Too Easy?

I know from experience that if I made this religion harder, I’d have far more participation and big donations. We would have facilities and equipment, vehicles and advertising, etc. Keep in mind that I’ve done conventional religious work and I know how to succeed in the mainstream. I also know that God called me away from that kind of success because it wasn’t what He wanted. I’m perfectly willing to do this thing all by myself because I have zero doubts about whether it pleases the Lord.

But part of pleasing Him is that I open the door to share with others. There’s nothing in my hands that can prod you to get involved. If you enjoy reading this stuff and don’t feel the call, I can understand that. But right now there’s less than a dozen active participants who are wallowing in the blessings of shared faith. It worries me that those of you who should participate and hesitate, are so used to the Anglo-American cultural blindness that it just hasn’t hit you how critical it is.

The one thing I can offer is this vision: We are building a close-knit tribe, a covenant community of faith. In accordance with God’s Word, it is a feudal covenant tribe. We are cultivating a high degree of trust and loyalty with each other based on the driving hand of God working in our lives. We expect to be quite different from the rest of the world, a peculiar nation of God. We expect to make an impression even if the world has no clue about us beyond faulty guessing. We will keep it all open to the public, but we cannot open their hearts to the truth so that it comes to life for them.

We believe that God intends to grow us sooner or later, but this is the time to get in on the ground floor. We really need to settle in some elders scattered around the country (or around the world, for that matter), because there is no way I or anyone else can help more than just a few folks at a time. This is a good time to put your hand to plow and train up, because there will be an opening of floodgates. Once tribulation begins in earnest, there will be folks looking for what we have, because they won’t have much else they can trust. Even if it’s just a handful here and there in some few towns and cities, that is thousands.

This series on pastoral psychology is the start of building a curriculum. I’m also praying about a prophet’s academy. Eldership is something you have to learn hands-on, and apprenticeship is about the best we can offer on that. It has to be individually tailored and one-on-one. But general questions about faith and how to do religion is something we can gather into an outline for broader distribution. And if you feel called to the priesthood, you’ll be forging into new territory entirely, because we have none right now. And I’m hardly the only expert on much of anything, just the guy who managed to get something started. My role is apostolic in nature, but I don’t want anyone calling me by that title.

Let me ask you to pray about it. We still need a lot of folks simply involved and living truth on their own terms. But “involved” right now means joining our forum and just getting to know the rest of us. That’s the “tight knit” part of being a covenant tribe. We are the folks who will be here to support you when you start to get swamped by this tribulation stuff. I can’t set any dates for you, but it’s right on top of us. It will save you and everyone near you much sorrow if you were already standing firm as a witness of sanity.