Exploring the Apostolic – 2.

 My Personal Journey.

In this series of blogs, I want us to explore the ministry of the apostle and the apostolic as I have started to understand it currently. In this second blog I am going to explain some of my own journey and passion.

Let me try and give you little insight into who I am and how I’m ‘wired’. I am a naturally curious person. Some of my earliest memories are getting in trouble for taking things apart to see how they worked, but not always being able to put them back together! I love to find new ways of doing thngs, or starting or pioneering new things. I am not afraid to disrupt things. Especially things that have become comfortable or say ‘this is the only way…’ My mindset is entrepreneurial and redemptive. I love to find new ways of doing things but I also like to look and see how God wants to redeem in any given situation or culture. I am passionate about seeing and being part of, grace imbued communities that help us be transformational individually, corporately and to those around us. To be  living in, and moving from communities that helps me discern Gods ways and what He wants us to do. It seems that God often wires us - the way we think, approach things and relate to others - for the call or destiny He puts on our lives. The key I have discovered is to find, mutually submit to, and interact with, people that think differently from me in order to truly find God’s will and discern His way forward.

As I alluded to in the first blog the journey to my current understanding of apostles and apostolic ministry started way back in the late seventies and early eighties in the restoration movement. My reflections on that would be, that although there was a lot of talk and teaching about the apostolic, I think it was really a quest to rediscover a more dynamic expression of the church. I think many of the leaders within those movements were apostles to the church, disrupting and challenging the status quo in a much needed way, finding new ways of being church and helping to lay some apostolic foundations that resulted in a more dynamic and missional expression of church. This also spread and influenced many of the traditional and historic church movements and denominations. Therefore, the apostle or apostolic tended to be based in, and function from, the local church. In many cases the main apostolic figure(s) tended to be leading that church or at least part of the leadership of the church. We can see this reflected in the New Testament, with Peter and James in particular, seeming to be relatively static. Their ‘sending’ was to the church to lay the apostolic prophetic foundations and ensure the church remained flexible and missional. However, we also see other possibilities in the New Testament, particularly when it involved cross-cultural* mission with people like Paul and Barnabas etc. It is these examples or types of apostolic I believe God is wanting to restore and release in this new era** we are entering.

In the mid ‘00’s we went to live in Rhode Island in the States for 3 months. Some of the things we went there to do fell through after we arrived, and I found myself with time to reflect; time to start to think and pray. Rhode Island is a beautiful part of the world to do be able to do that in!

For about 18 months I had been really seeking the Lord about what was the way forward in terms of developing our apostolic ministry. How could we be both relevant and effective in our time. I had become really dissatisfied with where things were, particularly:

• In the lack of real community for apostolic type people– the church community didn’t really seem to understand some of the things that we were facing and struggling with. Their solutions and advice I realised wasn’t wrong or ungodly when viewed from a church perspective but was often crippling, stifling and felt controlling for those trying to live out a more pioneering apostolic call – risk assessment rather than encouraging risk taking, looking to bring stability rather than being able to embrace the uncertainty of change and pioneering. As well as this, the apostolic work we were involved in was more of a team than a community. We lived so far apart real community was difficult and we weren’t really involved in the work together on the ground.

• As a result there was a danger of reproducing what we were – groups of gifted ministry orientated people! This for me wasn’t the fruit I desired or believed to be what God desired, which was establishing transformational communities of Jesus lovers that reflected the community of the Godhead and their character.

• Also there seemed to be a lack of real breakthrough into new fields.

• There also seemed to be a lack of miracles and evidence of the power of God.

At this time I also had some prophetic stirrings! I had had three particular prophetic encounters over a 2 year period that helped give me a framework in my own reflections and search:

1. During the early part of that year while praying about this issue I sensed the Holy Spirit impress upon me that one of the keys would be learning how to be more effective in establishing true apostolic communities, rather than just teams. I sensed that some of the things that happened in Ephesus in the first century were important. 

2. In my daily devotions I had been working through 1Chronicles. When I got to chapter 12 it looked like another set of lists. If I am honest I didn’t approach it with much enthusiasm but at least the background was a little more interesting. However, when I got to verse 32 I was arrested by these words – “…..the sons of Issachar understood the times and what the people of God should do.”

I thought at that time with all the turbulence in the people of God and the world at large – which did seem to be God’s doing – we really needed to be people who understand what is happening and know what to do. This encouraged me to intensify my quest because in the time of the early church there seemed to be a lot of political, cultural, and religious upheaval but the church thrived as the apostolic ministry emerged. As I am reflecting and writing this I am realising we are again in a season of turbulence and shaking which makes what was happening back in 2005 look like a calm day! My sense is that God is wanting to take what we have learned and developed so far, and take it to another level and dimension.

3. The third prophetic event happened later in the year. I was reading a book and this verse in Micah 2v12+13 jumped out at me:

v12 "I will surely gather all of you, O Jacob; I will surely bring together the remnant of Israel. I will bring them together like sheep in a pen, like a flock in its pasture; the place will throng with people. 

v13“One who breaks open the way will go up before them; they will break through the gate and go out. Their king will pass through before them, the LORD at their head."

Initially I was gripped by verse 13 but then God started to show me that v12 was the key to the breakthrough anointing coming – it was as we gathered apostolic type people in community, and moved out of that community we would see real apostolic breakthrough.

So, my basic premise and conclusion was that if we are to truly recover the effectiveness and breakthrough nature of the apostolic ministry we need to rediscover how to live, work and move out from apostolic community – and my opinion and experience over the last 20+ hasn’t really changed although there has been an evolution and development of themes.

This is all very well But does this have any basis in scripture and if yes - what might these apostolic communities look like?

As I write this Jessica and I are once again in Rhode Island. Last Thursday evening we had some time and took a small picnic and drove along Ocean Drive near Newport. We pulled into a space near a little cove that I used to drive to work from when we were there in 2005. It has the most beautiful panoramic view. As we sat there eating our sandwiches I realised this was the very spot where this quest of praying, studying and researching the next phase of apostolic ministry had begun.   

As I started to pray and dig in to studying, I had felt to particularly look at what Paul and his fellow apostles had done on their last missionary journey in Acts. I thought that this would be their most ‘mature’ expression and where we have a fair amount of information.

I particularly looked at what happened at Ephesus as well as trying to get as much historical background information as possible. I came to a number of tentative conclusions, such as Paul and the other apostles seemed to base themselves in Ephesus and travel in and out of the city to reach the rest of Asia Minor. This also led me to make a distinction between apostolic teams, and apostolic community. By that I mean teams tend to come together for a purpose and develop relationships, whereas, communities tend to be together in relationship and find or discover purpose. So, I think what we are seeing in Ephesus is a base community where the community help people discern Gods will, form teams and are sent out, for specific purpose. When they are finished they return to the base community for recovery, reflection, reporting and discerning again.

Having completed that study and recognised some patterns I then started to look through history with the belief that if some of my conclusions were correct we would see similar movements and similar patterns in historical movements. I found a number that had similar markers such as the Moravians, Huguenots, Mennonites and the Celts to mention a few.

Out of the ones I identified I decided to take a closer look at the Celtic Christian movement because one, I am a celt but mainly because the Celtic christian movement was one of the most successful missional movements the UK and northern Europe has seen, not just in conversions but in terms of establishing transformational community life and culture change. As I work through the rest of this series I will share and develop some of the themes I have seen and sought to develop, implement and build.

Not long after we returned to the UK from Rhode Island I presented a paper at one of our conferences where we looked to gather apostolic and Ephesians four type ministries entitled – ‘From Apostolic Community to Apostolic Breakthrough’. As a surprise to myself and the two guys I was working with, Dick Scoggins and Bernard Sanders, the paper turned out to be quite controversial! But we really enjoyed discussing and working through the issues people were raising as it really helped us to refine and clarify what we were saying and trying to implement.

Since that time I have looked to establish apostolic communities wherever I am based or with the people I am working with. So far, I have been involved in three apostolic communities myself and have also helped a number of groups to move to this pattern, as well as, coaching a few communities as they moved to this or a similar pattern.

*When I use the term cross-culture here I am not just talking about going overseas or even reaching people from other nationalities. I am using it to describe anyone who is moving out of the comfort of their own ‘comfort zone’ or ‘culture’ and endeavoring to reach into someone else’s cultural norm. Think Chuck Smith reaching hippies in the 70’s, or David Wilkerson reaching out to gang members.  

**to understand the ‘new era’ I sense is coming see the first blog of this series.