After reading two pages of text, you are possibly wondering "Where are we going here?" Good question. I am now ready to leave you with some more points to ponder and absorb:
The corporate/MLM church model is just the Hindu concept of the caste system Christianized. Caste (pronounced "kast") is a social class to which a person belongs by birth. Within a caste, most people share the same culture or occupation, belong to the same group, or enjoy the same level of wealth. The term caste is most often applied to the closed groups into which the people of India are divided. To maintain ritual purity, members of each caste neither marry nor dine with members of other castes (also called "varnas"). The top varna was white and was occupied by Brahmans. The next varna was red and consisted of Kshatriyas--that is, rulers, nobles, and warriors. Then came the yellow varna. People in this category engaged in banking and other kinds of business and were known as Vaisyas. The black varna was next, and it included Sudras--artisans and laborers. Besides the four varnas developed by the Brahmans, there was also a fifth category. People of the castes in this category were sometimes called panchamas (fifths) or outcasts. Today, panchamas are also known as untouchables. About a fifth of India's people belong to untouchable castes. The only way to move up in a caste was to do good deeds before you died and hope that you were reincarnated as a human being in a higher caste.
This is very similar to the corporate/MLM system of church. The tiers of the pyramid are very similar to the levels within the caste system. A denomination and/or a city's ministerial association determines your church's place within their pyramid/caste. A church determines your position in their pyramid/caste. You determine someone elses place within your own pyramid/caste. Depending on where you are within the corporate/MLM pyramid/caste determines what, how, where, when, and sometimes why do you get ministry. The comments I mentioned earlier on pages one and two apply here especially if a person who is a member of a church that uses the corporate/MLM pyramid mentality to determine who, where, when how, and why someone gets their attention, access, love, compassion, and even ministry.
Unity within a local-church body was re-engineered by the "teamwork" concept. Corporate/MLM churches, like corporate business America, implemented this "team" philosophy in the name of acheiving progress. Whether the progress acheived was man-made or Kingdom oriented is another point to be discussed later. We purchased these motivational posters from our local office supply store and Christianized their sayings to get points across to the congregations. Corporate/MLM pastors, like their corporate America counterparts, took these ideologies made theologies too far. This is true with the popular concept of teamwork where "if 'one' does bad, punish the 'all' of the team ". This concept is very popular in corporate America where if one person did not meet a performance quota, the whole team was punished by getting poor performance reviews and therefore, minimal to no raise in salary. Corporate/MLM pastors would blast the whole church for "not paying their tithes" instead of dealing with the one or few people there who did not pay their tithes. If we were still under the Old Covenant, this would apply. If we remember Achan's sin in Joshua 7, one man's sin caused a whole "team" of people to lose a battle. But the standard was set when Joshua went throughout his camp (team), found Achan who hoarded the spoils, and dealt with Achan and his family. One caused all to suffer, but when the one was dealt with, all was blessed and victorious. In the New Covenant, it was the individual and not the church team that was dealt the consequences of sin. If we look at the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5, we see that they held back their spoil that was supposed to be given to God and lied about it. Instead of the church in Acts being punished for their actions, Ananias and Sapphira was punished by death. The church in the book of Acts was not punished for their actions. In the old Covenant, the High Priest had to make the yearly offering in the Holy of Holies for the sins of the entire camp of Israel. In the New Covenant, Jesus became the High Priest and sacrifical lamb to provide the ultimate sacrifice for the sins of each individual who would confess their sins and accept Jesus as their lord. Many of the commandments of Jesus were directed at "whosoever". Who is "whosoever". Whosoever is a singular form of a person who did what Jesus commanded. Look at the grammar in some verses like John 3:16 "...whosoever believes in Him should not perish..." and John 6:54 "...Whosoever eats of my flesh and drinks of my blood has eternal life...". Notice that the grammar follows the rules of the singular syntax. It adds a refreshing meaning to the phraze we usually relate to Jesus as our "Personal Savior". In the Old Covenant, the saving miracles of God were directed towards a group of people or an army. Paul said we were one body with many parts in 1 Corinthians 12:12-31. The eye cannot say to the hand "I do not need you" and so forth. Why do we then see corporate/MLM churches producing "one body with one part"? In some corporate/MLM churches, the evangelists tell the apostles that "I do not need you". This is very unscriptural according to what Paul said in these verses.
Evangelism became sales and marketing In the corporate/MLM church, demographics heavily influence the types of people who attend their church. We decide through current trends and surveys which group of people we want to reach for God (or is it really which group of people we want to walk through our church doors?). I understand that a church cannot really do everything for everybody but when the church attendance is composed of likeminded ministries, but not the total members of the Body of Christ, something is wrong. The New Testament church in the book of Acts was designed to where the complete Body of Christ (rich, poor, black, white, single, married, widowed, divorced, young, mid-life, elderly, etc.) can come TOGETHER to offer up worship and praise to God along with getting refreshed and trained to go out and do their mandated Great Commission ministry (homeless, elderly, mens/womens/youth, internet, marriage, divorce, missions, music and arts, etc.) where God tells these people to go. By using demographics to determine the character and personality of the church body, do we end up excluding the needy who need God? We have the rich church. We have the white church. We have the so-and-so church. Does the church become the country club? Or have we been there since the beginning? A soul saved is a soul saved, no matter how rich, poor, black, white, fat, skinny, young, old, single, married, widowed, divorced, democrat, or republican they are. Period!
Pastors try to please everyone in the name of customer care Many pastors today can not spend time in prayer and fasting over their cities today because most of the church members are too dysfunctional to have any impact on society today. Instead of praying and fasting for their cities and studying the Word and spending time with God in the secret place to obtain the word that God wants their church to receive, many pastors are forced to spend the majority of their time in counseling sessions with the majority of the counseling time devoted to trivial matters. Along with spending time in counseling sessions, many pastors have to deal with internal sabotagic issues such as the gossiper who did not like the sermon preached last Sunday. Therefore, she is ready to take half of the church with her to another church or convince the elders that the pastor needs to resign. If it is not the gossiper, it is "Brother Bigbucks" who threatens to bring the building fund of the next building to it's knees by holding his promised contribution if his contractor brother does not get the bid. Therefore, the pastor has to become a "spiritualized hostage negotiator" by negotiating himself around the church politics and the Spiritual Absaloms that want to run the show. If this internal squabbling does not consume the pastor's prayer and study time, then the sermons and harsh words from the rival competitive churches in his own city sting and wound him. Since pastors of corporate/MLM churches measure themselves and others according to their local church pyramid scheme, these pastors are forced to view his congregation through the denominational pyramid scheme, then these pastors begin to formulate in their minds another pyramid scheme. This time, their own city is the big pyramid and they determine how to move their churches up to the top of this newly created mental pyramid. The tragedy in this type of pyramid is that in many city-wide minister's groups, this mental pyramid becomes a reality pyramid that becomes the measuring stick of church annointings instead of God's standards. Unity among the local churches became competition.
Instead of falling on our knees, reading His Word, seeking His face, fasting, and hearing from God, the corporate/MLM church performed "spiritual reverse engineering" by seeing what "Mega-Church" did to grow in leaps and bounds, re-engineer it to fit our needs, and forcing it to work even though God was not in the plan. In corporate/MLM churches desperate to increase church growth, trends are implemented rather than obeying the Voice of God. They buy books, listen to tapes, and go to Christian conventions to hear how Brother so-and-so experienced the over 500 percent growth in church attendance within one year and how his "methods" can help you experience the same growth. The corporate/MLM church takes these books, tapes, and seminars and break their content down to see what applies, what does not apply, or what can be slightly "tweaked" to produce a plan for church growth. They begin to implement these concepts usually without prayer because they have the instilled mindset that "If God did it for Brother so-and-so this way, then God will automatically do it for us this way". Sometimes the corporate/MLM church experiences some growth. Usually this growth consists of transplanted Christians and not the main original target of the church growth program, the unsaved. When the corporate/MLM church does not experience any growth or experience the same amount of growth as brother so-and-so, they freak out. The corporate/MLM churches decide to abandon Brother so-and-so's plan and try to implement the teachings of Brother who-and-what who said in his books, tapes, and seminars that the teachings of Brother so-and-so were wrong and the way to correct these wrong teachings is to implement Brother who-and-what's teachings. Then the vicious, repetative cycle of implementing and re-implementing programs begin to take place. When all this time, the answer to the church growth issues could have been easily obtained by waiting, hearing, and listening to the Voice of God and obeying what He said to do.
The church growth plan, along with it's promises of increased numbers and money becomes the God in the church instead of the God (Jesus) who really provides the harvest. The Power and The Glory has been replaced by the numbers and the money. The offering becomes finance instead of the firstfruit. In the corporate/MLM environment, when money is short, everyone knows. The biblical teachings of tithing is now only taught when either the church is on the verge of bankrupcy, or when the church is ready to begin the next phaze of their building plans. If Biblical tithing was taught at other times and not in the "we need the money" mentality, the church would probably not have the many problems it has with people not tithing. Tithing would be seen as a willing act of obedience instead of a grudge requirement to escape curses, judgement, and hell. Instead, many churches implement the Jerry McGuire concept of "show me the money and the numbers" and display their offerings received versus offerings needed, building pledges received versus building pledges needed, and windfall versus indebtitude. Attendance is measured and plotted towards a man-made goal established at the fiscal year meeting. Guess what? It's not your power. It's not your money. It's not your glory. It's not your numbers. It belongs to Jesus. It is HIS power, HIS glory, HIS numbers, and HIS money. He tells us what to do with it. Not we tell him what we are going to do with it.
Instead of sending proven and mature Christians transferring from other churches back into their called harvest field or the battlefield, the corporate/MLM church "reprogrammed" these people into their theologies and methodologies before allowing these people to minister while needy people spirtually died. We had to reprogram transferred Christians into our denomination's mode of thinking before we considered them saved. Even though Jesus already saved them. It is like sending Christ back to the Cross twice for something He had to die once for. We make these people go to "new membership classes" to instill our denomination's belief more than the Bible. We make them go to "seminars" to learn how to evangelize, or spiritual warfare before we recognize their gifts as evangelists or warriors. Many times, in these well intentioned programs, the requirements to be considered ready to operate in this Spiritual Gift take so long that the people we need to minister that imparted gift to are already spiritually wounded or dead. We have lost time, we have lost souls.
Instead of the Church becoming a hospital for the spiritually dead to be bought back to life in Jesus Christ and becoming a center for the spiritually wounded to heal in order to enter the harvest field and battlefield and become the annointed purveyor of the sciences, philosophies, and arts we once were, the church became a two-dimensional, mass production factory producing "cloned Christian widgets". We became like Adolf Hitler's "blond haired, blue eyed Germans". In most churches today (some non-corporate and many corporate/MLM churches included together in this statement), we have placed physical legalistic requirements on people and called it theology. We have told people that their Christianity is not true if they are not a "Right wing Republician, promise keeping, homeschooling, one working spouse, parent of over three children, Honda Accord driving, tongue talking, charismatic, bible thumping, TBN watching" Christian. God looks at the heart and not the garments and merit badges we award ourselves with. Like I said earlier, the corporate/MLM church places individuals and families on the tiers of the church wide pyramid based on these factors and other factors. The church has stymied the creativity and imaginations of many through the mass production and cloning of these "two dimensional, one body, one part widgets". In every body with different parts, each different part does a different function. In a body with one part, the body is made crippled and therefore, not up to 100 percent efficency to be the body. Where Christianity was once the innovators of the arts, education, and sciences, we gave it over to the devil. The church introduced drama and mime to society in the reinassaince era. It was Christians like Bach and Handel that gave us beautiful music. It was Christians like Galileo and Copernicus that wrote the basic theories of astronomy. It was a Christian by the name of Velikovsky who showed by math and science in his book Worlds In Collision that the sun did stop for the length of time that was detailed in the Old Testament and the Big Bang theory as taught today actually disproves the theory of evolution. What happened when we gave up? We let music degrade to the likes of Marilyn Manson. We let art degrade to the likes of Robert Maplethorpe's photograph of an aborted baby in a jar of urine. We let a deceased man named Darwin influence our children that I came from a monkey even though the last recorded words of Darwin on his death bed denounced his own theory. We went from prayer in our schools to fighting for the right to "see you at the flagpole".
When we could have fought to take our society back, did we? No. Instead of taking our music back, we formed "contemporary christian music" and kept it in the church, then argued if it was from God, and then told those who dared to take it to the world that they compromised the Gospel to get the opportunity to take it to the world. Instead of taking the arts back, we offered it as a minor degree at our Christian colleges with understaffed teachers, undersupplied accessories, and underfinanced budgets while Christian college administrators were pouring money into their Business and theology programs producing corporate/MLM theologians and corporate businessmen in the name of exodusing the oppressed christians to their businesses to futher financially oppress them. Insead of taking our schools back, we left to homeschool or for private Christian schools that cost too much for the average middle class Christian to afford. Instead of taking our sciences back, we gave the sciences completely.
There are few or possibly no Christian colleges today that have science, technical, and engineering programs in their curriculums. We could use those Christian engineers, programmers, and systems developers to help implement and forerun Y2K solutions. Instead of being the ones who would implement Y2K solutions, what did we do? We added to the fear and hoopla and joined the hysteria. We recreated spiritualized "Civil Defense" bomb shelters where we store our dehydraded foods and water for that day where we go when "The Sky Is Falling". We sell our books about the horror to instill fear to make people prepare and hopefully scare people into the kingdom, but the next Sunday, we preach in our pulpits that fear is not of God, but of the devil. According to older men in their early 60's, this is very similar to the "Red Scare" and "McCarthyism" era they experienced in the late 1950's and early 1960's where everyone who did not see things the establishment way was a Communist and needed to be dealt with. Is Y2k the "Red Scare" and the "McCarthyism" of the 1990's. It appears so, where the "establishment" fuled McCarthyism and the fear and hoopla around it, the Christians fueled, added, created, and enhanced the hysteria. My personal perspective on Y2K is that there will be some parts of the world that will be affected while other parts of the world will not be affected. Y2K can either produce the biggest harvest of souls into the kingdom because we were prepared to give and minister to needy people, or if the solutions were properly implemented and no major interruptions took place, the biggest slap in the face Christianity has ever seen leading to a more crazy viewpoint that all Christians are wackos which would lead to further persecution of the Christian church today. It is time that we start to show balance on all issues affecting Christianity and prepare out of need instead of fear.
