By Wolf

Moving from a traditional church base into the Kingdom, the domain of God’s uncontested rule, will change the church from being ‘market shaped‘ to becoming ‘Kingdom shaped‘. The opposite of God is not the devil; its Mammon (No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money Mt 6:24). In the same way, the opposite of the Kingdom of God is not the “domain of Satan” (as you can see, the Bible does not even call it a kingdom…), it is the market.

A market shaped church is essentially trying to package and sell a God-experience that religious customers would buy (by attending and financing the system). Make no mistake, we are not called to ignore what’s happening on the market, what people talk about. But we must be very careful not to be swept away by the powerful market dynamics of buying and selling. Otherwise the church is no longer driven by God into a prophetic and apostolic future, but by the ever changing gusto of religious consumers and ever present religious salespeople who give the market what the market wants. And then we end up with buffet Christianity, where everyone is free to chose a little bit of this, thank you, no, nothing of that, and maybe a harmless taste of this.

If we want to change the world, we have to chase the world out of ourselves and our church’s systems, yield to Jesus who is not only a Saviour, but a King who wishes to rule, and start shaping our lives, families, financial and political behaviors accordingly. Then our churches would stop to be our churches any longer; and yes, become His’ again. Why not?