First exercise in ministry training

To answer the question in the title of this post, here are some brief excerpts from chapter 2 of my book Simple Kingdom: Home Fellowships : This chapter begins answering the question of what is church by identifying four key principles that help us understand the purpose and nature of church.... This gives us our first foundational principle concerning church, which simply states that Jesus is king ... Our second guiding principle is that the purpose of the church is to advance the kingdom of God ... Our third principle builds on the second one by stating that to accomplish its task the church must make disciples ... This fourth and final principle is that home fellowships are where church really happens ... Based on my personal observation and experience over several decades, home fellowships are the ideal place for believers to learn how to worship, minister, serve, help, love, forgive, move in spiritual gifts, reach out to others, walk in holiness, and so on. Home fellowships are also a place where new leadership can emerge and be nurtured in areas such as teaching, healing, evangelism, the prophetic, pastoral care and ministry to the poor. And new church plants can even be birthed as the Holy Spirit imparts vision and authority to home fellowship leaders. A corollary to this last principle as far as large churches are concerned is that your home fellowship leaders are the real pastors of your church . Pastors of churches having hundreds or thousands of members face the difficulty of knowing what the needs of their people are and how best to meet those needs. This usually leads to increasing church staffing levels, which brings extra financial burden upon the church. Leaders of home fellowships however only have to oversee a small number of individuals. As a result, they usually know exactly what's happening with each person, provided the environment in the group makes people feel comfortable with opening up to share with one another. Churches have traditionally viewed home fellowships as programs that fill needs that Sunday gatherings aren’t able to fulfill. They may see them as a point of entry for newcomers into the community, and as a place for members to provide support to one another during the week. This is fine and good, but home fellowships are—or can be—much more than that... You can read this book and others that Ingrid and I have written on the Books page of our website. (Image: The Bible Reading by French artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze - Louvre, Paris - 1755)

Sometimes prophetic dreams are easy to interpret. Sometimes they're more difficult. Ingrid's dream back in April about how the direction our Canadian government is taking under Mark Carney will signficantly change our relationship with our southern neighbor was easy to interpret . Her most recent dream builds upon that earlier one and is a bit more difficult to understand, but we think we've got it puzzled out. Here then is Ingrid's latest dream, more or less in her own words: "I saw a man in what looked like a black-and-white photo from the 70s. He was stocky in build, but short, maybe 5 foot 6 inches. He was wearing a coat and his face looked old and drained. He reminded me of a businessman, either American or Canadian, and he seemed to want to smoke a cigar. As I looked at him the words 'all things unto himself' came to mind." That's it. What does it mean? Well, first, it very probably does mean something . Why? Because God has promised that his children (hey, that's us!) will see visions and dream dreams ( Acts 2:17 ). And both Ingrid and I have had a number of dreams from the Lord over the years, some of which have warned or guided us in making decisions, while others have given us glimpses of things that would soon happen. So we have a bit of a track record as far as receiving and interpreting prophetic dreams are concerned. And with prayerful pondering we think we know what this present dream means as well. Here then is our interpretation: Owners of smaller (5' 6") businesses here in Canada (and probably in the USA too) should accept the reality that they'll need to become more self-reliant ("all things unto himself") to keep their businesses going in the stressful (overweight, smoking, face drained) times that are coming upon Canada's economy. While this interpretation seemed fairly obvious to me when Ingrid first shared her dream with me, one thing did puzzle me: the phrase "all things unto himself" in her dream clearly seems to reference Colossians 1:19-20 which says "God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him [Jesus], and through him to reconcile to himself all things , whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross." But what does reconciliation have to do with this dream? Now some might eagerly jump in here and say, "Aha! The dream means that God is soon going to reconcile Canada and the US on all these trade issues! Good times are going to return and everything will go back to the way they were before!" But this is really justwishful thinking, and the Bible tells us how easy it is sometimes to prophesy what you want to happen (see Jeremiah 28 ) instead of what is going to happen. But the question still remains: what about the verb "to reconcile" in this verse of Colossians that Ingrid's dream seems to reference? The Greek verb here is αποκαταλλασσω and it only occurs in the New Testament, which makes it hard to pin down its exact meaning. The word is usually translated as reconcile in English translations of the Bible . But this New Testament verb is built upon the more frequently occurring verb καταλλασσω which in Classical Greek (starting from the time of Herodotus) usually means reconcile, make peace, or settle with your enemies. In Plutarch however, who lived around the time of the New Testament, the word can also take on economic meanings like exchanging currency or trading in gold. Trading, see? Anyways, remember that the gift of prophecy always has three parts: revelation, interpretation, and application. And application is what's most important i.e. how one should respond to a prophetic word. The application here is that smaller businesses in Canada that have relied for decades on buying and selling goods and services with the USA need to realize they are going to have to work hard to become more self-reliant (more reliant on our internal Canadian markets and new international markets) instead of relying solely on the good will of our neighbor south of the border. And the same is probably reciprocally true for SMBs in the USA, though with the American economy being so much bigger than ours the SMBs down there have more options available as far as markets are concerned. (Image: Ennui by Walter Richard Sickert - Ashmolean Museum, Oxford - 1917-18)