Saturday, March 30, 2013
Friday, March 22, 2013
A Letter to my Pastor
Dear Pastor ,
First of all, I want to thank you. You have been a light to me in so many ways. I can't tell you how many times I have prayed for specific answers to specific questions. There were times when I was sitting in church and the message that you delivered pin pointed my exact problem.
There have been times when Christ has put a verse in my heart. I would go to church the next day, and, out of the entire Bible, the verse in which Christ revealed Himself, would be the central point of your message.
I Know that Christ speaks to you. I've seen it countless times. It is unquestionable.
I thank you for the freedom that we have to speak. I love how you give us a voice to share what Christ is doing in our lives and in our hearts. That is a freedom that a lot of churches do not have.
Are we perfect?
No. But, this I can say. We have love for one another, and I can see and sense your love for the lost and the "least of these."
Why I am writing this letter?
I have sat silent on too many occasions. While others were sharing their testimonies, I should've spoken. But, speaking is not my virtue, I am a writer.
I was born to write. Writing is the reason that God created me.
I have spoken numerous times about my encounters with the darkness. One night I was sleeping. I could feel a darkness enter my room. My head was held down and I could not move. Truthfully, I don't know if I was awake or dreaming, but I felt a pain in my belly that was unfathomable and excrutiating. I felt as if every demon in Hell was trying to rip apart my insides. I was asleep, but the pain was more suffocating and real. I dreamt that I walked downstairs to my mom's computer and I started writing.
I wrote, as I wrote.. the lies of the enemy were exposed.
A few days later, I was in church. Mrs. Mitzi looked at me and told me that God was going to use me in my writing. You spoke the very same thing. I had not told a single soul, at that point, about my dream.
God is moving among us.
The one thing that He showed me is that in order to build something new, we must first tear down the old.
We do that with the Truth. The Truth tears down the lies. I have found that we are so engulfed in centuries of lies, that we aren't even aware of how deeply we are affected.
As a Body of Believers, we are hurting. Church is not what it is designed to be.
Christ showed me something in the Book of Acts. The early church. The one that was unstained by demoniationalism and religous hatred. The one where the Believers used their gifts and functioned as whole...The ones who didn't look at sharing as a "hippie" concept that left with the 60's. The one's who were so engulfed with Christ and others that were willing to give up every single thing they owned.
Miracles abounded. The numbers being saved increased daily.
I once read that people are so disallusioned with the institutionalized church that many will return. And think of the disciples. They took Christ with them everywhere. They didn't confine Christ to a building. Instead, they took Him and His message of the Cross wherever their feet would take them.
We are those disciples.
I once had a vision. I saw thousands of people walking on rough terrain. They were marching towards something. The climb was laborious, and the journey was difficult. There was immense darkness, but each person was walking in unision. Each one was carrying a lampstand, containing the very light of Christ. It lit up the darkness and made for something beautiful and extraordinary. They were the city on a Hill, and the place that they were marching was the Cross.
The world is dying and the message of the Cross has been diluted amongst today's false teachings.
We need to bring it back.
Christ is calling us out of our comfort zones.
So many churches look alike today, and very few represent the real Jesus.
I once heard that church is not a building, but about the Body of Believers acting in one mind and in one accord. I read that we are the living stones, not carved by human hands. I believe that.
I am going to share some things I have learned with you over the course of the next few weeks and months.
They will be hard to hear and hard to read, but the one thing that Christ has been showing me..is what is wrong with our churches today. There have been times when I have wept over the things that I have seen. There have been times when I have spoken against things that I thought were wrong, only to be shoved to the side and told that I don't matter. I have been called names because I dared to write about what is wrong in our churches.
Christ said that He is coming for a spotless Bride, and we are anything but...
I am in a humbling place. I can only hope that the things that I present to you don't offend. That is not my purpose or intent. I simply want to see us grow. I want to see us walk in the miracles that Christ has promised. I want us to be more unified, each using our gifts in the capacity that Christ has called us to use them.
I want to see the lost seeing the light of Christ in us and through us..
I want to see the world begin to see that hyprocrital Christians and a loving Christ are not one in the same.
I want to feed, to clothe, to care for the least of these and show the world that faith without works is dead.
I want to remind the world that God prospers us, but the prospering comes through sharing. When Jesus shared the loaves and fishes, He taught us that when we do the will of the Father, when we share, He multiplies..
anyhow, I want to thank you for all that you have done. My prayers are with you, and every Christian in every denomination. My prayers are with every man, woman, and child in this dark world.
If the Christians would realize that we are all family and begin to treat the lost and the unsaved like family also, then Christ's glory would be revealed.
On another note, as I reveal to you the things that Christ has shown me..over the course of the next few week and months, I encourage you to let me know if there is anything that doesn't line up with the Word and the Spirit of Christ. We are to test all things. I am humble enough to admit that I can and do make mistakes, and that, as a Body of Believers, we all need one another.
Love and God Bless
Rachelle
First of all, I want to thank you. You have been a light to me in so many ways. I can't tell you how many times I have prayed for specific answers to specific questions. There were times when I was sitting in church and the message that you delivered pin pointed my exact problem.
There have been times when Christ has put a verse in my heart. I would go to church the next day, and, out of the entire Bible, the verse in which Christ revealed Himself, would be the central point of your message.
I Know that Christ speaks to you. I've seen it countless times. It is unquestionable.
I thank you for the freedom that we have to speak. I love how you give us a voice to share what Christ is doing in our lives and in our hearts. That is a freedom that a lot of churches do not have.
Are we perfect?
No. But, this I can say. We have love for one another, and I can see and sense your love for the lost and the "least of these."
Why I am writing this letter?
I have sat silent on too many occasions. While others were sharing their testimonies, I should've spoken. But, speaking is not my virtue, I am a writer.
I was born to write. Writing is the reason that God created me.
I have spoken numerous times about my encounters with the darkness. One night I was sleeping. I could feel a darkness enter my room. My head was held down and I could not move. Truthfully, I don't know if I was awake or dreaming, but I felt a pain in my belly that was unfathomable and excrutiating. I felt as if every demon in Hell was trying to rip apart my insides. I was asleep, but the pain was more suffocating and real. I dreamt that I walked downstairs to my mom's computer and I started writing.
I wrote, as I wrote.. the lies of the enemy were exposed.
A few days later, I was in church. Mrs. Mitzi looked at me and told me that God was going to use me in my writing. You spoke the very same thing. I had not told a single soul, at that point, about my dream.
God is moving among us.
The one thing that He showed me is that in order to build something new, we must first tear down the old.
We do that with the Truth. The Truth tears down the lies. I have found that we are so engulfed in centuries of lies, that we aren't even aware of how deeply we are affected.
As a Body of Believers, we are hurting. Church is not what it is designed to be.
Christ showed me something in the Book of Acts. The early church. The one that was unstained by demoniationalism and religous hatred. The one where the Believers used their gifts and functioned as whole...The ones who didn't look at sharing as a "hippie" concept that left with the 60's. The one's who were so engulfed with Christ and others that were willing to give up every single thing they owned.
Miracles abounded. The numbers being saved increased daily.
I once read that people are so disallusioned with the institutionalized church that many will return. And think of the disciples. They took Christ with them everywhere. They didn't confine Christ to a building. Instead, they took Him and His message of the Cross wherever their feet would take them.
We are those disciples.
I once had a vision. I saw thousands of people walking on rough terrain. They were marching towards something. The climb was laborious, and the journey was difficult. There was immense darkness, but each person was walking in unision. Each one was carrying a lampstand, containing the very light of Christ. It lit up the darkness and made for something beautiful and extraordinary. They were the city on a Hill, and the place that they were marching was the Cross.
The world is dying and the message of the Cross has been diluted amongst today's false teachings.
We need to bring it back.
Christ is calling us out of our comfort zones.
So many churches look alike today, and very few represent the real Jesus.
I once heard that church is not a building, but about the Body of Believers acting in one mind and in one accord. I read that we are the living stones, not carved by human hands. I believe that.
I am going to share some things I have learned with you over the course of the next few weeks and months.
They will be hard to hear and hard to read, but the one thing that Christ has been showing me..is what is wrong with our churches today. There have been times when I have wept over the things that I have seen. There have been times when I have spoken against things that I thought were wrong, only to be shoved to the side and told that I don't matter. I have been called names because I dared to write about what is wrong in our churches.
Christ said that He is coming for a spotless Bride, and we are anything but...
I am in a humbling place. I can only hope that the things that I present to you don't offend. That is not my purpose or intent. I simply want to see us grow. I want to see us walk in the miracles that Christ has promised. I want us to be more unified, each using our gifts in the capacity that Christ has called us to use them.
I want to see the lost seeing the light of Christ in us and through us..
I want to see the world begin to see that hyprocrital Christians and a loving Christ are not one in the same.
I want to feed, to clothe, to care for the least of these and show the world that faith without works is dead.
I want to remind the world that God prospers us, but the prospering comes through sharing. When Jesus shared the loaves and fishes, He taught us that when we do the will of the Father, when we share, He multiplies..
anyhow, I want to thank you for all that you have done. My prayers are with you, and every Christian in every denomination. My prayers are with every man, woman, and child in this dark world.
If the Christians would realize that we are all family and begin to treat the lost and the unsaved like family also, then Christ's glory would be revealed.
On another note, as I reveal to you the things that Christ has shown me..over the course of the next few week and months, I encourage you to let me know if there is anything that doesn't line up with the Word and the Spirit of Christ. We are to test all things. I am humble enough to admit that I can and do make mistakes, and that, as a Body of Believers, we all need one another.
Love and God Bless
Rachelle
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Apology to the World
| Apology To The World - Doug Perry |  |  |  |
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Open Letter of Apology to The World Please bear with me, this is long overdue and there's lots of ground to cover. I want to make sure that I get it all out. Not just for me, but because I think you need to hear it. Maybe there are other Christians out there as well that need to make apologies and will find courage here. I appreciate your time, I know it's valuable. Dear Members of the World, I'm just a guy, nobody really. Son of a preacher and missionary. Years and years of Vacation Bible Schools, summer camps, youth ski trips, puppet shows, revivals, choir trips - you name it. Even went to a Christian college and got a degree in religion. I ended up in the business world, but I spent two decades tithing, sitting on committees, teaching Sunday School, going to seminars and conferences, etc. I even met my wife in the single's class at church. I'm not a bad guy, I've been mostly behaving myself and everybody seems to like me. I do some good stuff here and there. But lately I've been trying to understand Jesus more and stuff I never noticed before has really started to bug me. I've been taking a look around and I'm having a hard time making sense of what it is we've built here. So, it just seemed like, whether anybody else says it or not, I need to take responsibility for the part I played and say what I have to say. Here we go ... I know you think that Christians are a big bunch of hypocrites. We say we're more "religious" and we're going to heaven and you're not, and then we drive our big shiny cars with little fishies on the trunk and cut you off in traffic as we race by the homeless guy on the corner. We average just 2% of our money to church and charity, despite that we say the Bible is the word of God and it says we're supposed to give everything. On average, we buy just as many big screen TVs and bass boats and fur coats and makeup and baseball cards and online porn as anybody else. Maybe more. You've seen leader after leader end up in jail or court or a sex scandal of one sort or another. Well ... you're right. We're guilty of all of it. We've done it all. And, I'm really sorry. You see our cheesy TV shows and slick guys begging for money and you get that there's something seriously sneaky and wrong here. A high-pressure call for money so they can stay on the air? Were we supposed to use Jesus as just another form of entertainment? Who do we think we're kidding? Where's Jesus in all this? Aren't we supposed to rely on him? Isn't He going to meet our needs if we're inside His will? What happened to sacrifice and suffering and helping the poor? I'm just sick about this. I mean, the church leaders, they're not all bad guys, there are lots and lots of really hard-working well-meaning folks who love and care and are meeting real needs in the community. Some of them understand and love Jesus - but I'm just real sure those pastors don't drive Bentley's, have multi-million dollar homes and their own lear jets! I mean, what "god" are we worshipping? Money? Ego? Power? You see our massive shiny new buildings all over the place. Heck, maybe we even kicked you out of your house so we could expand our parking lots. You can't figure out why we need four different Christian churches on four corners of the same intersection. We've got playgrounds and bowling alleys and basketball leagues. We've got Starbucks coffee in the sanctuary. We've got orchestras and giant chandeliers and fountains out front. We've got bookstores full of "jesus junk" with every imaginable style and flavor of religious knick-knack. But where's Jesus? Is this what HE wanted? Oh, sure, there are good folks all over and not every church is such a mess, but Christians are the ones that say we're supposed to be "One Body." So even the good ones are guilty of not putting a stop to it sooner. We were supposed to keep each other in line and not tolerate factions and dissensions and greed and idolatry and all this other bad stuff. Man, we really blew it! We've got 33,000 denominations and most of them won't talk to the other ones. We lose over $5 million a day to fraud from "trusted" people inside the church! We spend 95% of all our money on our own comforts and programs and happy family fun time shows and we let 250 MILLION Christians in other countries live on the very edge of starvation. Not to mention the billion or so that have never even once heard of Jesus - or the homeless guy downtown we almost ran over when we cut you off. We're as guilty as we can be. All of us. Nobody is exempt. We should have put a stop to it a lot sooner. But I can't apologize on behalf of anyone else. This is about me. I know that you might have gone to church as a kid and stopped going as soon as you could. I know that you might even have been abused by somebody in the church! Maybe we got you all fired up and then just let you drift off like we didn't really care. Maybe you just don't fit our "profile." You might have piercings and purple hair or tattoos or been in jail -- and somewhere inside you just know that even if you wanted to go to church one Sunday, it would not go well. I'm sorry for that. Jesus loves you. He always hung out with the most unexpected people. He had the biggest heart for the folks everybody else tried to ignore. What have we done? We've told you to put on a sweater and some loafers or you can't go to heaven. I just want to throw up. Look, I know you're mad. And you have a right to be. We've done you wrong for a LONG time now. There's some things about Jesus that people need to hear, but we've buried a beautiful masterpiece under hundreds of layers of soft pink latex paint. If you have a Bible handy, look up Matthew 23. (If you don't, you can look it up here - www.BibleGateway.com .) Find it? Read it carefully, the Pharisees were the "religious" people of the day, the leaders of the faith. In this chapter Jesus SEVEN times says how pitiful and wretched and cursed they are for what they're doing to the people they're supposed to be leading. He even calls them "white washed tombs of dead mens bones" and a "brood of vipers"! I don't have time here, but read it and see if we're not doing EVERY single one of those things. Jesus can't possibly be happy about what we've done to you. Sure, we like to kid ourselves and pretend everything is OK - but it's not. We're hated. Now, please understand, Jesus was hated, too. But that was because he said hard things and sometimes people don't like hearing the Truth. And he promised we would be hated if we were like him. But that's not why we're hated at the moment. We're hated right now because we're a giant pack of lying hypocrites that say one thing and do something else altogether. If we were hated because we were like Jesus, that would be one thing, but that's not it at all. You see right through our happy music and fluffy services and you can tell there's something desperately wrong here. We're no different than anybody else - except that we say we're better than you. It was never supposed to be like this. Jesus asked us to care for the widows and orphans, to feed the hungry, care for the sick, visit those in prison, reach the lost. He wanted us to love our enemies and pray for them. He cared about human justice and suffering, the lost and lonely. But I don't think He would have marched on a picket line - He had His mind on much bigger problems. He wanted us to focus on the eternal things, not the everyday. He never once said to go into all the world and build big buildings and divide up into factions and buy Bentleys. Just the opposite! I get that you're mad at us and I think you have a right to be, but please understand, you're mad at what we've made under our own power, you're mad at "Churchianity." That's different than Christ and what he wanted. Don't be mad at Jesus! This mess wasn't His idea! Look, I'm really sorry. I accept responsibility for my part in having hurt you. But I'm committing to you all, dear Members of the World, that I'm not going to do it any more. Not a single penny more. I'm not going to put my faith in "Churchianity" or any leader or program or TV show -- but in Christ Jesus and His salvation. That's when I was set free and began to see that God wants and expects more of us than this. And I'm not helping anybody that's not fully committed to the same thing. It took centuries to build this monster, so it's not like it's going to just turn around overnight. But the times are changing and we're way overdue for something new. Big bad things are happening - like the tsunami in Asia - and I think more are coming. I don't want any more time to go by without having said this. I'm sorry for all the time and money I've wasted. But Jesus saves. Really. The church itself isn't even the point. Jesus is the real deal. He lived and He died for my sins and He rose again. He is who He said He was and He cares about me - and you. He's our only hope. We need places you can go that will only teach Jesus and will not be swayed or tempted or distracted by anything else. God willing, that's coming. Please don't think all Christians are just posers. Some of them really mean it when they say they belong to Christ. The problem is mostly in the West where we're all comfy and complacent and seem to like it that way. The Christians in China and other places are deadly serious. There's no room for anything but Jesus when you're on the run from the government. They are dying every day for their faith and doing crazy hard things because they're absolutely committed to Christ. These are martyrs. People willing to crucify little pieces of themselves every day to be more like Christ. People willing to set aside everything they want to do what Christ wants. People willing to rot in prison or take a beating or die if that's what it's going to take. People that act in pure love and never back down. I'm not worthy to tie their shoes. And there are some like that here, too, and I hope we can get a lot more people to start living that way. It's way overdue. If you're talking to someone and they tell you they're a Christian, ask them if they're the kind of Christian that really means it all the time or the kind that just means it on Sunday. The Bible says we'll know them by their "fruits" - by the faith and purity and love in their deeds and words. When you find one that proves Christ is in them by how much they love you, ask them to tell you all about Jesus. If you know one of those fearless martyrs that speaks nothing but pure, clean, hard Truth - ask lots of questions. Truth is a lot more rare than you would think. But don't settle for soft, fluffy and comfortable anymore - that's not in the Bible. As for me and my house, we're really sorry. From now on, we're going to serve the Lord, not "Churchianity." We're going to try to call together as many of those martyrs as we can and start doing what Christ wanted. If I run into you someday, please give me a chance to shake your hand and apologize in person. I'm going to try harder from now on, I promise. I think there are lots of others feeling the same way, so don't be surprised if you start hearing stuff like this more often. Thanks for your time. I hope it helps. Doug Perry - Liberty, Missouri, USA www.FellowshipOfTheMartyrs.com fotm@FellowshipOfTheMartyrs.com P.S. If you would like to help me get this apology to everybody in the world, please forward it on - but please don't make any changes. A PDF file is available on the website if you want to print it off. Audio, too. I think this needs to be said. Thanks! You can download the entire Apology to the World book that includes lots of writings from this site, plus some new stuff here - Download full E-Book FREE. |
Wednesday, March 20, 2013
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Terribly Interesting: Talk to me, Abba.
Terribly Interesting: Talk to me, Abba.: I know the path for you. It is not one lined with self-help books and false religious ideas. The path I have laid out for you is one I have ...
Terribly Interesting: Preacher, Repent!
Terribly Interesting: Preacher, Repent!: On September 10th and 11th, Denbigh and I (along with our dear friends Micah and Jana Beard) were blessed to attend The Greater Cause. It w...
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