WANTED URGENTLY: A KINGDOM-DRIVEN CHURCH (2)

The Book

“'Imagine that! We are meant to inherit nations. We are responsible not for sanctuaries and Sunday school rooms but for our nations. We are not separate from our nations in God’s sight. We belong to nations. God will hold us responsible for nations. We cannot flee into the church and think our hands will be washed clean of all that happens outside. We are called to the world to restore the kingdom'. - Pastor Sunday Adelaja"

As I have said so many times, in so many words, in this space, the Church needs to re-examine its theology, I am on record as saying that the Church that Jesus Christ built and against which he firmly affirmed the gates of hell will not prevail, is a pro-active one. It is a Church that sets the pace, not one that sheepishly reacts to trends set by the world.

Contemporary history has shown that where the church abandons its light-bearing role and focuses, as somebody has well-meaningly put, on lighting its corner, the world takes over and warps things up. In that situation, the church becomes the “clean-up guy.”  Meaning, when the system messes up the educational system, we abandon it and create our own. When they create mayhem, we organize relief materials for living victims and join in burying and mourning the dead.

But even, as I have been writing about it here, a Nigerian pastor based in Ukraine, Rev Sunday Adelaja has been doing more than write about it, although, write about it, he has, in a book the titled ChurchShift. But he didn’t stop there. Flowing from his experience in that Eastern European, former soviet socialist republic, he has created a ministry taking the message of the kingdom-driven church abroad, including the United States.

In the first part of this serial I pressed him into action as I quoted extensively from the first chapter of his book, ChurchShift, published by Charisma. In this part, I am virtually yielding this space to him as he continues his review of most of the state of the church today. As we saw last week, he characterized the church as either church-focused, or kingdom-driven.

He pointed out that “the Great Commission is not what many of us have understood it to be. We have understood it to be evangelism—bringing people from the world into our church buildings. But the Great Commission mandate is to go out and disciple nations. The focus is not in here, but out there. This was Jesus’s goal in coming to Earth. It is supposed to be our goal as redeemed people.”

Continuing, he wrote: “The Great Commission in Matthew 28:19 says: Go and make disciples of all nations. Jesus did not say, ‘Go and build great churches.’ He did not even say, ‘Go and save individuals.’ He never said, ‘May thy church come on Earth as it is in heaven.’ Neither did He say, ‘Seek ye first the church and all its righteousness. Rather, His heartbeat is for nations to be ruled by kingdom principles. That is the calling of every believer and of every church…

Now, please read on:

“So why has our attention been lavished on personal evangelism and building churches? The problem is our mind-set. We often forget that the kingdom has come. We forget we have been called to rule our promised lands—and to rule nations. We forget about the power we received from Jesus Christ, So our attention is drawn to churches. Building a church seems much more manageable than transforming a nation.

“My own religious background taught me that the kingdom of God was all about heaven, not Earth. I thought kingdom work took place after we die, once we had passed over into the kingdom.

“I misread the Bible and the words of Jesus. I made the kingdom of God all about the future, and so my focus and purpose in life were off course. I was having little impact on the world around me. But because God wanted to do something in Ukraine that was much bigger than our “big church” or me, He graciously taught us to take a proactive position in society, to go outside our building and enforce His authority over an ungodly nation and government.

“Today many people sit in church pews hoping to make it to the kingdom of God, and they don’t realize that, according to Jesus, the kingdom is here and now. Nobody has to die to see the kingdom.

“We are as close as we will ever get. Jesus didn’t leave the kingdom of God in heaven when He came to Earth. He brought it with Him. The born-again believer is in the kingdom at this moment. We can stop hoping for it—it came two thousand years ago, and it is present with us now.

“When we forget that the kingdom is here and now, we shrink from our calling to disciple nations. We want to use the church as our escape hatch from the world’s problems. The battle is certainly fierce, but God is sending Christians not to hide out in, or even build, churches but to have impact in their lives and on the nations of the world. If you are trying only to build a church, your goal is wrong. The promise of God is, “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your inheritance” (Ps. 2:8).

“Imagine that! We are meant to inherit nations. We are responsible not for sanctuaries and Sunday school rooms but for our nations. We are not separate from our nations in God’s sight. We belong to nations. God will hold us responsible for nations. We cannot flee into the church and think our hands will be washed clean of all that happens outside. We are called to the world to restore the kingdom.

“And if there is any nation that is suffering under a godless culture, it’s because Christians have not subdued it with kingdom principles. God did not answer our church’s many prayers to resolve our problem of having a place of worship because He had something bigger in mind—the salvation of the nation, not just providing a new place for us to gather.

“Some people believe that if they work in the nursery or sing in the choir, they are fulfilling their area of ministry. But this is not really ministry. It is merely housekeeping. Your work as a choir member, nursery volunteer, or usher is what we all must do to keep the church functioning, but it is not necessarily fulfilling the Great Commission. The Great Commission happens outside the church.

“Ministry is what you do to bring your life and your sphere of influence under kingdom rule…” (TO BE CONTINUED)