Developing Revelation

How do I know that God hasn't given a word to one of these pastors to renovate His church and establish a new way of worshiping? 

Quite simply, I don't. 

The idea that we're talking about here is the idea of "developing revelation" - the notion that God speaks to His people in seasons in and effort to develop across time the gloriousness of His plan in the world. This is how we got to the church in the first place - by tracking God's developing revelation all the way from "in the beginning" through Egypt to the tabernacle in the wilderness to the Temple in Jerusalem to exile and all the way to the Roman Empire, where Jesus revealed the church to us as God's design for His people under grace. Without developing revelation, without everything that came before it, we would have no way of understanding Jesus or the church. That's just how God works.

Then sometime, many many many years after Jesus, a bunch of religious professionals got together and decided that God was done speaking to His people and that nothing new was going to come from His mouth. Revelation, they said, was closed. 

Now, I'm not so sure about that. I don't think that a God who has spoken to His people in every culture and every historical era across time suddenly just stops and forces everyone to figure out what His Word to a people under Roman rule has to say to us in a world of smartphones and automatic weapons. I think He's still speaking to us, giving us a message that makes sense. If that weren't true, we wouldn't have so many Christian living books being published telling us what God wants us to know about our lives today. 

But the standard for new revelation has got to be high. If we are a people who believe that God's entire history was leading us to Jesus, then anything that we claim that changes a single thing about Jesus has an extremely high burden of proof. 

That includes changing the nature of the church. 

If Jesus Himself told us about the church and built it, if He's the one who established it, if He's the one who spent His life and ministry telling us how things work in the community of God and calling us to go make disciples and to love one another, then anyone claiming that the church is not that important or that Jesus doesn't love His church has to prove that that's God talking and not them. 

So far, none of them have. 

Listen, we already have in Revelation the way that God responds to a broken church. Seven of them, actually. We have already seen how God responds to the model that is carried out fallibly by broken persons in a fallen world. Not once does God say, "Wow. This church thing was a bad idea." Not once does He say, "Man, you guys are getting this so wrong that I'm going to have to rethink My plan." No, what He keeps saying is, "You aren't perfect, but keep loving Me, and I will keep perfecting you." "You're doing some things well, but there's some stuff you still need to work on." And He keeps repeating His call to love one another, to never stop meeting together, to not neglect the community of the church. 

And if God, seeing how broken the church can be, still thinks the church is the plan, then the church is the plan, period. No matter how chic it may be to start proclaiming otherwise. 

And as much as these pastors who spend their ministry tearing down the church try to tell you that they're just like Jesus, that you can find their kind of ministry all through the pages of the Bible, they're half-right. You can. 

But it's not where they claim it is. 

Disestablishing the Church

The conversation here gets a little muddier the deeper that we get into it. Yes, it's true that Jesus spent a great deal of time tearing down the religious structures of His day, the Temple culture that the Jews had lived since all the way back in Exodus when they built the first tabernacle. We could argue, perhaps, that it went even further back than that - all the way to Abraham and the sacrifice on the mountain. 

But the reason that Jesus did this was because He came to institute a better way of worship. He came to put into practice God's plan for His people. He came to fulfill the promise that rid them of the need for that Temple worship in the first place. He came to reconcile the world to God and establish the church as God intended it. 

He even said as much - I will tear down this Temple and restore it in three days. In other words, He's turning all of this to rubble to make it better - more glorious, more full, more wondrous, more holy. 

Now, here's where it gets a little trickier to keep talking like this: these activist pastors who seem to have it out for the church, these guys who tell you that they are just like Jesus...say the exact same thing. 

They claim that the church is failing, that it's not what God intended it to be, that God has something better for His people, that He is calling us to new ways of worship. They make the same claims against the church that Jesus made against the Temple, and they tell us that this is God's will. That God Himself has something better for us than the church. All we have to do is build it. 

At this point, you might be thinking they are right. You might be thinking they have a point. The church is, in fact, a broken institution, primarily because it is made up of fallen men and women. Who wouldn't want a more perfect assembly? Who wouldn't want to find a way to do it better?

But the line here is very thin. Because when Jesus established the church, He said not even the gates of Hell would overcome it. When Jesus established the church, He said this is the way that we're supposed to do it. When the New Testament tells us about the church, it tells us about a broken body of fallen men and women who have things to work out, but it never says that the church itself was a bad idea or that God is disappointed in it. 

To say that the church is not what God wants from us is to say that you have a better idea than Jesus did. It's to say that you have a better Promise than Jesus did. It's to say that Jesus got it wrong in building the church. 

It's to say that the entire testimony of the New Testament - from the Gospels where Jesus establishes the church through Peter, through the letters where Paul encourages the broken church, to Revelation where God writes letters to His broken churches (letters that are full of love) - is somehow wrong. Or outdated. Or broken. Or something. 

It's to say that the thing that God was doing from the very beginning of the world, the thing that Jesus accomplished in His life and ministry, isn't the plan. 

Do you see why that's a problem?  

Sounds Like Jesus

When we talk about Jesus who possibly doesn't love His church, the trouble is that there's a way to preach that message and make it sound absolutely legitimate. 

For example, most pastors who want to preach this sort of message take this spin on it: "Jesus came to tear down the religious structures of His day." And that much is true. You can build an entire sermon series around Jesus's confrontations with the Pharisees, His talk about the Temple, His expansion of the law. It seems like at every turn, Jesus was very much against the way that the faithful people of God had done religion for the preceding several thousand years. 

And the message that Jesus preached about the established religion of Israel is the same message that these pastors preach about the church - it isn't holistic enough. It doesn't go far enough. It doesn't have its emphases in the right places. In fact, a lot of these guys just take Jesus's words about the Temple and make them about the church. 

And...it sounds like Jesus. 

It sounds like Jesus because it is Jesus. It's His words, His attitudes, His emphases. You hear a sermon like this, and if you don't understand what's happening, then you're sitting in the pews going, "Whoa. We need to be changing a lot of things about our church!" 

Then, these pastors swoop in and tell you all of the things that you need to be changing about your church, about the way you worship, about the programs you put together, about the responsibilities you take on, about...whatever. 

But something very subtle has happened in between, something that most churchgoers (or followers on Twitter or listeners of podcasts or whoever) don't even notice: between telling you how much Jesus doesn't like the church and telling you what you're supposed to be doing better, almost every single one of these pastors stops talking about Jesus.

Once they've used Him to introduce the concept of tearing down the church, they stop talking about Him. When they've moved on to what the church is supposed to look like, listen - you'll realize they're suddenly telling you what they think. If they're name-dropping Jesus at all, the content has shifted, and it's no longer what He said at all...but most persons don't realize this because the front end was so loaded with authentic Jesus that if you even hear the name, you automatically assume the back end is just as authentic. 

It's deception at its finest, and it's extremely effective. The trouble is, of course, that it is not very much Christian at all. It's not Christ-centered, and it's certainly not Christ-like (ironic, since these are the guys who are most likely to repeatedly tell you how much like Jesus they are). Using the authority of the first half of the message, they depend upon that authority carrying through to their own part of it, and most of the time, this absolutely works. This is how we end up with entire congregations preaching this shadow Jesus who hates His church and wants it to look more like them. This is how we end up with comment sections full of agreements with activist pastors and absolute hatred for anyone who thinks differently. This is how these messages take root. 

Wait, though - if this is really the message that Jesus preached, shouldn't it be the message we're preaching? Don't we have an obligation, as faithful Christians, to carry on His Word, even if we don't particularly like it? 

Don't be fooled - this was His Word, but it is not any longer. There are some major fundamental differences between the ways that Jesus preached this message and the way pastors are doing it today. We'll look at some of that in the coming days. 

Unloving the Church

When we point out that activist pastors are prone to attack the church, we have to be very clear about what we're saying, lest anyone get the wrong idea. 

The church is not above reproach. She is not perfect. She is not even close. She is full of sinners and backsliders. She does some things well, and she gets some things wrong. If we look at the letters to the churches in Revelation, we see that this has always been the case - God Himself even recognizes this. 

Because of this, two things are true: first, we should not preach a Christianity that never calls out the church for her shortcomings. Our aim is always to get better at doing what God has called us to do, and that requires being honest about who we are. Second, we should not assume that every pastor who calls out the church is an activist pastor. Many, many pastors over many, many generations have called out the church out of a deep love for her and a desire to see her be authentically more like Jesus. 

Where we have to be very aware of what's going on is when we are dealing with activist pastors, and here's how you know: 

Activist pastors tend to preach a message in which even Jesus doesn't love His church. In which Jesus is disappointed with us and condemns us for the way we're doing church. In which church seems to be the biggest problem with Christianity. In which the church can do no right. 

(On that note, though, a bigger hallmark of an activist pastor is that any church that is not his church can do no right. He's usually very good at claiming that his church is doing all the things that no other church is doing and that every church should be doing and thus, his church should be the church that everyone should try to model and look up to. Do you see how this fits in with his narrative of building a platform for himself? He puts his church on display not only to show you how wrong you're getting it, but to convince you of how right he's getting it. It all feeds into his need to convince you that he looks very much like Jesus so that he can pick the fights he's picking and preach the messages he's preaching that actually testify otherwise.) 

The number of Christians who are disappointed in the church right now is staggering. I'm telling you - it's staggering. The number of Christians who believe the church is broken and that not even Jesus loves the church, let alone likes it, is flabbergasting. And it's not because today's church is fundamentally different than churches in the past, no matter how much some of these voices try to tell you that's true (any even coarse reading of church history will tell you it's not); it's because of these activist pastors who have built their platforms on tearing the church down in order to build themselves up, all while claiming a Christ-like humility and preaching a message that affirms that. 

It's because when you look for pastors on a social media platform, these guys are the first ones to pop up. They are the ones making the most content. They are the ones getting the most hits. They are the ones who seem like the ones you ought to be following. And then you get sucked in, and if you don't have a solid understanding of who Jesus historically and biblically was, they start very quickly and easily to shape your view of Him. 

And now, we have a Christianity that's being torn down from the inside under this big banner that announces that this was God's plan all along, that this is what Jesus would want. But remember what Jesus said? He said not even the gates of Hell would shake His church. 

So why are we letting pastors do it? 

(We'll continue this conversation into at least part of next week because as I wrote that last paragraph, I realized there was something very important that I still want to say. Something that we have to understand in this context. So stick with us.) 

Far from Home

How does an activist pastor get away with preaching a Jesus who is so un-Christlike? 

There are two primary ways. 

First, we have to recognize that pastors have a measure of authority. And when someone has authority, we assume that someone has learning. And when we assume that someone has learning, we assume that person knows more than us, so we trust that person to teach us. This is, truly, what ends up getting most of these activist pastors in trouble eventually - they rest so heavily on the authority that they have by virtue of their position that it comes their downfall. 

But in the meantime, they enjoy that measure of authority that lets them essentially preach whatever they want to, appeal to their own authority, and convince the masses that they must be right. They must know what they're talking about. After all, they're the pastor. 

So what happens then is that we have entire groups of persons who buy into what their pastor is saying and buy into it so wholeheartedly that they start repeating it, then the voices claiming that Jesus really is just like this grow. And a whole army of militant Christians who have adopted their activist pastor's pet project is unleashed upon the world. 

All you have to do is look at the comment section of any of the radical, non-Jesus-like claims these radical pastors are making, and you can see how it happens. They are filled with "amen" and "you preach it, brother" and "when will the world understand?" (That last one is really scary because it means that person has so thoroughly adopted the pastor's activism that the whole world is backward and wrong and lost and damned.) (Not, of course, that our world is not lost and getting some things wrong - that, of course, is the heart of the Gospel, but this is different.) 

The second way that pastors are able to continue to preach this kind of non-Christlike activism is even more pernicious: they get away with it because it sounds so much like the message of the world. 

These pastors adopt positions that are very worldly positions. They are hot-button issues, things the whole world is talking about. Things the world is even condemning Christianity for (which is why so many activist pastors build a platform on condemning the church). And we know that the more you hear a message, the more likely you are to believe that that message is the truth. So if you're hearing a message from the world, and your pastor then preaches it from the pulpit, then by gosh, it must be true. 

So these pastors are using your predisposition to believe the things you hear over and over again to make sure you're hearing their platform over and over again, and what better way to do that than to adopt a platform that you're already hearing?

This is how we end up with such a worldly Jesus being preached in our churches. This is how we end up with congregations that are very world-affirming, whose starting point seems to be that the world is getting it right and the church is getting it wrong. We see this all the time, don't we? And then we start to slowly question the church instead of the questioning the world, and from there, it's not hard to climb fully on board with this kind of platform. The world is saying it. The pastor is saying. Not long after, the church starts to say it. And all of a sudden, we have a Jesus who is no longer building His church, but condemning it. And that's the Jesus these activist pastors end up preaching. 

How far from the Gospel we have fallen! And it happens just like that.