Why a Refornation?

Jesus preached the Kingdom - what came was Christianity: Pyramidal structures, religious personality cults, nepotism, clerics-laity-division, programs, rituals, dogmatism, church splits, denominationalism, an obsession with buildings, competitiveness and the naïve or shameless marketing of religious brands to religious consumers. In one word: religion.

Large parts of the body of Christ have become lost sheep in this chaos, yet again. Once they were lost without Christ, now they are lost within religion. Good-natured and devotedly they have followed the blind leading the blind, and watched their lives turn into a dead end road: disillusioned, sobered, incapacitated and tired of all those fundraising appeals. Many are restless, upset, some even resigned. Many are treading water and ask themselves: Was that it? Was that all there is? They were looking for God, but were given a church leader. They looked for the Kingdom, but were given the church instead.

But there is hope! There is life beyond CAWKI: Church-as-we-know-it! Entire generations, inspired by the Spirit of God, are turning away from the institutionalized religion of their parents that is obsessed with organized meetings. Large parts of society have long lost interest in CAWKI, seeing it for what it is: a series of orchestrated, badly choreographed, predictable, boring meetings in buildings that are mostly empty and unproductive for the largest part of the week. Once inside a church building, you will inevitably have to experience a 4-S-performance: sermons, songs, and sponsoring for yet another social project. Every once in a while, CAWKI would raise some ethical concerns and challenge a world gone greedy and hypnotized by the spirit of Babylon, while it fails to demonstrate and live the radical alternative, what Jesus called, “the city on the hill”, the light of the world. The world is not all that impressed with the church, because it fails to see it as a true and exciting alternative to its own predicament. One of the reasons for this is that the founding message, the core narrative, has changed. Jesus preached: Repent, because the Kingdom has come. The church preaches proselytism: Welcome, become a member of our religion today!

But God is not oblivious to this dilemma. Too much is at stake. In a global recall, God’s spirit is beckoning everyone who has ears to hear to say farewell to man-made religion and come back to him. First and foremost, he is calling his bride: Come back to the house of the Father! But it is also a call to God’s people: Come back into God’s order! And the Spirit of God is saying to the world: The Kingdom, not the church, is God’s amazing offer to you.

Wherever people are following this call from God, we will observe a migration, people fleeing from religion and repatriating into the true Land of the Free  The Kingdom of God. If Jesus is not only our God, but our active King; if we observe his constitution and his (economic) house rules, we will experience a true revolution. The spirit of Babylon and religion will lose its power over us, and God will be able to perform a factory reset which will literally re-invent us to become, in his Kingdom, what we were supposed to be in the first place. This begins a process where we as individuals and as a body can begin to model the city of God, filled with the life of citizens of the Kingdom.

Because this process is based on God’s original and final nation, the Kingdom, we call it Refornation.