. They have to answer to God, but if my heart tells me I can’t use their narrative, then it’s just so much blather. I don’t have to call them liars or crazy; their visions have no bearing on my life.
And none of you are bound by my visions, either. I know what God tells me, and I’m hoping you learn how to hear from Him for yourself. I want you to gain the same faith and confidence to act on what is in your heart.
This is consistent moral logic; it doesn’t have to make sense to intellectual reason. Faith is like that, often directly challenging what your senses and reason can handle. For many of you, the primary core of your training here is finished and you can now graduate on to bigger and better things. What has been posted here is pretty much the limits of what I can offer. Future posts will continue with some prophetic statements and rehashing some of the same teachings from a slightly different angle, but the majority of you should get to work and read here only if/when you have time and inclination.
