The House Church Book

The newest book on House Church with the title “The House Church Book” is out by Tyndale House Publishers, dedicated to the three movements, The Revolution, The Reformation and The Retirement.

George Barna in his foreword to the book writes: “…It’s not often that you get a book whose cost can be justified by the content in the pages before you even get to the introduction! The House Church Book is one of those unusual resources. I found the “15 Theses toward a Re-Incarnation of Church” to be such a section. I suppose you could consider the bulk of the book a bonus. No matter how you look at it, Wolfgang has provided us with an outstanding resource that, like his earlier book (Houses That Change The World), pushes us to rethink some of our foundational assumptions about who we are in Christ and what it means to be part of the body of Christ…”

Starfish Series on Finnish TV

Here is the first TV series on “Starfish” by Wolfgang in Finnish Television. This is Wolf’s current message. It is in in English and it is a 5 times half an hour sequence program. Go to http://vod.tv7.fi/o…hjelmatiedot/ and look for Meritähti on the program table to the left side. ‘Meritähti’ is Starfish in Finnish. The program runs on Finnish time, so calculate the right time to your country accordingly.

I missed the first telecast yesterday, but it is rerun again today. Each episode will rerun six times. If you still miss it then watch it on the 25 and 26th of August.

The second episode is on Tuesday SEPT 01 and on SEPT  8th and 9th.
The third episode is on Tuesday SEPT 15th and on SEPT 22nd and 23rd.
The fourth episode is on Tuesday SEPT 29th and on OCT 6th and 7th.
And the last one is on Tuesday OCT 13th and on OCT 20th and 21st.

Help! My Son Is In A Worship Camp

During the old testament days, when people sought the presence of God, they brought with them their offerings. It was always something physical, something that you can see, touch, smell, hear and taste. There were grains, cattle, oil, incense, etc. In Exodus 25:2, God orders Moses, “Tell the Israelites to bring me an offering. You are to receive the offering for me from each man whose heart prompts him to give.” Yes, God expects us to bring him an offering, but it is not the offering itself that he is after, he is after the heart of the one who brings the offering. Remember Cain and Abel’s offering? Is the heart of a person in accordance to what God expects of him? Does God get to see obedience of heart in his people?

Disobedience to God’s ways separates people from God’s presence. We all know this from Adam and Eve. A sense of deep respect, awe and fear of God keeps people closer to his presence. The closer you are with God, the stronger is your love, obedience and loyalty towards him. Abraham was once asked to sacrifice his only heir as a burnt offering. He saddled up a donkey, took two servants and his son Isaac and went on a three day camp. On the third day he asked his servants to stay behind so that he and his son will worship God on the mountain and they will come back. This is the first time in the Bible the word worship is mentioned. Abraham went to worship God with a sacrifice walking and talking innocently beside him. Was God really after a dead burnt Isaac or was he after Abraham’s heart of obedience?

When we are willing to sacrifice or kill our future that we hold so dear for ourselves, then we are ready to worship God. This requires an obedient heart that does what God says without any argument and opinion. Look at the blessing that Abraham received because of his obedience: “I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore. Your descendants will take possession of the cities of their enemies, and through your offspring all nations on earth will be blessed, because you have obeyed me.” Genesis 22:17,18. When we worship God the right way we will see nations transformed.

Our oldest son is in a summer worship camp that goes on for four and a half days. There is singing and music with some preaching and prayer in between. Sometimes the music is great during ‘worship time’, fast rhythm, loud guitar, everyone is turned on and the worship rocks. It feels good, you sing and swing at the same time. You actually even feel like you have worshiped God with all your heart, might and soul and strength. Then comes the mellow phase of our ‘worship time’. The music gets slow and the good feelings changes to piety, repentance, and sometimes even self pity. To round it all up at the end, there is another song with a cool beat, to get back to the party feeling. We call this worship! What credit is that if we worship God according to the flexibility of our emotional moods? Even unbelievers do that in their music shows! Moses and the Israelites sang song to the Lord when they witnessed their enemies drown in the see and yet they themselves were spared. Their emotion of joy was expressed in singing and dancing. Few days later with that same mouth they grumbled against Moses. In spite of experiencing the miracles of God first hand, in spite of meaningful singing and dancing, their hearts were still far from God. God wanted their obedient heart, not their emotional feelings. If you listen carefully to me and do what I say, pay attention, keep my decrees, I will not strike you like I did to the Egyptians. Exodus 15:26

King David was a man after God’s own heart. Not because he could play well the harp or sing a thousand songs or even compose music, but he knew the sacrificial worship that God delights in. He was willing to sacrifice his position, his riches, his Kingdoms, his music, his everything just to dwell in the presence of the Lord. Better is one day in your court than a thousand elsewhere! Sacrifice everything else in order to hear God and do only that which He says, that is the heart of a true worshiper. David’s heart was steadfast in God. He disrobed himself in front of God. he was willing to become even more undignified than that, he was willing to be humiliated in his own eyes. He pleased God by displeasing himself. That is why he could sing and make music with all his heart and soul and mind and all that is within him.

When God became a tradition to his own people, he spoke through his prophet Isaiah saying how much he hates their appointed feasts and evil assemblies and camps and conferences. It has become a burden that he is weary of bearing them. The multitude of your sacrifice makes no sense, all the meaningless words with and without emotions, slow and fast rhythms, I have no pleasure in them. Stop trampling my courts, in other words stop warming up your pews! Don’t spread out your hands in prayers, because I hide my eyes from you. even if you offer many prayers I will not listen to you. You have not learned to do what my heart is after. If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the best from the land. But if you resist and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword. Isaiah 1

God saw that his people cannot worship him through their own deeds, so he sent his Son to the cross as a sacrifice and earned all the worship that he needs through the obedience of his Son. Jesus became the sacrificial worship of God. This is my son in whom I am well pleased. Jesus obeyed God in every way. He said only what he heard his father say, he did only what he saw his father do. He came down to show us how to worship God by living it everyday here on earth. He obeyed God in every step, even unto death. This kind of obedience to God – sacrificing everything, family, job, hobby, desires and dreams at the altar to ash and obeying (doing) only what God says to you is the profound act of worship that pleases God. If we are followers of Jesus, we got to follow him the same way He worshiped his Father- through sacrificial obedience!

If worship as we know today has to do with singing and dancing, shall we stop for a moment waving our colorful glittering banners to find out what Jesus said about music and singing as worshiping God? He is worth way more than our emotions and singing and dancing. Father sacrificed his Son Jesus not so that we could sing week by week and get our emotional tank full. No, He offered his son Jesus as a sacrifice so that we in return out of his mercies will offer ourselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God – this is our spiritual act of worship. Romans 12:1.

Worship is a spiritual act, not words or music to words. It is a doing! It is sacrifice. It is death to one’s self, one’s own future. When God saw that his people do not keep up to His word, he sent The Word in a human form. He sacrificed his own son Jesus in order to get back a people of his very own. Denying all that we are and all that we own and identify with, and then stepping out to follow Him without questions to the very end will lead us to be true worshipers. Worship has to become our lifestyle.

Jesus Unemployed

Each one pursues his own work in God’s name and believes this is what God is up to and is passionately burdened with right now. Belief in God has imploded into people believing in themselves. What is absent in this journey of faith? Is it the lack of hearing and discerning God, or is it disobedience, living and acting according to convenience, or simply the lack of knowledge of the truth, the inability to let go of tradition or the fear of the new?

If Jesus says, “I will build my church”, why then are we so busy building His church? If Church is the body of Christ, which is formed by every one voluntarily binding him/herself to Jesus and to each other, why then is there much disunity, malfunction, retarded developments and cocooned factions in the body of Christ? This doesn’t give the picture of the spotless bride that Jesus wants to marry and live happily ever after. How difficult are we yet going to make it for Jesus to build his Church? When will we resign from the job that is not originally ours and give it over to the right person Jesus who really really longs and waits with passion to build His Church. Any way it is his body; will we at all let him take care of his own body? If anyone messes around with another’s body, it is called violence and rape. We have not only made Jesus unemployed but we also forcefully plunder him.

And we do all these firmly believing that it is God’s will. What ignorance has overtaken us! So we work and work even harder and we run and run until we hit the brick wall and are not willing to learn the lesson. We will not resign and give the job over to the one who is rightly and truly authorized for the job.

Basically, we don’t want to trust Jesus with his job. We know better how to build churches. Therefore we sacrifice everything, even the job that is assigned for us: to be in unity with the Father and his son Jesus, SO THAT the world may believe in the one that was sent. “Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” “May they be brought to complete unity to let the world know that you sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me”. Here, Jesus, gives an important and valid tip on how to let the whole world know about him. Global evangelisation demands the lifestyle of unity of Jesus’ body. He also gave the most helpful tip on how to unite, to become one like he is with his Father: “All I have is yours and all you have is mine”. When the churches and mission organizations around the globe could honestly say this to each other and mean it then we can experience Psalm 133; his blessing and his life.

So far the world has recognized Jesus as a swear word but not yet as the Word, the sent one who deeply loves them. Why? What are we reflecting on this world? Disunity, despair, jealousy, competition, factions and divisions, selfishness, and the list can go on. Jesus even prays to his father about the glory that he has given to his believers, which his father had given him, so that we believers are one just like he and his father are one. Whatever happened to this glory that he is talking about! Where did we loose this glory? Why no one gives even a little consideration to look for it that which we have lost? Is this glory the main component that keeps us as one? Have we lost it or forgotten it? Do we at all care for it or do we ignore it because we want to build OUR churches?

Jesus is longing for you and me to resign and retire so that he can take his rightful place as the architect and master-builder and do what he knows best to do, build his Church. The one through whom the whole universe came into existence is absolutely able to create his own Bride. Jesus has been lonely for a long time now, let’s unite so he can celebrate the most exciting day of his life: his wedding.

Let’s employ Jesus again and allow him to build his Church and let’s indulge ourselves to unite until the Body of Jesus becomes ONE. As we unite to oneness Jesus will be easily able to build his Church. If we could earnestly say to the other part of our body: “all I have is yours and all you have is mine”, then we know we are one. Then we are dressed worthy for the wedding banquet.

It’s Time To Re-do The Garden

Often we pray that God will not allow us to preach that, which we don’t practice or live in our own lives. (As surely as God listens to prayers, he lets us go through certain times of ‘learning by doing’.) When the going gets tough that’s when we stop to think, “wait, what did I pray?” Some of these moments are quite intense, long winding and tiring. It costs almost all of our strength, effort, faith, patience, vulnerability and helplessness as we search and strive to figure out what God wants to teach us. He allows all this to happen to test how far we would reach with our own wisdom, minds, knowledge, experience and self. Then comes this time of physical, emotional, mental and spiritual exhaustion after we expend all of our available resources towards the achievement of an answer and just self-surrender. God allows us to come to this place and then he intervenes to teach the core message that we have been trying to discover all by our own means. In acute and urgent cases we seek him through fasting and prayer.

One such moment has been the re-doing of our garden. Since 2005, we live in a small village of 351 people here in the Black Forest of Germany that has just one vending machine for chewing gums, nothing else. No other shops or Cafe or restaurants. It is a beautiful village with vineyards, cherry, plum and apple trees, cows and tractors. Most of the villagers are farmers and work at their land. The average German admires perfection, the country side German idolizes it.

The garden around our house is like a sore thumb in this village. It is considerably big and both Wolf and me have less green fingers. Plus for many other reasons, this garden has not been really taken care of for the last 13 years. Since we moved in here 4 years ago, it has bothered me to have an untidy garden in a small village like ours. We did our best to pull out weeds, to trim plants, cut back the over grown trees and we were even able to afford to get a tree cutter to cut down 13 trees, that blocked sunlight and air around our house. And yet the garden is an unfinished task. It needs new lawn, new hedge trees, a fence, stone path, so the car doesn’t get stuck in the mud and loads of digging and moving heavy stones.

For 4 years now I have been praying, asking help from friends, pleading, nagging, and forcing Wolf to do something about the pathetic condition of our garden. We even had 3 different gardeners come and help us suggest an easy-care garden. They also left behind sheets of unaffordable estimated cost. Winter is almost gone, the snow has thawed and Spring reveals the ugliness of our garden again for this year.

It is frustrating for me since I live here everyday and being an Auslaender, outsider (not a pleasant word for non-natives), people look down on us too for not tending the garden as any normal German would do. Discouraged and disheartened after any possible attempt to fix the garden, I brought this situation also today before God like I have done for the last four years. And it was different.

Suddenly, God opened my mind to think things that I have in all these four years never thought of. He started to show me that there are reasons why we are allowed to go through this frustration and discouragement. Gardening is at the heart of God. Firstly, he created a grand garden for Adam and Eve in this world that gave the purpose of their lives – to tend the garden and defend it from the enemy. Secondly, in the garden he met the first humans every evening and they shared lives.

From here on my mind rushed to the “gardens” of the Kingdom of God, that Paul describes as areas that are measured out by God to his gardeners for the advancement of his kingdom:

We, however, will not boast beyond proper limits, but will confine our boasting to the field God has assigned to us, a field that reaches even to you. We are not going too far in our boasting, as wo uld be the case if we had not come to you, for we did get as far as you with the gospel of Christ. Neither do we go beyond our limits by boasting of work done by others. Our hope is that, as your faith continues to grow, our area of activity among you will greatly expand, so that we can preach the gospel in the regions beyond you. For we do not want to boast about work already done in another man’s territory. But, “Let him who boasts boast in the Lord.” For it is not the one who commends himself who is approved, but the one whom the Lord commends. 2 Cor 10:13-18

There are many many desolate gardens everywhere. Gardens that need to be fixed from the scratch, like our own garden. Gardens that are trampled by everyone and everything, from false foundation to false teaching to false mission. Gardens that are not given the proper care because the hands of the garden owners, (apostles and prophets) who work at it are tied up. They survive by making tents. As long as we build on the foundation of pastors, evangelists and teachers, we will have aliens (disunity) among us; we will continue division in the body of Christ.

Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. Ep 2:19,20

I’ve been asking God almost everyday how long will my garden remain unusable? God takes us through this frustration with our own garden to reveal to us his own pain about his gardens and the heavy cost to pay to redo it. It costs our very lives to serve in the Kingdom, to see his garden established. This was God’s answer to Jeremiah’s complaint when he was in such a situation.

Many shepherds will ruin my vineyard and trample down my field; they will turn my pleasant field into a desolate wasteland. It will be made a wasteland, parched and desolate before me; the whole land will be laid waste because there is no one who cares. Jer 12:10,11

How dare we trample his garden for our own self-consumption, with ‘what is in it for me?’ attitude. The gardens of God that he can make use of again, to meet his people and give purpose for their lives need the foundations of the apostles and the prophets. Right now, they are treated as Auslaender (outsiders) and the church barely acknowledges their existence. Their hands are tied, because most of the resources are wasted into churchy programs and events that are run by pastors and evangelists who cater to the ever consuming Christians. We have a market shaped church. God’s voice is replaced by programs and we don’t see God really walk in the cool of the day in our churches anymore. We are led to feel the presence of God through lulling music, but not really touch him, sit with him, talk to him, hear him, exchange lives with him.

See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to destroy and overthrow, to build and to plant.” Jer 1:10

This is what needs to happen everywhere. It is time to re-do the garden; every stone has to be turned upside down. We need to break the ground, uproot unnecessary wild bush that block sunlight and fresh air, tear down old structures, destroy weeds, and overthrow wrong foundations and build according to the patterns of heaven to see his Kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. We need to uproot market shaped Christianity and plant Kingdom shaped Church. We need to move along with the Holy Spirit to a Kingdom mind-set. As we do that God will rearrange and rebuild the church on the true apostolic and prophetic foundation. Imagine how his garden will look like in the area of money, sex, power and church! Imagine the non-Christian neighbors in your area watch and wonder your garden grow that brings forth Kingdom fruits that remain! Imagine the heart of the creator bubbling with joy to see his garden tended carefully and defended from enemies.

Pray and ask God how you could contribute your resources to see Kingdom shaped gardens flourish in your region and beyond.