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Systems, Structure or the Holy Spirit.



The Christian Leader and the Holy Spirit.

I have for a while been thinking about the idea of change and the process of change when re-engineering a church. I have also been looking at the place of the Holy Spirit in that process and in the church itself. We are after all a spiritual entity, we are in the world but not of the world.

Who is the Holy Spirit? According to Jesus he is our advocate our comforter. He will come and convict and convince the world of sin, righteousness and judgement. He is the one that empowers the church and when he speaks to us he does so to comfort, edify and exhort the church. 

I believe when a Christian leader is taking a church through change that there is a great need not only to put in place structure and systems to ensure that the process of change can be outworked. But I also feel and believe there is a need to submit to and make room for the outworking of the Holy Spirit.

As I see it there are two dangers; The danger that a church becomes too structured and program and event orientated that there is a reluctance to stop proceedings for what might be God the Holy Spirit wanting to speak, move amongst us, heal comfort or edify. Or the other danger is to have no structure or systems in place and our services become a free for all and that silly and weird things happen that might to some appear to be godly but are in fact purely of the flesh and the mind.

I am by persuasion Pentecostal in my leanings and upbringing. However, I have been in Pentecostal churches that have for all intents and purposes forgotten their roots and are more Methodist ( my apologies to Methodist's) in the way they do some services, they have congregation members who are, or claim to be third generation Pentecostal but who have no real experience with Jesus and have not experienced the baptism of the Holy Spirit. In fact I have come across more Baptists and Methodists who are more Pentecostal than many Pentecostals. I have also been in churches that have strong structure and systems in place and have great worship services. On occasion in these services when there has been a wonderful presence of the Holy Spirit, rather than allow a moment to set aside the program to let God move, have stopped the worship to have announcements.

Many mega churches and mega churches in the waiting can make the mistake- and have a tendency, to concentrate on events rather than people and forget the move of the Holy Spirit entirely. It's all about the time and the run-sheet.

What then is the answer? We need to always remember that the Holy Spirit is there to help us, he is the one who sets up the divine appointments that lets God grow his church. We are the ones that create the atmosphere to let the Holy Spirit do his work. We should not let our systems get in the way of that and we need to be awake to his moving and his presence in our services, we need to actively acknowledge him even if it is at the detriment of our systems.

Food for thought perhaps.

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