The Body Life

I titled this the "Body Life" to contrast it to the traditional church or home meeting. Christians get fixated on meetings – the where, when and how. They can see how the home meeting can be intimate and participatory but can’t imagine how it would work in a larger meeting.

I would not have believed it if I hadn’t experienced it for a number of years – meetings with upwards of 200 or 300 people or more in a large hall that was totally unscripted because the Holy Spirit was in control. There was no "order of worship". Anyone could begin by a prayer, a song, a testimony. Very often the Holy Spirit led us corporately in a single theme. Anyone was free to participate at any time. There was no chaos. There was order. The chairs were in a circle. There was no podium. There were elders but they were not visible or obvious. If something got off track, they would bring it back, but they were truly there to facilitate rather than dominate. The spirit and attitude everyone had was to follow the leading of the Holy Spirit, to sense what to do when – whether to pick a song, read from the Bible, pray, praise, testify or teach. Most understood that they were there to glorify God and to share what the Lord had done in our lives that week. The meetings were fresh and often glorious.

This is not to say we didn’t have some bad meetings, people sharing inappropriately, etc. but that’s what leadership is all about. When someone goes off track or just plain "off the wall", the mature saints need to be sensitive to the Lord and bring it back into the flow of the Spirit. This is not heavy handed or dictatorial. The meeting is still in the hands of all the saints who are free to share a hymn, a psalm, a testimony, pray, etc.

So what can the pastor do who wants to turn his church around from the dead one man show to a living body? The pastor may tell people, "okay, folks, I’m going to shut up for the next month. I’m just here to encourage you." Function follows form. Take away the pulpit. Put the chairs in a circle. Begin to announce a couple of weeks before hand the reason for the change and how it will work, emphasizing the need for all to have fresh experiences and light from the Lord to share. Encourage them to be sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit as to which song to pick, when and what to share. Keep prayers and testimonies "short, quick, real and fresh" (as we used to say). If someone drones on for a while without much real to say, it will kill the meeting and interrupt the Spirit’s flow.

Christians grow when they let the life of Jesus they have experienced flow out to others. This can happen in large meetings or small. It may take a little time and prodding to get people used to the idea, but it can be done.

Most of these meetings fall flat on their face. Why? A "body life" meeting is only as good as our walk with the Lord. If we are living in the past, living off of experiences we had last month or ten years ago, we are going to be in for a rude awakening. It may sound trite to say that we need to "have a fresh experience of Christ" daily, but it is true. Many people can tell old "war stories" for hours on end, how the Lord did this or that for them years ago. But what counts is what the Lord did in my life today, this week - not last year or 30 years ago. An interesting thing about a body life meeting is that there is no place to hide. You are exposed. If your experience is stale, your sharing will smell like a stale ash tray to you and others the minute you open your mouth.

Why do we end up with big meetings and professional speakers? In the traditional service, there is nothing to do, nothing to prepare for. It takes the heat off. We can hide and don't have to deal with our shallowness and lack of reality.

• Unless we can get to the point where we can be honest about where we are spiritually...

• Unless we can get to the point where we can really touch the Lord regularly in prayer and in the Word...

• Unless we get to the point where each and everyone of us can have fresh daily experiences with the Lord, fresh revelation of our own, rather than someone else's, our meetings are bound to be pitiful because they reflect our poor walk with the Lord.

This is foreign to the average Christian, because we are used to being passively entertained. Just the thought of having to share with others is scary to some. I know through years of experience what works and what doesn't. The only way a person will move from knowledge to reality is through the constant loving support of a group of brothers and sisters he/she trusts and knows are there to help rather than condemn. This kind of dynamic can only be achieved in body life meetings. Saints need an opportunity to participate meaningfully in each meeting. It’s the little things - the things you are thankful for, how much the Lord means to you, how He pulled off a little miracle at work, how He let you share Him with someone. Once all the members of the body get released, people finally get the idea.

There is no such thing as a bad meeting or blaming someone else. The meeting depends on me. If the meeting is dead, it's because I had no life to bring to it. What did I contribute? If someone was obviously down and out, how did I help? What can I say? How can I pray for them this week? The best part about an open fellowship is there is no one to blame but me. That's why they work - and don't work.

In a very real sense, there is no "right" or "wrong" way to meet. God doesn't care about methods. He gives us very little instruction on what to do and how to do it. The question is, is the meeting under the guidance of the Holy Spirit? Are there mature leaders who can sense the flow of the Spirit and move with it? Now I am not talking in the sense of something "extra-Biblical", voices, miracles, signs and wonders. I am talking about the ability of a small group of people to let the Spirit of God lead them in prayer, worship, song and testimonies. One will find that there is often an unspoken or unrecognized theme that the Spirit will lead in a meeting and that everything will relate to it - without planning and without an agenda. For example, the Lord may impress us this week with his mercy so the songs, testimonies, scripture and prayer will all relate to that theme.

Think of the Holy Spirit as the conductor of an orchestra and each one of us is an instrument that He plays. He has worked in our lives during the week, ministered to us through His word and through experience, and now we bring that to the meeting and offer it up to the Lord as a "sweet smelling sacrifice unto the Lord." The meeting reflects the fresh moving and working of the Lord in each of our lives.

The Place of Leadership

Leadership is there to sense the moving of the Lord - not to carry out their planned order of business, not to follow an outline or course of study, or even verses that were picked the previous week. Leadership should be there to sense the move of the Lord "real time" as they say in computer jargon. Our relationship with the Lord should be living and powerful, not programmed and planned.

If there is one main reason a small meeting won't work, it is the lack of effective mature leadership. Looking back I can see that when there was mature, directed, visionary leadership, the meetings didn't get too far off track and people matured dramatically. Saints weren't just little birds with their mouths open to be fed. They quickly became foragers, bringing in what they had gleaned during the week so they could feed others. That was the secret to their growth. It is also the reason why the present day church is so atrophied. People come to be fed rather than to feed others.

The goal of leadership should not be to "lead by dominating," or doing everything for everyone so things will be comfortable. The goal of leadership should be to facilitate so others can come forth, mature, share and function. The goal of leadership should be to keep things on track, provide discernment and protection when strangers come in and provide a safe environment for growth. They provide "on the job" training because there is a real opportunity to practice every meeting. I hear pastors say their goal is to train so the people will take over but for some reason this never happens. The training never ends and, even more important, the opportunity is never made available for the average saint to minister to others.

As long as we let the professionals, the gifted and the mature run the show, the less chance the little guy will ever grow up and mature. I will grant you there are things to learn, but we seem to have forgotten that until the last hundred years or so, we got along fine without Bible Schools and Seminaries, commentaries and "how to" books. Today, most people can read. The best training we can have is our Bible, our daily walk with the Lord and the encouragement of one another. We already have among us gifts to the body, every day saints with no formal training: pastors - shepherds with a heart for people, evangelists with the gift for sharing Christ with others, teachers, exhorters, people given to hospitality, visiting the sick, helping others. They are all gifts to the body for its building up. None require a degree, special ordination or any such thing.

Yet, we have professionalized everything. We are a society of specialization. It used to be that a smart, educated person could get a job and learn the specifics needed on the job. Now, the person needs a masters degree or doctorate with a super specialization to even get a foot in the door. It is no different in Christianity. Just look at the catalogue of majors available in the typical seminary. We make the additional error of thinking that just because someone has studied and specialized in an area, he or she is an expert. The Christian life is 10 percent knowledge and 90 percent experience. What is real is what the Lord has worked into you, not what you have learned.

Although what I am about to say is a generalization and I admit that generalizing is dangerous, here goes. This super specialization and professionalization of Christianity has only reinforced the feeling that there are "full-time, committed Christian workers" and "part-time less committed lay people." Although there are many exceptions, I think the generalization holds, and this is not to take away from the dedicated "full-time" professional. Full-time Christians have to do several things at the very least: give up their "secular" job and go to Bible School or Seminary for training and then prove their dedication by taking a much lower paying job than if they were on the "outside." Again, the last point is not always true, but usually - we hypocritically expect the "full-time" Christian to live on far less than we do. There are always a small number of committed "lay" people but the rest are mere spectators. Modern churches are like the old saying, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer". Those who are the most involved are the most blessed. If a person is "on the spot" every week, he has to produce so he grows in the Lord. The key is to give everyone meaningful opportunity to be involved so all grow.

Bible School and Seminary is not the way of the Lord. As one brother recently said, in three and a half years the disciples went from fisherman to apostles. Being a pastor, teacher or evangelist should have nothing to do with our education and training but the working of God in our lives. Saints are given gifts for the body. The teacher, prophet or evangelist in your midst will become evident. A person does need to study and be grounded in the Word but he doesn't have to spend years in Bible School and Seminary. They need to be equally grounded in life and experience with the Lord, not just knowledge. The true servant will be evident to everyone. You don't need a doctorate to be able to minister, to teach or evangelize but you do need an anointed, empowered life.