The Emperor has no clothes!

By Dermot Cottuli

Over the past 26 years I’ve been on a journey that started during my first stint as a senior pastor when Deb and I moved to Deeragun, north of Townsville back in 1997 to take on the leadership of a newly planted church. Prior to Townsville I’d spent 5 years in Tasmania helping to plant a church and then 4 years as an assistant pastor in Brisbane. It was in Townsville that I first started to really grapple with the questions, “What is church all about?” and “What is it that we’re meant to be doing as pastors, when we have the weighty responsibility of leading a church?”

I remember asking myself the question, “Where does Jesus want to be in my community?” And the answer I came up with was, “He wants to be at the very heart of it, he wants to be known by everyone.” Sounded great in my head, but how were we meant to take him there? Obviously if the church is His body then it stood to reason that the church needed to be involved at a grassroots level in the community if they were to have any hope of meeting Jesus through our service. But then it lead to another question, “How would we know if we’d been successful in taking him into our community?”

The only answer I could come up with for the last question was another question, “If our church were to close its’ doors tomorrow would anyone even notice?” Which has then over the last few years, morphed into “Would our community suffer if we were no longer here or would our absence make no difference whatsoever?”

We can talk about reaching the world, our nation, our state, or our community till the cows come home, but if they have no idea we’re even around, all the praying in a back room won’t change the relevance of Jesus to the average Australian.

Sure, God could send an angel to talk to people in their homes but when has that ever happened in your experience? We can declare salvation over our neighbourhoods and yell out “Amen” in our prayer meetings but what difference does that make? Some might say we’re impacting the invisible realm, the realm of the supernatural, when we declare God’s truth over nations. Now that may be the case, but then again, it’s just as likely that it’s making no difference whatsoever other than to drown out the quiet despair that we keep hidden deep in our hearts when the reality of our experience doesn’t measure up to our hyped up expectation.

I love the movement I’m a part of, the Australian Christian Churches. I love the expression of Jesus’ life and the prominence we’ve given to the work of the Holy Spirit in and through our local expressions of church. But I’m starting to think we’ve stopped at the door and failed to enter into all that God wants for us, indeed, commands of us in the great mission before us – the reaching of our communities with the love of Jesus.

If you attend a pentecostal church you’ve probably heard a message or two on revival, more so since COVID I’m sure. Whilst it sounds nice to talk about revival and it does seem to get people fired up, have you ever stopped to think that maybe we’re just reving our cars in the garage, so to speak, without actually going anywhere? The danger we’re facing when talking about revival is that people will start to lose heart or worse yet, their belief if there isn’t a demonstration of what it is that we’re talking about. Hence the title of this article.

The anointing of the Holy Spirit wasn’t given to believers so that we could enjoy exciting meetings when we gather together for “church”, but rather to enable us to go into situations within our community where “angels fear to tread” and young men “stumble and fall.” Jesus said that he’d been anointed to take a message of hope to the poor. Peter said Jesus had been anointed by God and went around doing good and healing all those who were oppressed by the devil. It’s what we’re called to do. It’s why the Holy Spirit anoints us.

Nowhere in scripture do we read that the anointing was solely for our own benefit, unless of course we find ourselves in one of the situations that the gospels tell us Jesus often found himself in. We don’t find Paul or any of the other writers of the gospels telling believers to pray for the revival of the church and when they pray for supernatural signs and wonders it’s for when they’re out in their communities doing what Jesus told them to do.

Ask yourself this question, when you pray for God to move, what exactly do you mean? What would it look like if He was to answer your prayer?

William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army put it this way,

“I’m not waiting for a move of God, I am a move of God.”

Maybe that’s where our problem lies? How many poor or disadvantaged people do you know?

When you seek to help those worse off than yourself you place yourself in the very position that Jesus found himself in and it’s in that place that the true power of the Holy Spirit can be seen at work in people’s lives. Let’s move out of our churches and into our communities. It’s where Jesus is.

It’s okay if you disagree with what I’ve written above but if it helps you think more clearly about your practice then that’s a good thing. Don’t be afraid to ask questions, even if you feel you’re disrespecting a sacred cow. We all see dimly as through a dark glass but we have this confidence that the Holy Spirit will lead us into all truth. So let’s not stumble over the stones in the road but instead press on to take hold of all that Jesus has for us.