The Church in the wilderness - Sunday Vision
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MANY Christians are wondering away from the church services to fellowship in small groups or even staying home to worship God. Moses Mulondo finds out why.
IN the past, it was very rare to see church services happening outside the traditional churches. With many church services turning into purely religious, commercial and centred on human customs rather than the gospel, many Christians who yearn for an intimacy with God have found themselves moving out of these church buildings into the wilderness, home fellowships, street fellowships and marketplace fellowships.
As the church leaders have degenerated into the conduct of the Pharisees and teachers of the law, whom Jesus blamed for teaching what they don’t practiSe, many Christians have opted out of the church buildings to seek for God’s presence in these smaller fellowships.
This has led to two major emerging churches; the marketplace (workplace) and the church in the wilderness, which comprises those who have home fellowships or confine themselves in their houses and read the Bible on their own while praying to seek the face of God.
Many of these people no longer go to church since these fellowships are able to meet all their spiritual needs. It should be remembered that all the revival movements like the Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements were started by such small groups of people who moved out of the traditional churches to undertake spiritual experiments that would cause reformations.
Whether you are talking about the great East African Revival, the American Pentecostal Movement or the Charismatic Renewal Movement, the pioneers broke the walls of the usual ways of doing things in their traditional churches and came up with better avenues of seeking the supernatural permeation within their spiritual lives.
All the great prophets, whether in the Old or New Testament, emerged from the wilderness after being separated from the then temple worship systems. They faced a lot of resistance from the priests of those days, who had been entrenched in the old-worship systems. That is the same way all great contemporary revivalists emerged.
Another group of Pentecostal Christians, who are dissatisfied with what is going on in churches, meets in Wandegeya for fellowship on weekends not only to discuss the various ways through which the Pentecostal church has gone astray, but also to nourish each other spiritually by sharing the truth about salvation through the scriptures.
Eldest in the group is Edward Kimbowa, 44, who lives in Mubende, but comes to Kampala to share the truth he has discovered with many other Christians who no longer go to the churches.
Common among their arguments is that like the Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches, the Pentecostal church has equally become a religious church where people do certain routine religious acts.
The group looks at such acts as man made ways of doing things, which church leaders are emphasising other than emphasising the intimacy between man and God.
The group leader, Kimbowa, believes the Church is currently experiencing a radical transition from systems and practices of the past to the full release of the kingdom of God among men.
They believe the Church will experience changes until we go back to the first Christian church of the apostles, where believers met in their homes and shared the word of God while living as one family.
“Jesus did not come to start churches in the perspective of buildings because the concept of temples in form of buildings stopped in the Old Testament. In the New Testament, we became the temples of God. I am the Church. Even when we fellowship three people in a home, which is also a church and the kingdom of God will be established in that kind of set up,” argues Evangelist Robert Arubaku.
Arubaku, a Pentecostal Christian, who rarely goes to the church, spends much of his time reading the Bible and praying in his home in Makindye. On weekends, he gets in touch with people of like minds, who call themselves the remnants to share the revelations and insights in the word of God.
“I don’t waste my precious time going to services in church because of their conservative customs and prosperity gospels which appeal to the flesh other than the spirit. I yearn for a life-giving word of God. I yearn for an intimate union with God, which I can rarely get in our backslidden churches,” Arubaku explains. There are thousands of Christians like Arubaku.
This calls for wisdom from church leaders to initiate reforms that would accommodate such Christians.
“I don’t think anyone can come out and dispute the authenticity of the Church in the wilderness or the home-based church. Even the first church of Jesus’ disciples started in a certain home in the upper room.
To further confirm this concerning the first Christian church, in Acts 2:46-47, the Bible says: “They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people and the Lord added to their number those who were being saved.”
Even Jesus Christ’s message had many new revelations and because of that the Pharisees chased him out of the temple.
He always held spiritual meetings in public places just as John the Baptist had done at River Jordan after several years of seeking the face of God in the wilderness. Paul, the greatest of all Apostles, was removed from the church system the disciples of Jesus had established and taken to a lonely place which was another kind of wilderness to receive a direct message from the Lord.
That is why Paul proudly said in Galatians 1:11-17 that “I want you to know, brothers, that the gospel I preached is not something that man made up. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ…
But when God, who set apart from birth and called me by his grace was pleased to reveal his son in me so that I might preach him among the gentiles, I did not consult any man, neither did I go up to Jerusalem to see those who were before I was, but I went immediately into Arabia and later returned to Damascus.”
Published on: Saturday, 18th September, 2010
