Mike Ross

This blog continues the examination of Watchmans Nee’s book Spiritual Authority and how it has permeated the modern church. See the previous two blogs for a review.

This twisted ideology not only disarms and cripples believers, but further reading into this book reveals how destructive it really is.

Nee suggests that a leader must “sanctify” themselves from common believers. If you spend too much time with or get to close to “common” believers your “usefulness is gone” and your “authority is lost”.

Page 185 under “Authority Is Based on Sanctification”: Authority has its foundation in sanctification… You cannot represent God if you maintain very liberal and loose communication with the people. The higher the authority the greater the separation.

Page 191 under the chapter “The Conditions for Being Delegated Authorities”: To be in authority is costly; such ones need to be sanctified from the rest and be ready for a lonely life…. As soon as one becomes too common, he is dropped from the work. His usefulness is gone, and his authority is lost.

The pastor or leader that subscribes to this debauched belief will not have the ability to fulfill the great commission. To embrace this way of thinking removes your ability to disciple people. You will be so consumed with protecting your supposed “authority” that you will be too wary to engage in meaningful relationships. The minute the relationship becomes meaningful you must cut it off, or at least change the nature of the association in order to preserve your authority.

If you serve under a pastor or leader that accepts this philosophy you have no chance of being discipled or of attaining a meaningful relationship with them.

Now that my opinions are out there let’s see what the Bible says about this. In 1 Thessalonians 2 we read the following:

7 but we were gentle among you, like a mother caring for her little children. 8 We loved you so much that we were delighted to share with you not only the gospel of God but our lives as well, because you had become so dear to us.

Paul says they were “gentle” among them and that they shared not only the gospel, but their very own lives because they had become so dear to them. Does this sound like a person that is concerned with his authority? Does it sound like he is trying to “sanctify” himself from commoners?

Now, what would Jesus do?

John 15:15

I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.

Jesus calls us friend. Jesus was the ultimate example. He loved people and was often accused of hanging out with the “commoners”.

I hope this blog helps shed light on how perversive and manipulative this teaching is. It prohibits the disciple making process which wounds believers and renders leaders useless.

In my opinion the following scripture succinctly describes the results produced by the view and application of delegated spiritual authority and “sanctification”.

The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them. (Ezekiel 34:4)

“But be not ye called Rabbi: for one is your Master, even Christ; and all ye are brothers. And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. Neither be ye called masters; for One is your Master, even Christ, But he that is greatest among you shall be your servant. And whoever shall exalt himself shall be abased; and he that shall humble himself shall be exalted. Matthew 23:8-12

According to Watchman Nee in his book ‘Spiritual Authority’ there is a hierarchy that exists within the Kingdom of God. Apparently you must traverse this hierarchical tree and its nodes properly, and know your place within the tree, or you are in rebellion.

Page 22-23 under “First Lesson a Worker Should Learn Is Obey Authority”: We are under men’s authority as well as having men under our authority. This is our position. Even the Lord Jesus on earth was subject not only to God but also to other’s authority… A Christian worker ought to know who is above him. Some do not know who are the authorities above them, hence they do not obey. We should not be occupied with right or wrong, good or evil; rather should we know who is the authority above us. Once we learn to whom we must be subject, we naturally find our place in the body.

This flies in the face of the fundamental principle of the Priesthood of all believers. When Jesus died on the cross the veil of the Temple was torn in half signifying that we no longer needed a priest, or mediator between us and God.

Let’s assume that this hierarchical tree really exists in the Kingdom. According to Nee those who are saved before you are in authority over you, because of their hierarchical position. This means that Peter would have been several levels above Paul, yet Paul openly confronts, and rebukes Peter. Was Paul out of line? Was he in rebellion?

In 1 Kings 13:7-25 we read the story of a “young” prophet and an “old” prophet. This sets the stage for us, and helps us see where these two would fall in the hierarchy. According to Nee the older prophet would be the spiritual authority for the young prophet. The young prophet would need to do whatever the older prophet told him to do, without regard to whether it was right or wrong, good or evil. It is evident in this story that Nee’s idea of obedience to the “man of God” being paramount does not line up with what God thinks. The young prophet obeyed the older prophet instead of the Lord, and he was killed by a lion because of it. I am not willing to get killed by a lion because I would rather listen to a man than God.

You are perfectly capable of hearing the voice of Jesus. Spend some time with him and get to know his voice. We know this is possible because he told us “My sheep know my voice.” The more time you spend with him the more clearly you will hear him.

I am not endorsing living as a spiritual lone ranger. See my last post about Spiritual Authority versus Godly Counsel. I am encouraging you to spend time with Jesus and get to know him personally and hear his voice for yourself.

In my next few blogs I want to discuss the concept of spiritual authority. As a pastor spiritual authority can make my life much easier. It can mitigate some of the messiness in people’s lives thereby giving the appearance that people are getting it and that their lives are being affected by the gospel. It is easier for me to tell a person what to do than it is for me to actually disciple them and teach them how to hear the voice of the Lord themselves. In this scenario the individual will comply with the rules, but I would have removed their dependence and need for relationship with the Holy Spirit. This concept of spiritual authority is sinister at best.

Often this submission to spiritual authority is propagated through the teaching of a chain of command or hierarchy in the church. This is also referred to as “delegated authority.” 

This teaching was introduced into the modern church by Watchman Nee in his book ‘Spiritual Authority’. On page 71 we read, “If God dares to entrust His authority to man, then we can dare to obey. Whether the one in authority is right or wrong does not concern us. The obedient one needs only to obey. The Lord will not hold us responsible for any mistaken obedience; rather He will hold the delegated authority responsible for his erroneous act.“ Another passage reads, “We should not be occupied with right or wrong, good or evil; rather should we know who is the authority above us” (page 23).

Scripture clearly teaches that “each of us will give an account of himself to God.” (Romans 14:12)

The position of someone in leadership does not negate the necessity of the Holy Spirit in the life of the believer.

I can’t help but think that this places the “authority” in the place of the Holy Spirit. If someone in authority tells you to do something wrong, and you hear the voice of the Holy Spirit say it is wrong, according to Watchman Nee you must obey the delegated authority. As you can see this is dangerous territory. What he is essentially stating is that delegated authority is more trustworthy than the Holy Spirit. This cripples believers and makes them dependent upon leadership. Initially the Holy Spirit has to speak to an individual in order to draw them to Jesus. This should provide evidence that this individual can hear and recognize the voice of the Lord. In the realm of delegated authority something apparently transpires the instant a person is born again, and they lose the ability to hear the voice of the Lord. Now they must have a mediator to tell them what God is saying to them.

Often in this hierarchical framework if you disagree with or challenge leadership on an issue you are made to feel rebellious or spiritually immature. If you disappoint leadership, you disappoint God himself. This is why an accountability structure is critically important. A good accountability structure safeguards the congregation and the pastor.

I will go into more detail about this view of spiritual authority in the next blog, for now I would like to highlight the inexorable necessity of Godly counsel. While I believe that the subscription to delegated spiritual authority is subversive and very dangerous, I feel that a life without Godly counsel is even more dangerous.

Throughout scripture we are admonished to seek Godly counsel, to gain wisdom and surround ourselves with counselors.

There are times that you will distinctly hear God’s voice and you will know exactly what to do. There are other times that you will have a decision to make and you are not sure that you have heard from God on the issue. The first place to look in this situation is God’s word. If you cannot find a direct answer in his word then you should seek Godly counsel. This requires faith and trust. You have to have faith in God and the principle he has put in place, and you have to trust someone other than yourself. Let’s face it we all want to be self-sufficient and putting our trust in someone else can be unnerving. The good news is that God has proven consistently that He can be trusted when his principles are applied to our lives. I personally do not make any big decisions without prayer and Godly counsel. Even if I think I have heard from God on a matter I will still run it past Godly counsel to make certain I have not missed anything.

Here are a few scriptures from the book of proverbs that implore us to seek Godly counsel.

Proverbs 1:5
A wise man will hear and increase learning, And a man of understanding will attain wise counsel

Proverbs 11:14
Where there is no counsel, the people fall; But in the multitude of counselors there is safety.

Proverbs 12:15
The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, But he who heeds counsel is wise.

Proverbs 15:22
Without counsel, plans go awry, But in the multitude of counselors they are established.

Proverbs 19:20
Listen to counsel and receive instruction, That you may be wise in your latter days.

Proverbs 20:18
Plans are established by counsel; By wise counsel wage war.

Proverbs 24:6
For by wise counsel you will wage your own war, And in a multitude of counselors there is safety.

Please understand, while I am saying that the “delegated authority” view of spiritual authority is subversive and completely non-scriptural, I am not advocating living the Christian life as a spiritual lone ranger. Be wise and a man or woman of understanding. Attain wise counsel.

Those of you that know me are aware of the fact that Lynde and I have always been a little left of center when it comes to religion. I hope that most people would say that we love Jesus more than we love the idea of Jesus, or the religious protocols that are typically associated with people involved in ministry.

When I read the four Gospels I see a Jesus that is radical. Jesus is probably not the kind of guy that would sit in front of whiteboards working on a church growth strategy. I think we would have a hard time keeping him withinin the four walls and away from people. Jesus probably would not go over very well on most church staffs because he would be unmanageable and unpredictable. “Hey Jesus could you please stop raising the dead during worship? It is too distracting and we have worked so hard on the production.”

If you read the gospels you will always see that people “flocked”  to Jesus. I have a friend that thinks people flocked to Jesus to see the show. While I am sure there was a certain amount of people that wanted to see the show, I think there was a far greater number of people that wanted to see Jesus because they had never seen anything like him before. I think they knew the real deal when they saw it. It is amazing to me that demons and “heathens” could see who he was and the religious world had no idea who he was. Apparently you can be religious and not know who Jesus is because He did not come the way you expected him to. I don’t want to miss Jesus because he came in a way that I thought was foreign or out of my comfort zone. Maybe this is why I scrutinize everything we do in ministry.

There are some that think the content of some of my blogs is rebellious or divisive or that I am targeting a particular church or denomination. I would like to assure you that it is not my intent to be divisive. It is my intent to get people to start thinking.

If we started acting more like Jesus we would have to spend far less time working on church growth strategies. The problem is that we cannot start acting more like Jesus until we identify the ways in which we do not look like him. To identify the ways that we are falling short of representing Jesus we are going to have to start asking tough questions, and examing every aspect of our institutions, and our lives as Christians.

While I may be rebellious I want you to know that it is for a cause. I desperately want to see the Gospel message impact the culture in which we live. I am afraid that as long as it is weighted down with the paraphernalia of inherited traditions, ideologies, and rituals that we will not be on His mission because we do not know what He looks like.  

On this blog, and in person, I will ask tough questions, and say things that some may find offensive. I am willing to take the risk of being unpopular, and offending some if it moves some of us closer to being a greater agent of the King on his mission.

There are plenty of openings on team rebellion. Let me know if you are interested.

Now that some of you think I have lost my mind, and some of you are mad at me, I would like to share with you the catalyst for my last blog posting. Lynde and I have struggled since we moved to Austin with what church should look like. We live in an area of Austin known as “the church planter’s graveyard”. There have been 19 church plants fail within a five mile radius in the past five years. At least four of those churches were well funded denominational churches. The culture here in Southwest Austin is not church friendly, yet we were sent here to plant a church. I spent the first six weeks praying like I have never prayed before, and felt like God was telling me that what we were going to do would not necessarily look like traditional Sunday AM church.

While my last post may have offended some, I want to be clear that causing offense was not the goal. My goal is simply to express my concerns.

We have produced generations of Christians that are content with showing up on a Sunday morning so the guy in the suit can feed them a feel good message. This behavior is not their fault, we have taught them that this is the way it should be. When pastors do for people what God has called them to do, everybody gets hurt & the mission of God gets hindered. Our vision for our people needs to be greater than parking cars or handing out bulletins on a Sunday morning. Jesus did not die so you could hand out bulletins.

If the last thing Jesus told us to do before he left was “Go and Make Disciples of all nations” I think he was and still is pretty serious about it. Are you “going” into the world and making disciples? Does your church encourage you to seperate yourself from the world, or do they tell you that you are an agent of the King, on the mission of world transformation?

Lynde and I simply want to produce an environment in which people will see Jesus before they ever hear about him. Our goal is to see transformation of people’s lives followed by exponential replication. If I am egocentric enough to think that everyone God is going to reach in Southwest Austin will be a direct result of my personal efforts I have missed it. I need to teach the people God has entrusted to me that they are priests and that there is a particular people and a particular place God has called them to. When I am the only Priest in the equation I may add a few here and there, but when we are all priests, and fulfilling the mission of God, then we have exponential replication.

More thoughts coming soon.

For many years I have found great difficulty in reconciling “church” with what I see in the New Testament. We get together once a week for an hour and a half on a Sunday morning and have church. We coax people to come to a meeting, we sing, and then a sermon is given by a guy in a suit. In most cases this is as involved on a relational level as the guy in the suit gets. At the end of service we ask people to raise their hands so they can get saved all the while no one else is looking. It is like we are all part of a secret society or “the brotherhood”.

Once we get someone to raise their hand we then try to extract them from the world. They must become entrenched in the brotherhood and start calling each other “brother” and “sister”. I find this odd because I do not address my biological sister or brother by prefacing their name with “brother” or “sister”. This just makes the church seem more like an exclusive community in which only certain people are welcomed. Once they learn how to call each other by the correct title then we tell them they can’t go into the world, and that they need to stop hanging out with all their friends and make new “Christian” friends. They need to start watching Christian television, going to Christian concerts, and listening to Christian radio. We try to immerse them in some weird sub culture that cannot relate to the world. We make these new believers think that their degree of separation from life as they used to know it determines their success as a Christian. This is real growth.

Once the extraction from the world has happened, we can proceed to put them in their place of “ministry”. We show them what they were created for. We tell them “before the foundation of the world God created you to ……”, and then we stick them in the place where they are needed the most to make the machine run. “Welcome to your spiritual destiny. You can park cars.” Maybe they can be a greeter and hand out bulletins, or work in the nursery. If they are really gifted and possibly attractive enough they can serve on the worship team.

 So here is the process:

1. Get them “Saved”.

2. Extract them from the world and induct them into our exclusive community.

3. Show them how to be real Christians and live in a bubble.

4. Put them in the place they were born to serve in. Show them their destiny!

5. Give them a T-shirt.

That is world transformation and something I am willing to give my life for! What about you?

Is it just me or are we missing something?

More to come.

So here we are in Southwest Austin. At the end of August, we moved here for the purpose of planting a church. Although it has only been a couple months, a lot has transpired since we moved here. If you would have asked me what our ‘church’ would look like when we moved here, I would have been verbose about my plans and how I was going to implement them. As I sit here writing this, I have to confess that it appears as though I do not know as much as I thought I did. As a matter of fact, I feel like I do not know much at all about what He has called us to do. I am certain he said ‘Go,’ and I am now certain He is saying to me that I should forget everything I think I know about what church and ministry really are. I feel like He is deconstructing all my ideas about what effective ministry really is. Being the church is not an event or a slick production that we gear up for once a week.  It is something we must live every day. This living should intentionally subsume the un-churched. The religious part of me is wrestling with all of this. Personally, I like programs– they are easy and a lot less messy. It is easy to look at statistics and throw numbers around about the people we can get to attend our events and productions. If effectiveness in ministry were measured by a head count, this would be so much simpler. And although I have always subscribed to the idea of getting people involved in my event or production, I now have to question how much real, lasting fruit can be sustained by that strategy.

In my last blog post I talk about how there are times when I can be overpowered in thought or feeling and how it is usually because I have neglected to order my world by simply allowing the Word to illuminate my path for the day. A couple of days without the Word and the path starts to get ominously dark. When I am not in the Word on a regular basis the outcome is predictable.

The second practical step I take when I feel overwhelmed is to review. Review what you may ask? I am glad you asked! I review what God has called me to do. If I were Jesse Jackson or Dr. Suess this is the part where I would say something like “the best way to renew is to review”. The Word says in Proverbs 29:18 “Where there is no vision, the people perish”. I find that when I lose sight of what God has called me to do and I get distracted that it is easy to feel overwhelmed.

If you are feeling overwhelmed I challenge you to spend some time in the Word. Get up a few minutes early and read a Proverb for that day. This can be done in less than ten minutes and I promise you after a couple of weeks of this you will find clarity you have never experienced before. I would like to also challenge to to review what God has called you to do. Do you have a vision? What are you going to do with what God has put before you? Make His name great and He will make your name great!

Do you ever feel overwhelmed? With four children, a wife, a job, moving to a new city and church planting, the feeling of being overwhelmed can overtake me if I allow it. To be honest I have felt overwhelmed many times in my life when I had exponentially fewer things to worry about. What is interesting is that this cycle is predictable. When I am overpowered in thought or feeling it is usually because I have neglected to order my world. I would like to share with you how I order my world and practical steps that I take to keep me headed in the right direction. Those of you that know and love me are painfully aware of the fact that I am a “big picture” guy. When I talk about ordering my world I am not talking about daytimers, blackberrys or spreadsheets. My world is ordered by the Word.

The Word is a “lamp unto our feet” and a “light unto our path”. When you are not in the Word on a regular basis your path may not be as luminous as you would expect. You may find yourself struggling with confusion and doubt. Being in the Word every day mollifies the struggle of trying to figure it all out on your own. The Word gives you wisdom you need to maneuver the difficult decisions of your day.  So the first practical step I take when feeling overwhelmed is to ask myself “Have you been in the Word?” If the answer to that question is “no” then the rest is predictable.

I will share step number 2 soon.