In REVISE US AGAIN, I discuss how our personality and temperament influence our theology and spiritual conversational styles. Discover the three main temperaments, the three main theological perspectives, and the three main spiritual conversational styles. Strikingly, they all work together.
A Word to All Authors – Aspiring or Actual
The scripture is the skeleton that must be “fleshed out” by divine revelation.
As a prophet matures, he (or she) need to be checked out by other prophets to gain confidence in their guidance. Paul went back to Jerusalem to check his guidance with the apostles there.
When I was in community 30 years ago, we would lay a decision on the dining room table and tell everyone to go off and pray for guidance. They would come back in about ten minutes and we would poll the community, starting with the youngest Christian on up so no one would change their answer based upon awe for an older Christian. We always came up unanimous.
It was a sad day when God told us to close out the community. We weren’t expecting it, but it was unanimous.
Today I would first have us pray a deliverance prayer for us before doing it, to eliminate any possible demonic influence.
I accept various forms of divine guidance: An inner voice from the Holy Spirit, spiritual video clips & snapshots, a heart sense and an inner spiritual knowing.
BTW, Francis MacNutt wrote “The Nearly Perfect Crime” which was on a similar topic as “Pagan Christianity.” It reads differently, so I think he researched & wrote his book with no knowledge of your book. As an ex-priest & seminary professor in the Roman Catholic Church, it must have been very painful for him to write. His fellow Roman Catholics leaned upon him until he gave the book a less damning title, “The Healing Reawakening.”
Excellent post- appreciated the balance and overall perspective on hearing God. Wisdom is the big picture.
Permission to send this out to our list?
Steve
I read Pagan Christianity and have studied alot of that info in college and on my own (though you do not need my opinion) and it was on the money. From time to time, I inhabit an organized church close to my house and alot of the people I’ve met in this church are not saved (of course not in every organized church – some are full of very spiritual Christians who are frustrated).
The term “born again” is not mentioned and is seldom used. You would never hear the parable of the goats and the sheep or the great net severing the wicked from the just in the organized church that I inhabit from time to time.
I have gone to home meetings for years and years and when you invite someone who is not a Christian, there is no where to hide from the Lord! The people in the meeting intimately love the Lord and someone that sees it wants to learn more about him! (I’ve seen it!)
Thanks for the book – Frank!
(Read the book – The God or Abraham, Isaac, and Ishmael by Watchman Nee – WOW!)
Frank – i doubt it will come as any surprise to you but i would like to mention here Something a great Australian Educator (as opposed to a strictly religious ‘thinker’), whose courses and tapes i have studied, teaches his students – the human ‘Triune’ or three-fold Brain.
The most basic, primal (early) level is the limbic brain that almost solely deals with our base functions like breathing/heartbeat and primal response to either flee danger or face and fight it – our ‘Doing’ brain if you will.
The middle brain is that which surrounds the limbic ‘core’ and is responsible for all emotions and associated endocrinal functions – our ‘Feeling’ Brain.
And the Third and most complex outer layers, such as the neo-cortex, deal with the higher intellect and thought functions – our ‘Thinking’ Brain.
i like the harmony/reciprocity of your divison of God’s word with the latest scientific, secular thinking concerning how man is divided in his primary processing centre.
Just coincidence??
The Aussie educator is a gentleman by the name of Glenn Capelli who runs the True Learning Centre In Perth.
He also says that most humans tend towards one particular way of learning (there are 5 distinct forms of information procesing we learn ‘best’ through and we tend to mainly resort to one, or perhaps a combination of two of them to learn something ‘new’. He believes we all could increase our ability to learn and retain information by developing our brain’s ability’s to function more in all 5 areas and in utilising interconnections between all three regions of the triune brain.
Mozart wrote some of his music that specifically helped harmonise three way interactions within our brains also. (left/right hemisphere connection, feeling/thinking connection and temporal front lobe/rear lobe interaction)
I found your post most enlightening and intend delving deeper.
<B
I’m gleaning from what all of you are saying that balance is the key in healthy church life just as it is with all organic life. And I think we all recognize that we cannot possibly do it without God’s word and His Holy Spirit.
Frank, I copied your piece on organic church to show to a pastor/friend of mine since you are more articulate on this subject than I. Before I even pulled out the paper, he started telling me about this book he just started reading…Pagan Christianity… At first glance, he’s excited about it…totally unexpected! I’m looking forward to his evaluation and sent him this page hoping that he will join the discussions.
Just kidding…. In doer churches, there are usually plenty of thinkers giving framework and thought to the urgency of doers doing, and there are feelers who are the welcomers and embracers of the people reached by the doers…
I started out as a thinker. I became a feeler. Now I’m headed towards doer.
I’m a bit suspicious that our “temperment” in this regard may be as much a function of the spiritual environment in which we find ourselves versus an innate temperment. How Christ is presented to us is what we reflect – did we first encounter Him through people that were thinkers? Feelers? Doers?
In the thinker churches, there are always those who “feel” the things that are being thought about. There are always those scurrying around doing things to enable the thinkers to have more time to think.
In the feeler churches, there are always those giving careful thought to how people feel. There are doers making sure that the the other feelers feel good. (and have lots of coffee and donuts and interesting music.)
In the doer churches, there are …wait….doer churches only seem to ever have doers. So much for that theory ;P
Wow, I read both web links that you gave me, and I agree with everything you said, although I have not had opportunity to worship in an organic setting. I’d like to, and have been praying that God would make this available.
By your definition of a prophet, then what I have been doing, interestingly, is prophesying. My role in the ministry I am involved in is shepherd/teacher. But what I have been doing is prophesying. That’s very interesting, and actually a little unsettling.
It seems that Torah must come first, and indeed it does in real life, in the Bible. It seems that as we are conformed to Torah, particularly in our inward being, then prophecy is borne out — has to be, as the Lord draws us closer to Himself and shares more of His thoughts with us. It seems wisdom would come last, as it can only be borne out of experience, and experience takes time.
After reading your book “Re-Imagining Church” (I read “Pagan Christianity” first. Then “Re-Imagining Church.” Then “Straight Talk To Pastors,” which I recommended to my own pastor, and he is still speaking to me, so that’s good. Then I read some other smaller books, like “Who Is Your Covering.” I have your book that aligns the epistles to their proper chrono setting with Acts, but am saving it for the summer, for my summer study) I decided to call our worship services “apostolic meetings” in my mind and have found contentment with that arrangement.
The ministry I am involved in seeks to teach the Bible to everyone who will come. Torah first. We encourage our studiers to ask God how they can apply what they are learning from Him in their real lives. Wisdom. What we are weak in is a way to help our studiers speak out the word of God as He gives them His thoughts, though we do train in this area as well — just not as strong as the other two.
Am eagerly awaiting the organic church conferences scheduled for next srping — I along with about a dozen others.
Thanks for the kind words. A number of churches I’ve worked with have found the insights quite helpful. The truth is that we tend to hear or “recognize” the Lord speaking through only one mode or style. This breaks that assumption and helps opens us up to hear Him in different ways through others.
Lynne, yes, I think there can be a corporate personality. The denominations I mentioned, at a general level, have such I think. In working with organic churches, I’ve noted that various churches will have different personalities also.
Joanna, I believe there is true prophetic speaking and a lot of stuff that flies under that banner that’s bogus. I’ve written some on this at
http://www.ptmin.org/fivefold.htm
Hope it helps.
I have just read an article about growing grapes. The best soil for a vineyard is ‘loam’. I had no idea what loamy soil was so I looked up the definition.
“loam: soil composed of sand, silt, clay, and organic matter in evenly mixed particles of various sizes. More fertile than sandy soils, loam is not stiff and tenacious like clay soils. Its porosity allows high moisture retention and air circulation.”
I could not help but draw a parallel to your thoughts about the combination of law, prophecy and wisdom to properly understand God’s will. Jesus often used agriculture in his parables: seeds, soil, trees, vines, fruit, etc. I would say that the organic church would grow best in loamy soil like you have described.
I immediately recognized myself as a thinker and a doer, and in fact the parachurch organization I am involved in is thinker/doer. I am at the same time intrigued with prophecy and distrustful of it. I have sure heard a lot of fake prophets in my day, and I think prophecy is the easiest of the three revelations of God to fake (hence all the fake prophests featured in the OT). It’s sure hard to fake scripture since we all have easy access to Bibles, and it’s hard to fake wisdom, too.
My background is as varied as it gets, since I have spent time in synagogues, Catholic church, at least twenty different kinds of Protestant churches (Arminian variety, Reformed variety, orthodox, evangelical, and pentecostal/charismatic), and a little dipping into New Agey type thinking in my youth…so I chose “Sola Scripture” when I became born again. it seemed the safest, closest way to the Lord’s mind and yes, His heart.
So how do I recognize a true prophet in a day and age where stoning is no longer the penalty for faking it? I know when the Lord is speaking to me, and when He is responding to me — it is pure delight, and a daily way of life. And I recognize His Spirit in others. But I am immediately on red alert when someone launches into a long discourse about something they got from the Lord and there is no way to verify their “word” with “the Word.”
What are your thoughts?
Frank, Well said!
Fortunately,my husband and I have worked in/with many different denominations over the years and have observed that , although there are threads of truth in each, no one ever gets it completely right. ( including us) just as you said. In looking back over many times of revival in church history I’ve noticed that, even though all aspects of His ministry are present, we tend to focus more on one. For instance, in the early 1900″s speaking in tongues seemed to be what the main focus turned out to be. In the last that I was involved with, a large number of participants tended toward prophecy. And so, as you said, our temperment often determines our focus on what God is saying to us.
Do you think that there is a “corporate temperment” at any given time as well?
Great Post!
In looking into my own background (evangelical, with a smattering of fundamentalist) and in looking into the background of others around me, there is much truth in the differentiations given here between thinkers, feelers, and doers.
All of the aforementioned categories have a tendency towards viewing their own gifting as an end in itself, as if it is the sum total of the truth and all others are secondary. Even in writing that phrase a bit of me is hollering out “Sola Scriptura!!!” because of fear of “compromising the place of scripture.” (See note above referring to background 🙂
But, the truth of the matter is that none of the methods we are speaking of lose any of their importance or “place” when they are viewed in the integrated, holistic way that is presented here. In fact, it is very pleasing to see that they are all complemented and work in harmony.
All in all I really resonate with this way of viewing scripture, prophecy, and wisdom because I see the Lord I know and love in it. The integration and interconnectedness of all three of these facets with each other draws a wonderful parallel… it mimics in many ways the triune God to which they all point.
Love in Christ,
Ray
This was an excellent foundational, right on time word of sound direction that I will be passing on to others to read.