Response to “A Magna Carta for Restoring the Supremacy of Christ”

I’ve just read “A Magna Carta for Restoring the Supremacy of Jesus Christ” by Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola and I just love what I’ve read.  It resonates so deeply with what God too has been awakening in my heart and in my husband’s heart. It’s amazing what God is doing all over the globe. The return to a focus on Jesus is the heart of the ministry God has led us to develop in Barbados where we live. As God’s people become more dissatified and fed up with the political bureaucracy which Church has become and even as they are leaving the traditional church in large numbers, many of them are in fact longing for a more intimate reconnection with Jesus; the one and only true bedrock of Christianity.  Many misinterpret this leaving and “fed up-ness” as rebellion or as an attempt at one-upmanship; they couldn’t be further from the truth. Personally for me it represents a de-cluttering of all the unnecessary gunk we have allowed to crowd our vision of Christ. The sad thing is that as many churches focus on conferences and conventions the departure from a focus on Christ is not easilly recognised or acknowledged. We may sing about Jesus in our worship but worship has become a big industry in the gospel arena governed by its own rules and guidelines of correctness. It has for many churches become an end in itself. In each epoch of the history of the Church God has had a way of “reining” things back in when they’ve gone too far; remember Martin Luther of the 1500’s? I think that the reality of Christ and His sacrifice is such an uncomplicated matter that we human beings just can’t grasp it.  Grace seems so simple that we seem to think we have to add more to make the search for God more believable. I think what has happened to the Church with respect to the loss of its focus on Christ is simply a symptom of man’s eternal efforts to “save himself”. We’ve created a monster called institutionalized religion which seeks to reduce Christianity to a set of principles and ideals which are really cleverly crafted in today’s contemporary language but which fail to magnify the person of Christ himself. I think that this is really a symptom of the Church in the west and is a direct result of the nature of our societies. In the Church’s efforts to make Christ more palatable to a corporate capitalist world we have re-languaged Jesus into a “Seven Principles of Highly Effective Christians” (if you get my drift) and have lost the essence of who Jesus Christ really is.  This is not a problem for the church in the East. In the west, we’ve focussed in the church on prosperity, worship, the restoration of “offices”, and the “diefying” of the prophet, pastor and apostle. This diversion is a sad injunction on how the church has been led by society instead of leading society; we have been influenced by a materialistic, capitalist bent. What I’ve read is an excellent reminder of WHO we are really about and is particularly needed even as new-agers jump on the bandwagon of presenting an abstract, mystical, politically correct christ who is NOT the Jesus of whom we speak.