IF WE CHARISMATICS KEEP RUNNING THE CHURCH LIKE THIS WE MIGHT NOT HAVE NOTHING TO LEAVE BEHIND
MANY CHARISMATICS ARE RUNNING CHURCHES LIKE A SHOP
SO I TOOK TIME TO STUDY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, THE ANGLICAN CHURCH AND EVEN THE BAPTIST CHURCH
WE ALSO STUDIED FOURSQUARE AND ESPECIALLY THE CHURCH OF GOD IN CHRIST (THEY WERE ABOUT 100 WHEN WE WERE 30) BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL OLDER THAN US.
NO CHURCH MINISTRY HAS A FUTURE WITHOUT STRUCTURE
GOD TOLD ME STRUCTURE IS THE ONLY WAY TO SECURE THE FUTURE OF ANY ORGANIZATION
IF YOU WANT A CHURCH MINISTRY THAT LASTS, GO AND STUDY THE ONES THAT HAVE LASTED LONG BEFORE YOU.
THE REASON WHY ORDER HASN’T COME IN MOST CHARISMATIC CHURCHES IS THAT MOST HEAD PASTORS HATE TO BE ACCOUNTABLE.
ANY CHURCH WITHOUT AN ACCOUNTABLE STRUCTURE WILL COLLAPSE
- Bishop David Oyedepo
Afternoon Session, Day Two
Church Growth Conference 2022 As soon as order was set in the early Church, the disciples multiplied. Order secures progress, order secures the future. No prayer and fasting will ever be a substitute for order. Let all things be done decently and in order. All things, not some things, not most things. God is not a God of confusion but of peace (I Corinthians 14:33). Church Gist. You can’t tell the value of order until you have set it. Even in our personal lives, when order is set, waste is curbed. Order is an asset of inestimable value to human existence. There will be chaos without order. No organization has a future without order. Most of the crisis that we see today in many organizations is traceable to lack of order. May the God of order visit us this afternoon.
We are looking at the second structure towards building with the next generation in view. The Administrative Structure. God who is not the author of confusion created the world by divine order. One after the other. What if He made the mistake of creating the animals before the grass came? They will all die. What if He created the fishes before the water? Church Gist. Everything is according to divine order. God is a God of order and He demands order from us. So we can have the best experience with Him on earth. God commands you to set order or you will be shattered.
Exodus 18:21-24.
Lack of order creates a crisis. Order installs peace. 2 Chronicles 15:3 -6. You will always get into trouble naturally when there is no order. Get committed to installing order. You set the order for a building from the foundation. If in the time of the founder, there is no order. It is lost. You don’t renovate a foundation. It is the foundation that determines what the building will look like. Church Gist. If you can’t see who to trust, there will be no order. If you handle everything, there will be no order. Order is the mother of peace, the mother of progress. It is the fountain of the future. Why we have never had any issue with what to eat and drink is because it is planned. So we are not just deciding it.
My wife believes very seriously in order because I have never been asked to add anything to what had been planned from day one till tomorrow. I never bought a pair of socks in my life for any child. I don’t have much time. Praying without planning is playing without knowing. Planning with programming your actions is just having fun living in the woods, with no direction. Church Gist. Programming with pursuit is dining with the dead. You have to pursue it for it to deliver. We had 70 of our senior ministers that came around during the final reading of the mandate. We couldn’t go to Church, we read page by page. That’s how serious order can be. Order will not set itself, you have to set it.
Titus 1:5
There is what we call setting out when you are doing a building construction. You don’t just go and dig, you have to set it out. We have to set order, it won’t set itself.
One of the things the Lord taught me very early is the place and power of biographies. Reading up the life of those that have gone before you, to see what you can learn from it. I love biographies so I introduced Biographical Studies in our Bible School to give people an idea of what those who have gone before them did to get where they got. So I could tell when I am on Billy Graham’s frequency. I could tell when I am on Oral Roberts’ frequency. I could tell Billy Sunday’s frequency and avoid the pitfalls that I come across. Jeremiah 6:16-17.
We are in an I.T. age, a software age, we don’t go for things hard. Is there software for fasting? Have you seen it before? Where you just press a button and your fasting is going on – 18 days, 39 days, 40 days. If you don’t move this thing, it will be here for the next ten years. Church Gist. Certain forces must go into play to set things in order. The principal raw material is planning, an undying commitment to planning towards where you want to go.
You can learn from nature. In my own view, the Catholics have done a good job in terms of structure. Where you can sit down and pull out materials of 600 years ago in their original form. How many of us in ministry today can pull out things of ten years? It’s known to be the longest organized system on the earth for over 2000 years of existence. If we keep going like this, not one thing will be traced to the charismatic in life. If we keep going like we are going without retracing our steps. Many are running it like a shop. I took time to study the Catholic system, I took time to study the Anglican Church, I studied some evangelicals like the Baptist, some of the younger ones like Foursquare but they are older than us so why don’t we learn if there is anything they have learnt and applied and it has worked for them. Church Gist. It is the cheapest way to find the way forward, when you are looking for a thing like this find examples. We spent a lot of time on the Church of God in Christ, they were 100 years and we were 30. So we need to find out what they did to be there till 100 years because I know a lot of ministries that were then when God called me and they don’t exist again. Not just in Nigeria, in America. Behind it is a lack of order. The pastor can go anywhere he likes and comes back anytime he likes, he is not accountable to anybody. That is not life. But every single ministry represented here today will stand the test of time. No one here will leave a dead ministry behind. No one will leave a dying ministry behind by taking responsibility early.
Do you want a Church Ministry that lasts? Go study the ones that have lasted. It is a lot of hard work to set order. No Church ministry has a future without an accountable structure, without a well-defined structure. I had an encounter with the Lord sometime in 1998 and He said “Structure! Structure!! Structure – the only way to secure the future of any system”. Church Gist. We came up with another structure that time to define principal offices, to specify their functions, tenure of office. Don’t define offices, define functions and make them tenured. Define lines of authority, define formats of accountability. Any Church without a proper organizational structure is bound to collapse.
The Apostles would have lost the fire in Acts 6 if they didn’t install order. If they were busy managing the distribution of food, they would have lost the fire. There would have not been Acts Chapter 6, it would have been one of the most short-lived movements. Church Gist. Quickly their system came alive, we can’t afford to lose the ministry. That’s what is difficult for many Pastors to do today. Let the helpers face outside the altar affairs, you face the altar and watch the ministry just blossoming and going. Acts 6:7. Let’s wake up and set order with a sense of mission. This is what we have to do, not what we like to do.
Somebody came to me and said “How do you manage all these things?” so you think I am the one managing all these things, you are wasting your time. I am managing the Bible with every sense of mission. I read and I write daily. Church Gist. My diary that I wrote on the 8th of March is finished. The one I brought here just came on the 22nd of this month. I am managing my portion of the assignment.
- Your ministry will be stress free in the name of Jesus Christ.
Acts 16:4-5.
Can I tell you what order has not come to play in most parts of our own movement as Charismatics? The Head Pastors hate to be accountable. I had no right to access any Church funds by a law that I set and subscribe to. Life is so easy but people don’t want to be accountable. In our Churches today, you know the level of order we have in our local Churches. Church Gist. There is the Chairman of the Church Board. There is Chairman of Local Church Council, Chairman Audit. The smallest of our schools has a Governing Council. No one just wakes up from the wrong side of the bed and does what they like. It goes through a process before you approve anything.
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