For those who are followers of Jesus and advocates of not preaching and teaching, but mere musical worship and prayer, I have the following to say: the work of unpacking the text is still necessary.
Allow me cite the existence of one document whose existence shows why the task of preaching and unpacking is necessary among groups of believers: The Passion Paraphrase.
The Passion is what happens when the work of robust discussion of the bibical text is squelched in churches, probably because:
1) we are afraid of people shelving the fruit of the spirit,
2) we lack the discernment to know when a conversation is going off the rails, rather defaulting to our natural or soulish faculties, and
3) we mistake vigorous back-and-forth, loud voices, or raised voices for anger or murder or lack of sanity (see #2).
Truly, the Passion is an interpretation of the text to include certain buzzwords that are not in the text, and it is the result of a person who does not lead a translation team or is a translator (I am friends with the person with whom Mr. Brian Simmons consulted on Genesis, and most of that person’s counsel was ignored) working from original manuscripts.
Like so many issues in the Charismatic Movement, we have frequently put disagreement and robust discussion on lockdown, treating those behaviors readily as dishonoring. I have watched as friends dared to call into question what is done in secret or isolation, or to even ask questions about things that unsettle them, called out for dishonoring. And when they leave, they are offended.
We are not having the vigorous discussion that we must have about what is really wrong in many issues in the church.
Another example of this refusal to discuss or question is the probelms with all of the current models of the Fivefold Ministry, and why just about every model of that is broken. Current teaching does not put the apostolic and the prophetic in their proper place at the bottom and alongside other gifts but rather lifts them up to the top of a mountain that should not exist and vests them with an form of authority that is nothing like what Jesus placed on them, and sets them in a heirarchical fashion when that is a violation of the biblical text.
Granted, I am not saying dishonor in conversations isn’t happening. It is. However, there are regularly times when concerns that are raised and concuding discussions with diagreements are treated as dishonor.
I am not sorry for saying we need to be reintroduced to vigorous dialogue, debate, disagreement without being gaslighted with words like “heretic” or “dishonor”.
Arthur Burk has clearly called out the garbage and lack of integrity and crap that passes as covering and the fivefold in both of his teachings called High Impact Christians and Tough Spots In Inner Healing, and much of the church has responded with silence and continuance of bad behavior. Just about all of the models proceed from a mindset of control and are empowered by the spirit of Antichrist.
Apostolic has nothing to do with Authority or Oversight. It’s about foundations. Period.
Is it any wonder we Charismatics have given John MacArthur so much ammunition? It’s because there is something really wrong, and we are not correcting the junk, and we are character-assassinating those who speak up. Gang, this must stop. Because the movement is rapidly and continually building a stronghold for the Antichrist in our midst and G-d had to send a Pale Horse plague to get us to stop this nonsense, break us apart into our basic units, and to see how badly we have been controlling one another, so we can see the Spirit of Fear that He is trying to expose to us that we walk in and is controlling us to the point that we have to do whatever the dictators in government say.
For my fellow Americans who follow the L-rd, you have ceded over control and authority of your nation to the few corrupt, and you have failed to recognize your place as the kings in authority (We The People: given the Constitution is the Group of Founding Principles that provide the governing framework for this nation, Romans 13:1-2 and 1 Timothy 2:1-2 point a nation to pray for and submit to whatever individual or aggregate governs that nation. The United States is a nation of laws, and therefore, in the context of the above passages, we look to our earliest documents, namely the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution for guidance on who is in charg. And the Constitution and the Declaration of Indendence both say in their openings that those in authority are the people, the citizens. Ultimate authority rests with us, who elects representatives to SERVE, not RULE. We are those in authority, and, like Jar Jar Binks, we have exhorted our fellow leaders to give emergency powers to the Chancellor, who, with the PATRIOT ACT and the National Defense Authorization Act, created the Department of Homeland Security, which has legalized gross violations of the 1st, 4th, and 10 Amendments.
Likewise, we as Christians have ceded control to these “apostles” and treat them as our covering, when it has been proven repeatedly that covering does NOTHING to augment the safety of a beliver. It is because we have lost the plot that we are getting destroyed, and we are further lulled to sleep by a welfare spirit that teaches us to depend on another man’s or another woman’s gift to tell us what to do. And so we move from prophet to prophet and ask them to have our dreams for us (COUGH COUGH Rick Joyner, Jeremiah Johnson) and give us our national words, when that was never the way G-d designed it. He designed for us somethign to be sustainable, but we suck each other dry because we demand they give us of their gifts. It was never about us sticking our hose in someone else’s tank and throwing the pump on high so we can drain them. It was about us putting our hoses in the infinence of the L-rd of Bethel and turning THAT pump on high, so we can hear for ourselves.
If we do not correct the problem, worse things will happen, because G-d is trying to return us back to Himself. And if he has to use the panic caused by news of plauges to expose the spirit of fear, and crooked sticks like John MacArthur to reveal our welfare spirit, and actual prophets like Arthur Burk to show us the poisonous, vitriolic cocktail of codependence and slavery we have drunk, then so be it.
That is the best I can say for now.