"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been: it is lying as in magic preservation in the pages of books."
-Thomas Carlyle

by Daniel Morgan

Growing up in a traditional church, beside tens of millions of other Southern Baptists, I knew right well what the Christian life was supposed to look like. It meant that you pretty much stayed clear of sin (though I've been radical enough to not include alcohol, smoking, and dancing in that category), prayed a good bit throughout the day, and had a good thirty minutes of Bible reading in the morning. If one had an especial gumption, he might even share the gospel a few times. And the really anointed, top-tier believers became missionaries.

That's all changed since I've experienced some of the values modeled at Antioch Community Church in Waco, Texas as lived out on the mission field. (Yes, I live in Houston. Yes, that is three hours away.) Since then, the drastic notion that the Bible is literally and practically true has come to light in my life. If we believe the promise that the Holy Spirit can and will move in our lives but experience otherwise, we must conform our lifestyle to Scripture to see this take place. Then the literalness of each verse rings home: the living, eating, praying, and ministering together, the constant sense of awe and working of miracles, the sharing of all with all believers, and finally the harvest of believers added daily. It's like Calvin (the cartoon visionary, not the theologian) said upon getting in the tub (but not turning on the water): "I obey the letter of the law, if not the spirit." That's us. We sit in the tub of right doctrine and never think of reaching up for the faucet. To paraphrase Jesus, "Duh, you don't have anything because you haven't asked for anything."

Knowing that Christianity is not about us being sturdy and sinless and staying in bounds (well as that is), but about us reaching the lost through the heart of Christ, our whole American paradigm must change. If the most important thing, "the one thing needed" as Jesus told Martha, is being in His presence, from which all other good things come, then it naturally follows that this should consume our time and energy more than anything else. Pursuant to this, we practice His presence by walking in the Spirit. The fullness of life stems from abiding in the intimacy of the Almighty, talking to Jesus as naturally as a good wife relates to her husband.

You may nod absently at this point, impatiently murmuring assent. I know I did. I knew all of this in my mind since I was young, but until this Spring Break, all my knowledge did was puff up, without the reality of edifying love. What does this look like, this John 14-17, Spirit-led Christianity? To be honest, I don't really know. I'm just a couple of weeks old at it. But I can pass on what truths I've seen and heard thus far.

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This Spring Break I went with six hundred Antioch Community Church or church plant college students to Juarez, Mexico. The church has been going there for the past seventeen years, to watch the Spirit of God move in the community and join in the work. What struck me first of all was how much prayer went into this endeavor. We prayed before, during, and after the trip. We prayed spiritual conviction, encouragement, and warfare. I almost became convinced that I was seeing that impossible verse "pray unceasingly" become possible in front of my eyes.

The second thing that clenched the fruit for us was the reliance upon the Holy Spirit as though His opinion really mattered. Normally, we Protestants are prone to regard Him as the elephant in the room. Sure, we know from Scripture of His omnipresence and enjoy quoting out of context the "two or three gathered are in My Name" passage, but we rarely address Him outside of the third-person. I don't know that there was a time when we went on an outreach without having waited on what the Lord willed and receiving visions or words that would be confirmed that evening. Nearly every member of our small team had something to contribute as the Body of Christ worked its Musketeer maxim: "All for one and one for all." The otherwise confusing or frustrating evangelical encounters we had were often times redeemed by remembering that such was forewarned earlier in the day in a vision or when God spoke His assuring Sovereignty over the circumstances and into our hearts.

The last thing that unfortunately struck me as foreign to my conservative rearing was the rigors of encouragement that our team was put through. Again, of course, we all know in our head that the giving of encouragement is mandatory by Hebrew 3:13. But the proof is so precious in the acting out. I never knew that among the mission field there were so many of the valiant wounded. I saw these men and women as fellow warriors, and witnessed their courageous deeds of battle, the sick being healed and the lost being found as we reached out to the least of these. But each response time that came after the morning sessions saw scores of Christians rushing to receive God's healing love, or release from the bonds of sin, or passion for claiming the nations, or to be filled with the Holy Spirit, i.e., whatever was the topic of the day's sermon.

And I realized that such prayer and brokenness of spirit and encouragement was constantly in dire need, because we were constantly running into battle and being wounded, and constantly needed to experience deeper healing from God. We ran to the forefront of the fighting knowing that we would be hurt in the process and thus in turn could get ministered to even more so by God. It was very mythic. I'm reminded of the Norse Einherjar battling before Valhalla; each day they are struck down; each night they feed on Odin and rise to fight again. In the Book of Acts, it is the disciples getting jailed and beaten for preaching in the Name, and then praising God for the privilege of such suffering and running back out again to proclaim His Name.

A glimpse of how necessary such encouragement is in those times will readily be understood by the embattled Christian. When I was worried that my past sin would somehow linger and hinder God, a group leader came by with a verse from John and the exhortation that God calls me obedient. When I was frustrated and confused about the workings of the Holy Spirit and His so-called "baptism", our team leader came and mentioned a lyric we just sung about God's sovereignty, which gave me rest to know my questions were in His timing. When I worried about the glass wall over my prayer life, my room leader gave me a vision of being delivered from the bars of fear and into the open fields accompanied by a word from the Psalms. All of this happened without my telling them of my concerns; God told them of my plight and with words that pierced through to my deepest places of rapport. There was never a time when I felt more cared for than in the middle of God's boisterous and rushing work. I had more rest and peace, though I never knew where the Spirit was coming from or going.

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What I hated most was having to return from this fairy tale adventure back to "the real world", which is in fact the more superficial and banal. The spiritual is always more real than reality and to be asked to transition back to the way things were before the trip was a wretched idea to me. What I had to figure out was how to transfer the flame from Juarez to Houston, to perform the rather difficult task to conjure up early church practices from scratch. The key ingredients, however, I believe can be boiled down to keeping the local church (i.e., small group) platform, continuing the dialogue (and barrage) of prayer, and to really expect God to move like He said He would with a joyous anxiousness.

The local church is a concept missing from America but is making its comeback. The early church met house to house quite naturally and spread out from Jerusalem unto the inhabited parts of the world (oikoumene) under the goads of persecution. However, the underground nature of the house church is built into its structure so that it is practically built for persecution.

As far as prayer goes, often that only comes as God gives us a heart-burden for the lost and a brokenness in light of seeing our self in all its desperation. When we are praying what is on God's heart as the Spirit directs our thoughts like avatars of His own, we will grow in intimacy, which means deeper communication and trust, which leads to obedience to His word, to more revelation, ad infinitum. It is a glorious current to ride once we can get out of the eddies and driftwood of our own good-intentioned prayers.

Finally, if we want to see God move, we must believe that He can. Most of us have been taught that the bizarre and wondrous acts of God are limited in time and place to the "holiest among us", whatever that means, and to small pockets of revival, as though it is not God's heart to see transforming revival take over the whole world. Sadly, our pastors tell us this because their pastors did as well, and the chain was never broken because no one saw first-hand the works of God. We are all second-generation Israelites who have not witnessed the cloud by day and the fire by night that defeated the armies of Egypt. Instead, the naturalist-materialist religion of evolution has infiltrated our theology and ostracized our expectations of the Holy Spirit. The creationist movement has done much to remedy this pseudo-science and sorry religion, but has not emphasized enough the awesomeness of the Spirit. I suppose we do not want to resemble much our New Age neighbors and Hegelian Romantics, and so keep hushed up on our Sunday pews between the hunchbacked evolutionists and flailing spiritualists.

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But God has called us out from among that nonsense and into the fellowship of the firstborn. Once there, the only commandment is to love God and love man. The only way to do that is with our totality. And the only thing to achieve is the full purpose we were created for.

Calvin (the Reformer theologian, not the comic character) expressed: "However many blessings we expect from God, His infinite liberality will always exceed all our wishes and our thoughts," though at the same time, "All the blessings we enjoy are Divine deposits, committed to our trust on this condition, that they should be dispensed for the benefit of our neighbors." We can't dispense this love if we still have the fear of deciding whether or not to witness of it. Once in the mainstream of the Spirit, it simply flows out. It is the freedom of compulsion Paul speaks of in 1 Cor. 9:16-17. What helped me was my friend (a church planter no less) modeling out how every appointment or encounter with someone is, even if for a minute, a divine appointment meant to bless the hearer.

If we are confused about which divine appointments to choose from, there are always the crowds Jesus targeted. I imagine Him popping into a town, saying a few beatitudes to the welcoming committee at the city gates, a few woes upon the scribes, and then boot-scootin' it to the local bar and brothel or freeway bridge to hang out with the down-and-out. He knew who had the deepest needs and who was the most receptive. If we are not reaching the poor with the good news, we must not be preaching the good news. It is time to drastically reevaluate our evangelical outlook based not on past experience, but purely and earnestly from the model of Scripture.

At Juarez, I felt as though I had stepped into the Book of Acts. We lived together, prayed together, and ate together everyday (hint: this is a different critter altogether than the standard Sunday/Wednesday programs). We laughed and cried together. We saw signs, though not in self-indulging isolation but with the incoming harvest of new believers, everyday and in great abundance, clusters of households, tens, and hundreds. This testimony cannot convey the experience, only the exhortation for you to believe the same for your house group and do likewise. One cannot describe the sensation of the front lines; but there are scars and medals to be shone and displayed before the youth.

Once we jump in all the way, the cold shock is over soon and we will be amazed that we feared the water's cool caress before. I personally do not like the ocean. I fear its black immensity and unknown terrors, but the depths of God are better than all the solid ground I've walked in the past. And the blessings are all the greater for the sacrifice. Paul does not speak in superlatives in 2 Cor. 9 for nothing:

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