Many of you that know me know I am friends with Arthur Burk.
And for those of you that are friends with him, you know how deeply he wars against the welfare and poverty spirits.
Neither of which are limited to finanical matters.
But, in the last few days, I have noticed a trend among some of my friends, and those that think of SLG as a home, and the smaller group I co-lead as a tribe or a church family.
But, recently, Arthur threw down a pretty substantial gauntlet in the midst of the tribe, and in that post he made an observation about the way the Fivefold Ministry was modeled for us, starting in the early 80, He wrote:
Two changes occurred in the 1980s which dramatically impacted the core values of Western Christianity.
One was the emergence of inner healing and deliverance (called personal ministry for the purposes of this article) and the other was the emergence of the “Fivefold Ministry” with the focus on apostles and prophets.
The combination of the two had devastating results.
On the Fivefold side of things, it massively established a two-tier Christian culture. To have an elite group, you have to have a non-elite group. When you have the group in power, there has to be a powerless group. When you have those who hear from God for others, there has to be the group that can’t hear from God.
This dynamic has recurred regularly throughout church history. There are always those who lust for power and always those who delighted in powerlessness because it justifies their lifestyle of dependence, and always those in the middle who go with the flow to be agreeable.
It is a viable milieu for the emergence, time and again, of first class and second class Christians.
But in the confluence of the Fivefold and personal ministry, we developed a much larger “upper class” than the usual clergy/laity split.
Now there is a small army of people who have supposed power with God or with demons, and still a substantial pool of people who are needy and go to the power people to get fixed.
And THIS is the core issue.
Arthur Burk, Why Some Events Are Not Recorded
Gang, as much as some of us “need” what only Arthur has and can provide, we have not stopped to unpack with the Trinity what He has for us to unpack. We treat every “no” as a church rejection, and we think if we beg harder, the “no” will turn into a “yes”.
And we don’t realize that the Fivefold Ministry, and the satanic view of covering that we in the charismatic church have developed, have both caused us to view the church as divided into the spiritual haves and the spiritual have-nots.
And we have reduced ourselves from adults who can chew filet mignon to helpless babies that are sucking on the breasts of whatever the Fivefold will let us have.
NEWS FLASH: There is no distinction. There is not a division. If you think in terms of the anointed apostle or prophet or bishop or pooh-bah who hears from God, then you are also likely to come to the conclusion, whether spoken or unspoken, that there are people who do not have the access and are powerless without it.
You are not helpless. You do not depend on God’s man or woman to find whatever you need. You do not depend on someone recording their truth so you can have it.
Truly, we have all the access we can handle, and honestly, Father’s desire to give always outstrips our desire to take in.
Put differently, the Fivefold has reduced us to helpless people who think there are people who can hear, which by reason means we also believe there are people who cannot hear.
People more often than not do not hear because they do not want to hear. Or they only want to hear a part, and they don’t want to hear the rest.
What remains for us is to reject and throw out the current manifestation of the Fivefold, and to seek the Lord for HIS manifestation of what it really should look like.
And it doesn’t look helpless, gang.
Just my take on some of these things.