Few would deny that the Lord is cleansing his temple.
We are witnessing a modern version of that ancient, sacred moment when Jesus confronted the commercial defilement of his Father’s holy house.
“My house will be called a house of prayer, but you are making it a den of thieves!”
Right before our eyes, Jesus is driving out buyers and sellers, overturning moneychanging tables, and intercepting people carrying their merchandise through his holy dwelling.
Or, from the view of another biblical metaphor:
The Lord is healing his body.
He is releasing a host of healthy cells into our collective spiritual bloodstream to fight the pathogens of abusive leadership and the systems that protect them.
These include courageous survivors and whistle-blowers, discerning church members and advocates, and faithful leaders.
Welcome to Revival
I believe this temple cleansing, or this immune response, is a bonafide move of God.
In my opinion, we are in a “revival.”
But it is a strange, painful revival, not at all what we may have expected. This revival is not the kind that fills auditoriums. It is rather an unearthing of all kinds of ugly. Right now there is turmoil and shaking—the storm before the calm.
Emotions are raw.
Voices are bleating.
But it is a necessary suffering. The rot that lurks below the whitewashed surface must be revealed to be excised, and that just hurts.
Yet the goal is always redemptive: to purify and restore the church.
So, for those who have prayed, “Revival or we die!” your prayers are now being answered.
But it is this revival—this difficult revival that brings exposure and justice and idol-smashing and pain and controversy and humiliation and horror and weeping and repentance and cleansing and restoration—it is this revival that had to occur… or we die.
Without the unmasking of abusive, deceptive leaders, the body would die.
Without the exposure of the evil systems that protect them—the Den of Thieves—the church would perish.
So, as local leaders in Christ’s body, I believe we must submit to the Lord on the specific terms of this present visitation. We must know how to act in season. The Lord tears down the false to clear the terrain to build the true.
This article, then, is an introduction to a few more articles about the kind of leadership that builds the true. They will address leaders as those who should serve, supply, and shepherd.
But first we set the stage.
Charismatic Chaos
These articles will focus on those segments of the church I would call, “charismatic.” In my opinion, the current crisis has roots in the “prophetic movement” of the 1980s.
While I do not necessarily deny that some of the “prophets” in that movement were gifted by the Spirit, I do not believe they stewarded their gifts with biblical wisdom. As a result, that movement created a subculture—or maybe a pop culture—of leaders that did not seem to integrate successfully into local churches for genuine fellowship, accountability, and locally-focused ministry. Instead, it released a virus of leadership stardom and ministry idolatry into charismatic Christianity.
“I am of Paul… I am of Apollos… I am of Cephas… I am of Christ…”
The infection has now spread far beyond that watershed group and has become a rampant spiritual sickness centered on celebrity leaders and the unbiblical systems that protect them.
But the infection has reached a critical point. The Lord is now confronting it with resolve and public visibility.
Charismatic Sanity
Despite the prevailing illness among popular, charismatic Christianity, I personally maintain a continuationist theology. I believe Scripture teaches that the Spirit’s gifts were meant to continue till Jesus returns.
I will not allow the abuses of so-called “prophets” to dictate my theology.
Nor do I think we should allow those who harm the church through prophetic abuse, continue to harm the church by giving the Spirit’s gifts a bad name. We should not react against one extreme with another extreme. We should respond to all extremes with biblical truth.
The Corinthians were a charismatic church sickened by hero-allegiance, divisions, immaturity, sins, and abuse of the gifts. Yet Paul did not discourage the gifts in his response. Instead, he actually encouraged the gifts, especially prophecy, while teaching the Corinthians how to exercise those gifts as a local church under the governance of love, and with specific regard for the weak.
In fact, I will take my continuationist perspective one step further.
I believe the infectious, hyper-spiritual, “charismatic” leaders who usually operate through conferences and public media, actually promote a brand of Christianity that is functionally cessationist.
Let me say that again, a different way.
I reject the pop version of charismatic Christianity because I am a continuationist.
The prevailing brand of charismatic culture is centered on the leaders rather than the people. Therefore, it effectively robs God’s people of their voices in the Spirit. And it does so while looking, acting, walking, and talking like it is “Spirit-filled.” But when the rubber meets the road, most of what happens in these circles resembles audiences attending concerts and TED Talks, rather than local churches speaking and functioning together in the Spirit.
In my opinion, no church is biblically “charismatic” unless its members have the opportunity to express their voices in the Spirit to build the body, as the body.
That is what “charismatic” means (1 Cor 12).
The more we flock to conferences rallied around favorite speakers and experiences, the more we add to the vortex that sucks the spiritual wind out of our own lungs.
The more we rely on others to be our voices for spiritual clarity, the more we are silenced with a false sense of speaking.
We are falling into a spiritual psychosis. We are being gaslit by the sheer existence of a system that wants to determine our reality from an exalted platform, rather than from a dirty floor where servants like Jesus kneel to wash feet.
Conversely, when the saints treat their leaders like little messiahs, the true Messiah’s voice gets muted among saints. Those saints must then give unhealthy devotion to the little messiahs in order to feel like they are hearing from God.
We have to break this cycle.
As long as it continues, we allow the little messiahs to disempower us as members of Christ’s body. Such leaders may be “charismatic” in doctrine, name, and appearance, but they are not charismatic in biblical practice.
If they were biblically charismatic in practice, they would get off the popular speaking circuit and sacrifice their empires to empower the local body of Christ—especially the weakest and most vulnerable members—to do the work of ministry in their cities.
But, ironically, they deem themselves “too important to the body” to come off the circuit and help the body. So they use the body as audiences to support their fame and affluence, all while claiming to “equip” them.
I do not understand why we have tolerated such leaders, let alone idolized them.
Or maybe I do understand—we have turned our Father’s house into a Den of Thieves.
But the Lord is visiting, cleansing, healing. The fog is evaporating and the hypnosis is lifting.
History Repeats
The tragedy of compromised leadership in the charismatic world is not new. I believe the prophetic movement in the late 80s was a relatively recent advancement of a pre-existing infection dating from the post-WW2 era. While God was indeed doing extraordinary things during that era, it was also racked with scandals related, I believe, to the celebrity status conferred on its leaders and a de-emphasis on the local church.
In my opinion, our current dilemma finds historical continuity with the healing revival from the 40s and 50s. Again, I honor everything the Holy Spirit was doing during that time. But some of the leaders in that stream did not seem to steward it according to God’s wisdom.
The propensity of that movement came to celebrate gifted leaders in large meeting campaigns, rather than cultivate the Spirit’s gifts among God’s people locally (Eph 4:7-16).
This has become our current problem, our infection. Instead of learning from history and these failures, we have perfected them through modern technology and the clergy culture of secrecy. And we have ushered it into an even worse manifestation that has gotten out of control.
Members of Christ’s body meant to be equipped and empowered have become unwitting supporters of Pharaoh-type leaders. Religious elites are building empires on the backs of those they should be serving.
That is a bad system.
The main thrust of the current revival, then, is to confront this system and build its biblical alternative.
That is precisely where we local leaders must respond. These articles are meant to draw attention to the biblical roles of church leaders, versus the popular roles. While the Lord tears down the spiritual empires of Pharaoh-like luminaries and liars, we want to conform to his will as Christ-like shepherds.
Jesus’ eyes of fire will keep exposing. The flames will keep burning from red to orange to yellow to white and then to blue until they have run their course. But then what? Then the church must do the hard work of reading the Bible with honesty and doing what it says about leadership and church. This will take effort and a willingness to change.
We must do more than expose and protest, as much as both of those are necessary.
We must also build.
During this intense move of God, there a few things with which we leaders must reckon to help us read the Bible with sobriety and respond to its message afresh:
The Reckoning
First, remember that the high-profile leaders who recently came down are not suddenly falling into sin. They were exposed for sins they had already committed over a long period of time. Or they were exposed for sins they previously committed and then tried to hide for a long period of time.
Some of the most successful charismatic ministers have been building ministries and influencing people while being completely disqualified from leadership. And they have been doing so for decades.
It is one thing to have a spate of failures. But we have had a spate of successes that should have been failures and only recently got exposed.
This should make us uncomfortable.
This should make us look at ourselves and ask, How did all of this escape our notice? Why were they not exposed by fellow leaders? What does this imply about the charismatic church’s general state?
I ask these questions as one who was effectively deceived myself.
It is hard for me to exaggerate how deeply I have questioned my own heart and history as a man, let alone a leader, because of this deception.
Thank the Lord, after many months, he has helped me settle this issue.
But there is a larger illness. We must diagnose the problem and wake up.
Christianity has become an alternate reality to itself.
In other words, popular Christianity has become an alternate reality to biblical Christianity. It has torn passages out of Scripture and thrown them into a cauldron of performance, big business, and hype, producing a witches’ brew that has put many under its spell.
“You were running well; who has bewitched you?”
The success of this Christian superstition must end. The job of authentic, local leaders is to return to the Scriptures in their raw form, full of the Spirit of Truth, and start the hard work of building God’s house, God’s way.
Second, then, we must face the fact that there is a system of leadership and ministry in place that allows these disqualified leaders to thrive. When I refer to the “system,” I am talking about an embodied philosophy of leadership and ministry that is directly contrary to the explicit teaching of Scripture.
This includes churches that are companies rather than spiritual families.
It includes church governments run as pyramidal hierarchies rather than a team of humble, qualified servant leaders.
It includes celebrity speakers who run their ministries like political whistle-stop tours on the front end and businesses on the back end.
It includes an unwritten (and sometimes written) code of secrecy that creates an interconnected, greenroom country club where the members protect one another after abusing the sheep they should have been serving.
It includes idolatrous reverence for talented talking heads.
And it includes a Christianity that is a rootless, floating circus tent holding conferences and internet ministries, but is not able to equip people on the ground to do the work of ministry themselves.
Even many “local churches” resemble these floating circus tents.
The system has turned God’s house into a haunted house—a Den of Thieves.
But Jesus has come into the den, and his eyes are blazing.
Third, the Lord always acts redemptively. As I said above, he does not tear down bad leaders and their systems without building the authentic, biblical culture to replace it. Otherwise,
When the unclean spirit goes out of a man, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and does not find it. Then it says, “I will return to my house from which I came”; and when it comes, it finds it unoccupied, swept, and put in order. Then it goes and takes along with it seven other spirits more wicked than itself, and they go in and live there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first. That is the way it will also be with this evil generation.
Matt 12:43-45
Once the ghosts leave, Jesus warns us that they will seek to come back with vengeance. Having a house that becomes clean and temporarily safe is not enough. We must renovate the exorcised house with biblical wisdom so that the only worthy occupant comes to reside in it and guard it.
Leaders must lead the way in this endeavor. And we do so by conforming our lives, as well as our leadership roles and goals, to the example and teaching of Jesus. Believe it or not, his pattern is actually simple—offensively simple. But it cuts against the grain of the world, as well as our own pride.
I would love to see the church make a massive return to biblical leadership. I do not know if I will see it in my lifetime. But I hope I do.
And if I do, I believe I would have witnessed a true, spiritual “revolution.” That is, I would have witnessed a full circle rotation, a “revolving back” to the biblical teachings on church and leadership.
This return will require Christ-centered humility and character, as well as a way of life that embodies the cross.
May Jesus be the Leader of leaders in our generation.