There is a massive shift taking place in the Body of Christ–a transition from the Church Age into the Kingdom Age. Believers are leaving churches in droves in search of the deeper life they instinctively know is available. Holy Spirit is drawing the people out of the church as it has, in many ways, become the new Egypt. Yes, there are many honorable, God-loving and God-fearing men and women who still serve and engage in the “normal” way that church has been done in the past, and this is in no way meant to condemn these people or say that what they are doing is wrong–God will lead each of us individually. However, it must be seen that there is a reason people are fleeing Egypt to head toward a new Promised Land.
While some may find this comparison to be a bit drastic, I don’t feel it is that way at all. Those who leave are often kicked out or were treated so poorly inside the church that it is clear they were not valued, much as the Hebrew slaves in Egypt. Some who leave are in search of something deeper, but many are just in search of something different, something more authentic that isn’t about building a newer, bigger, better pyramid for the current Pharaoh and being used to leverage a larger empire for the church leadership. As they leave they head toward a Promised Land that, like the Hebrews, they have never seen before and are taking it on faith that on the other side of the wilderness up ahead is a better life.
Truthfully, for those who have left the church it is at first very much like a wilderness, often drifting about searching for springs of living water to navigate through the otherwise spiritually dry desert. Some, however, discover quite quickly that at any time they can call forth water from the rocks and find that without all of the external trappings of religion that they are able to drink even more deeply from that fountain of Living Water that is Jesus. Where before there was a list of rules to measure up to, now there is freedom to follow the cloud by day and the pillar by night wherever it may take them.
Even as I am typing this, there is a fire alarm that just went off in the hospital building I am in. This is a prophetic picture that Rome is burning–the church is sick and in need of a doctor, the Great Physician, the only one who can breathe life into a dying system. And it is possible that God is standing silently by waiting for it to breathe its last so he can resurrect the Remnant from its ashes, raising them up to look like His bride, without spot or blemish.
There is a clarion call going out into the earth in these days, a call to wake up. A call to freedom. A call to being. A call to authenticity, and relationship, and oneness. Jesus is determined to have his bride, and He will wrest them from the hands of any who stand in his way, even if that be leaders in the churches. Gone are the days of the top-down leadership where everyone else sits and blindly follows in pews like sheep. Instead, as Jeremiah prophesied in Jeremiah 31:34a, there is coming a day, and even now we are stepping into the firstfruits of it, where “no longer will they teach their neighbor, or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know Me from the least of them to the greatest,’ declares the Lord.” Regardless of whether you are in the “corporate church” or the body of Christ who has left the four walls, there is a shift and we must refocus to step fully into the Kingdom Age, which has already begun. Let’s go!
