1. My Personal Commitment
© 2018 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
I lived eighteen years of my life in the context of intentional, Spirit-filled Christian community, from age 20 to age 41. Through a series of very specific interactions of God with me, when I was 21 and 22, I commitment myself absolutely to the revelation of Jesus Christ through His Church.
I left Christian community with my family in 1998 because the communities I had known did not measure with the aching desire and knowing of my heart. For these 20 years since, every day, I have longed for and believed God for and in my great inability reached towards the fulfillment of that Christ Community of my heart, the fulness of Jesus in His Church, the revelation of Father.
My Communities. Here are the Christian communities where I lived.
- Graham River Farm in British Columbia – three visits totaling one year. 1977-1979.
- Bowens Mill community in Georgia – three times totaling five years. 1978, 1981-1985, 1996-1997.
- Citra community in Florida – four months in 1978.
- Albuquerque community in New Mexico – one-and-one-half years. 1979-1980.
- Blueberry community in British Columbia – eight-and-one-half years, two different times. 1986-1996.
- Blair Valley community in British Columbia - one-and-one-half years. 1997-1998.
Nonetheless, my experience included innumerable difficult things, as one should expect when relating closely with people. At the same time, Nicene theology, especially the views of the cross and the flesh held by most Christians, led to ways of relating to one another and word being preached that created only agony inside me because I knew it was not the life together as I carried inside my heart.
Returning to Community. Now, moving back into a community experience would be a big deal and a step not to be taken lightly. I would not subject myself or my family to anything that is built on any other word than the one that is presently flowing out of me. Community is give-and-take, most definitely, and I would not be “the boss.” However, I cannot be a part of something that would be religious and deadly or unless I play a leading role in the Spirit, the philosophy, and the direction of that community.
I do not trust most Christian leaders. I KNOW that I cannot walk together with something with which I am not in full agreement. So, all of my comments are about community as I have tasted it – as I know that it can be by God’s grace.
1. God Made Me for Community. I always loved community. I love being around God’s people. I am a solitary man on the one hand, but I always gravitate towards people on the other. I am both. Even when I was a teenager and not walking with the Lord, community beckoned to my heart. When I touched up against it, on occasion, I heard it calling to me.
I am designed in many ways by God for life together, not the least of which is my own disabilities, as God has given disability to each, so that we might need one another. Yet my abilities are also very in tune with the needs and the workings of a Christian Community.
I have never felt at home except inside of life together.
2. The Richness of Fellowship. There is a fellowship, a togetherness, a seeking God together, that is totally absent, it simply does not exist outside of community. The American way of life is so empty and barren.
In community your lives are entwined together with each other in richness. All that is my brother now belongs to me, and I enjoy all the differences and all the perspectives that each one provides. In community, fellowship is ongoing and spontaneous. Enjoying one another in peace after the evening meal is the highlight of the day. I enjoy people, but often, just as an observer. I like to watch others interact together, for in that way, I can know and enjoy each one.
3. The Immediate Knowledge of God Among Us. In community there is the anointing and the potential for the release of so much that is God. Because everyone’s heart is set on seeking to know the Lord together, both formally, in the services, and informally, in daily fellowship, the immediate knowledge of God among us is simply a normal part of life. And God among us is power, power to heal and to set free.
God with us, directing our steps and revealing Himself, is normal in community as I have known it. Church outside of community doesn’t even come close. Yes, we know God with us as individuals, but knowing God with us as a family together is a far greater knowledge of God.
4. The Bracing Winds of Reality. My heart has never connected with anything I have been a part of in this world. In community you are working for one another in the Lord. I don’t care for working at a secular job. I much prefer to build the gathering together of brethren.
Community is the very opposite of “escape.” It is far more difficult and trying than the hardest thing in the disconnectedness of life in the world. Those who love the bracing winds of reality walk together as the body of Christ. Community is where you have to forgive, nearly every day. In the church in the world, you hardly ever have to forgive anyone. I love the giving of my heart, poured out completely, in the building of community, of the gathering together of God’s people.
5. The Blessing Found Nowhere Else. I am uninterested in “elitism” in any form. However, there is an anointing of God upon the corporate life of community, as brethren gather together to worship Him and to share Christ with each other that is simply NOT found or experienced by anyone outside of community. It is impossible to explain to someone that there is a grace and anointing of God that they have never tasted and will never taste except inside of community. Many may dispute me on that, but the truth is, they simply do not know.
David says that the blessing is in the cluster. No matter the many difficulties, there is an anointing of the Holy Spirit upon the gathering together, an anointing of joy and power, that I have never known anywhere except in community.
6. Life Together. Christ is a corporate man. He is a many-membered body. The American way of life seems “normal” to us because it is all everyone knows. But most people have no idea how twisted and abnormal modern American life really is. Through history, most people have lived in some form of community and been a part of their neighbors’ lives.
The isolation of the world sends the children off to their isolated warehouses, divorced from life and reality, sitting in rows with other kids, and the old folks to their warehouses, and the parents go off each day to their warehouses and everyone is disconnected and unreal. The kingdom of God is and will be community in one form or another – members one of another. Life together.
7. Loving One Another. The largest amount of teaching on one topic in the epistles is on the relationships together of brethren in church life. So much of the gospel finds its working out in life together, things that we never consider in any application of church once a week with all the plastic smiles.
The Promised Land is the life of Christ, loving one another with a pure heart fervently. And the Promised Land is filled with giants, not sunflowers. It is filled with rich fruit, and it is filled with bloody difficulty. We don’t know the one without the other. James and Peter both said that it is not a strange thing that Christ-life is filled with fiery trials and strange difficulties. What is strange is a Christian life that is not filled with all the difficulties of walking together in love.
8. Facing the Storm Together. Living together on a rural agricultural property is the only possible way we will survive the shattering of the American support system, a shattering that is at the door. People have no idea what life will be like when the electricity shuts off and the gasoline is no longer there. No one knows how to get their life out of the ground.
This is real and imminent. The system that brings us our sustenance is more fragile than most people imagine. And when it’s gone, then Christians who are isolated and alone will be hard-pressed. Yes, we will all have to live by the open power and provision of the heavens before this is over, but a shared life on a property with gardens and pastures is just so much better than facing the onslaught alone.
9. A Shared Life. There are so many outward advantages to life together that just don’t exist in our isolated suburban living. When life is shared, then everyone can enjoy the use of things that each one separately could never have. I’m looking forward to things like a woodshop, chickens, a wood for the children to build forts in, nice gardens and fruit trees, an herbarium or a trip to relatives without worrying about the bills.
I love sharing meals together. Gathering together in the community dining room after a day’s work. Relaxing around the tables. Enjoying the laughter and the buzz of conversation. Enjoying the stories that different ones have to share. A shared life is so rich. Life in the American way of isolation and separation is so barren.
10. Engaging with the Holy. There is an engaging together with the things of God in the Holy of Holies that is not known outside of Christian community. There is a knowledge of life-power, arising from within each one, that individuals do not and cannot know outside of full commitment together. Church life, full commitment together, is the place of God’s choosing, where God “shows up,” where God shows Himself as He is.
This knowledge of God is not found outside of such commitment together. Yet inside of life together, the unfolding of the holiest things of God is normal and ongoing. How I miss these things for myself and my family through these years we have not been living in community.
11. God Did Not Make Me for the World. I prefer going in the opposite direction of the majority. When I’m in the same track as the herd, I get very nervous. I love radical Christianity. I thrive on “heresy,” that is, what is called “heresy” by people who don’t know God very well.
I don’t care much for a Christianity that is insipid and that fits so comfortably into this world, that finds an ability to be “good Americans.” I love the wilderness; I love that which defies the falseness of the world.
I love being on the cutting edge of what God is doing in the earth, part of the mighty moving of the river of God, of power, of life. I want to be front and center in the moment when the Father Himself reveals Himself to all through His fully completed temple. I want to know Him.
12. A True Foundation of Ministry. Community would take the ministry the Lord has given me and place it on a far larger platform.
A community, however small, is a place to which you can invite traveling ministries; I would invite some I know who move in precious anointings that most don’t even know exist. It is a place where people can visit for services and conventions. It is a launching place to go out from and take the word of the revelation of Jesus Christ to others. It is a place where you can tell people, “If you want to taste of what God is doing in the earth, then come and see.”
I know that there is no real witness of Christ as He is apart from committed Church life, brethren walking together in love.