“The church is the most powerful thing on Earth”
“What church do you go to?”
“We went to church on Sunday”
“Welcome to the house of God today”
“Bring them to church and they will get saved”
“Church leaders are the most important thing in building the church”
“We need to be relevant to our culture to effectively build the church”
“I am passionate about the church”
“Bring your offering so we can build the house of God”These are just a few of the statements that we hear over and over again but have you ever wondered if they are correct, are they scriptural?

About three years ago the Lord started bringing my attention to various things I have learned over the nearly 30 years of ministry. It all started when He spoke to me with such a force it was almost audible in a conference I was attending on church leadership. He said very clearly “beware of socio humanistic philosophy” – I said “what on earth is that”, I didn’t have a clue what that meant. He then continued showing me over the next half an hour all what was going on in the ‘church’ and then confirmed it by giving me a living example that I clearly recognized. I went home from the conference and did a Google search on the term ‘socio humanistic philosophy’ and added the word ‘Christian’ to it. I was amazed at what I read and began to understand what the Lord had shown me. Basically that the church was rampant with this philosophy. (I will go into this later in this publication) Over the last three years he has expounded on that revelation and this study is the result of everything the Lord has shown Jeannette and myself.

Just to back up a little. The Lord spoke very clearly to me 4 years ago to go to and live in a small town in New Zealand called Ashburton from our Home in Brisbane, Australia. For three and a half years we questioned the Lord as to why He took us there because as far as our ministry is concerned it died. We had been ministering there for many, many years prior to moving there. What was once a place where we had seen God do incredible miracles and His presence manifest in amazing ways turned into a place of dry bones for us.

We now understand that the Lord took us physically out of the ‘system’ of the ‘church’ we were so actively involved in by taking us to that small country town and has been getting the ‘system’ out of us ever since.
I started seeing things differently and for some reason I started cringing at the statements like the above when I said them or when I heard someone else say them. It got worse the more I heard and it seemed like my spirit was tuned into picking up those sort of things. It got extremely bad when I heard a whole sermon by one of Australia’s most well known preachers. He spoke about how great the church is, how powerful it is and how much of a privilege it is to serve in the house. My spirit squirmed and then I started thinking “hold on – he hasn’t even mentioned the Lord, God, Jesus or the Holy Spirit once through the whole sermon and I started thinking things like ‘the church isn’t the most powerful thing on Earth – the Holy Spirit is’ and questioning whether the church is in actual fact the House of God. Even is the church really the church Jesus talked about and is building on Earth today.

I recalled hearing the head of a Pentecostal movement in New Zealand state that it wasn’t the Holy Ghost that built churches it was good leadership. That was his opening statement as he opened a new church building in a particular town. I felt like screaming out “what did you just say” – I couldn’t believe what I just heard. Yet there were hundreds of people there just swallowing it all up. I went home thinking ‘what is wrong – what is going on’.

Another pastor I heard preach recently said this as his opening statement. He said “I love the church, I am so passionate about the church, the church is the most powerful, influential force on Earth. I am so excited about the church again”. My spirit immediately squirmed and I thought  ‘I know exactly where you have been’ – I discovered that this was his first message after returning from a conference hosted by the first preacher I mentioned here.
I thought ‘why aren’t you passionate, excited and in love with Jesus’. Why have you been stirred up with a passion for the church – is this scriptural? Shouldn’t you be stirred in your relationship with Jesus?

Again another example – I was watching Australian Idol where they interviewed one of the contestants and during the whole segment he talked about how the church saved him from his old life – how good his life has been since he went to church. He went on about the church this and the church that and I thought what about Jesus! – he never mentioned Him, God, the Lord, the Holy Spirit once, just how great the church was.

Now you may be thinking (as I have questioned myself) that I’m just getting critical. But you see this guy may not have really understood what he was saying – he was probably taught this by the idol that has crept into the church called ‘the church’.

Yet another example of a pastor preaching a message on evangelism. Except he wasn’t telling the people to go out on the streets and bring people to Jesus he said go out onto the streets and bring them to church so that they can get saved. The whole message was along those lines. Can you see the subtlety?
Now I think that if I talked with any of these people I have used as an example they would most likely say something like “oh yes, of course I mean Jesus. Isn’t the church the body of Christ anyway?” or “aren’t you playing semantics – the church and Jesus are the same, He is the head, we are the body”

But what this really proves is that there is overall a fundamental misunderstanding of what the church is. There is a huge error in our theology. There are whole movements preaching error that sounds like its scriptural but are in fact preaching about an idol called the church.

An idol called the ‘church’

What do I mean by  ‘an idol’?

The definition of an idol:-

"Dear children, keep yourselves from idols." 1 John 5:21

Idolatry is a sin very deeply rooted in the human heart. We need not go very far to find of this the most convincing proofs. Besides the experience of every age and every climate, we find it where we would least expect it—the prevailing sin of a people who had the greatest possible proofs of its wickedness and folly, and the strongest evidences of the being, greatness, and power of God.

It amazes us sometimes in reading the history of God's ancient people, as recorded in the inspired page, that, after such wondrous and repeated displays of his presence, glory, and majesty, they should again and again bow down before stocks and stones. That those who had witnessed all the plagues of Egypt had passed through the Red Sea by an explicit miracle, were daily living on manna that fell from heaven and water that gushed out of the rock, who had but to look upward by day to behold the pillar of the cloud, and by night the pillar of fire to manifest the presence of Jehovah in their midst—that this people, because Moses delayed coming down from the Mount, should fall down before a golden calf, and say, "These are your gods, O Israel, which brought you up out of the land of Egypt," does indeed strike our minds with astonishment.

And that this sin should break forth in them again and again through their whole history down to the period of the Babylonish captivity, in spite of all the warnings of their prophets, all the terrible judgments of God, all their repeated captivities, and, what would be far more likely to cure it, all their repeated deliverances, does indeed show, if other proof were lacking, that it is a disease deeply rooted in the very constitution of fallen man.

If this be the case, unless human nature has undergone a change, of which neither scripture nor experience affords any evidence, the disease must be in the heart of man now as much as ever; and if it exists it must manifest itself, for a constitutional malady can no more be in the soul and not show itself, than there can be a sickness in the body without evident symptoms of illness.

It is true that the disease does not break out exactly in the same form. It is true that golden calves are not now worshiped, at least the calf is not, if the gold be, nor do Protestants adore images of wood, brass, or stone. But that rank; property, fashion, honor, the opinion of the world, with everything which feeds the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, are as much idolized now as Baal and Moloch were once in Judea, and Juggernaut now is in the plains of Hindostan, is true beyond all contradiction.

But what is idolatry? To answer this question, let us ask another.
What is an idol? Is not this the essence of the idea conveyed by the word, that an idol occupies that place in our esteem and affections, in our thoughts, words and ways, in our dependence and reliance, in our worship and devotedness, which is due to God only? Whatever is to us what the Lord alone should be, that is to us an idol.

[J. C. Philpot, October, 1855]

Read full transcript here http://www.gracegems.org/Philpot/Idolatry.htm

Basically an idol is anything that takes the place of God.

“an idol occupies that place in our esteem and affections, in our thoughts, words and ways, in our dependence and reliance, in our worship and devotedness, which is due to God only”

Now with that in mind re-read the statements above and you will see my concern.

I have been putting off this publication as it will most likely offend some, anger some and most likely cut off the last dangling piece of ‘our’ ministry skin pumping life into what is left of ‘our’ ministry but will also most likely resurrect the ‘Lords’ ministry through us.

Now my statement that encapsulates what I have been saying over the last 10 – 12 years and the revelation I have had over the last 3 -4 years that there is a problem with the church.

I now realize that the church (in the west) has become an idol and has in many ways taken the place of God and that we have been preaching about the idol called the church believing we really mean Jesus.

This is actually deception that can only be broken by revelation.

The next few chapters will reveal scripturally / theologically

• What the Church is not
• What the Church is
• Church Belief systems
• How to deal with the idol
• How will we do church now
• Changing mindsets