The CHURCH ADVOCATE Article on Apostles

The CHURCH ADVOCATE is devoting articles to APEST in each of its issues this year. In addition, the CGGC eNews plans to carry an article on APEST each month in 2018. Apparently, all of these articles will be written by CGGC Director of Transformational Ministries, Brandon Kelly.

This month's CA APEST article focuses on apostles.

Prophetically, the CA article made me sad. The article in the eNews made me angry.

A characteristic of CGGC thinking about everything, but particularly about APEST, is that it is church, not really Kingdom, focused.

Within that context, the mountaintoppers seem to know, in their hearts, that this is a Kingdom issue and they seem really to want to focus on Kingdom matters but, in the end, they just can't get themselves to do that.

So, typically, this article on apostles begins with references to the Kingdom but, in the end, it focuses on what to do about the problems connected to having apostles IN YOUR LOCAL CHURCH.

Reading the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, I can't see how this focus could be more off-base.

And, Brandon's vision seems to be more about tweaking declining and decaying CGGC parish priest dominated religion than living out the "New Testament plan" which is demanded by the CGGC Mission Statement.

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Apostles, in the New Testament, were, to use the term employed by the CGGC Shepherd Mafia in their credentialing document, translocal. Apostles' ministries function on the level of the Kingdom. Their involvement with a local gathering of disciples, in the New Testament, came from above and beyond the local gathering.

As I've said here and on the eNews blog, this is how the Church of God functioned in its early days when it experienced God's blessing and grew rapidly.

From a New Testament plan perspective, the importance of apostles to kingdom ministry in the CGGC today will be realized when apostles are empowered, by people like Brandon, to operate above and beyond the local church...

...AND ABOVE AND BEYOND THE AUTHORITY OF INSTITUTIONAL HIERARCHS LIKE BRANDON HIMSELF...AND LIKE LANCE AND LOCAL CONFERENCE HIERARCHS.

So, yeah.

As the article suggests,...

...Someone in your local church who always has ideas for new ministries and who chafes against your church's status quo may have a spark of apostolic calling,...

... but the way to empower, to DISCIPLE, those people is not,...

...as the article suggests,...

...to give budding apostles freedom to be themselves within your local fiefdom. It's to connect them to a broader community of apostles beyond your local church...

...in the same way apostles functioned in the Book of the Acts OF THE APOSTLES in the Word.

For that broader community of apostles to exist in the CGGC world, our institutional hierarchs are going to have to be willing to decrease so that ministry in the Spirit can increase.

They are going to have step back to empower apostolic ministry. They are going to have to practice, in their own context, what they're telling people in our churches to do.

They are going to have to live what they preach.

This is what, for most of the past generation, CGGC hierarchs have not done.

Our churches will not practice what the hierarchs preach...

...until the hierarchs walk their own talk.

Brandon and the CGGC staff in Findlay are not living APEST.

They are foolish to think we will embrace apostles when they aren't embracing apostles in their world.

We, all of us, must repent.