One of my first mentors taught me something simple yet profound about the "prophets of old", as he called them. He said that the prophets of the Old Testament rarely ever spoke out their "word" until they had first lived it, or at least, acted it out. It was the "acting out" that caused people to wonder what was going on; it was what caused them to ask "what might the Lord be saying?".

I still remember the night I was first baptised in the Holy Spirit. My pastor at the time spoke to me prophetically and said, "you are a man who will live by his convictions".

Put this two things together and, as a prophetic man, the result is that I have often found myself living out what the Lord has been saying even before I understood it! In fact, this has been the pattern of my life for nearly 20 years now. I would be living life happily and merrily when, through no compulsion of my own, I would find myself in a season of life I did not understand but that had that distinct "scent of God" about it.

When I came to understand what the Lord was saying by, eg, the path He had led me to, or by the season of life I now seemed to be in; that understanding would then cause me to live in a particular way because I was all the more convinced about what the Lord was saying to me and to His church.

This is incredibly helpful when trying to see ahead for both myself and for the church, because you begin to live the "things that are not, as though they were". Of course, the down-side of that is that you have to live everything twice. When your season of "seeing ahead" is done, then you have to walk with the church through their season when the things that "were not", now are!

Does that make sense?

That’s why I found this second article by Dr Thomas Hohstadt to be so helpful and encouraging. I continue to find myself in another of those times of "not understanding", but for the longest time there has been that "God scent" about it. I may not fully understand it, but I just know God is in it.

Enjoy this second article by Dr Thomas Hohstadt of  www.futurechurch.net

Kerry

TALKIN’ THE "TALK" by Dr Thomas Hohstadt

It’s a scandal!

Today’s believers no longer speak today’s language! The Lord of History is doing a "new thing,"(1) yet our linguistic journeymen have missed the journey. And, as a result, God’s "representatives" seldom represent God.

They may "walk the walk," but they can’t "talk the talk."

Lost in the past, some know the language of the seminary, but almost none know the language of the sidewalk. Looking into rearview mirrors, many understand scientific reality, but few understand virtual reality. And, learning from soured skeptics, the majority speak knowingly of grim realities, but few speak convincingly of glorious visions.

The Christian "elite" walk confidently in the grammatical, but not in the mystical. They work tirelessly at the political, but not the poetical. And, they are experts in the literal, but not the metaphorical.

In short, they’re great at "God talk," but they don’t know "God’s talk." They embolden their "modern world," yet they don’t realize their world is no longer modern.

Meanwhile, history moves on:

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I continue to do research and reading, as and when I am able, into the global discussion regarding the evolution of church as we know it and church as it is intended to become. I find it heartening that many of the things that I have shared with churches and leaders for what feels like decades regarding the future of the church, are in fact beginning to come to fruition. I wasn’t crazy or making trouble after all!

However, it is challenging as a prophetic person to be able to see so far ahead and to believe what is seen as though is already here .. to then be ignored and even persecuted because of what is seen. All prophets need to make friends with rejection, that’s just a part of the deal. But all prophets also need to make sure their character has been sufficiently developed so that when the slew of apologies begins to flow, they don’t go off on an "I told you so" binge which, believe it or not, leads to pride, bitterness and ultimately, ineffectiveness.

Anyway, I stumbled onto the following article today and felt it was worth sharing. As is so often the case with American Christians, they love to fill their writing with grandiose language that can make you feel like you’re wading through a liquid dictionary. That’s certainly the case at times here, but the essence of what is being communicated is well worth reprinting. Some of the concepts will seem a bit far fetched, but they are nonetheless things that are becoming a reality for us all whether we agree or not.

As usual, chew the meat and spit out the bones, but give this guy a decent hearing .. you’ll be glad you did.

Kerry

SPIRITUALITY AND THE LANGUAGE OF THE FUTURE
by Thomas Hohstadt of  www.futurechurch.net

History is overthrowing the way we think. Futurist Ray Kurzweil in fact believes our era will end 6,000 years of "civilization" as we’ve known it. And, in this century alone, we’ll see on the order of 20,000 years of change (at today’s rate of change).

In massive historical shifts, the very structure of knowing changes—not "what" we know, but "how" we know. We are changing, for example, to an oral culture where words do things—where virtual reality becomes real—where fiction becomes fact—where metaphor becomes the very seed of the future.

In other words, language is breaking with the past. Today’s spiritual language, for example, is going against "proper" churches and "respectable" seminaries. It’s shifting from logic to revelation, from mind to spirit, from proposition to intuition, from labeling to doing, from the literate to the prophetic ….

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