By David Ryser
“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” (The “wizard” in
the movie, The Wizard of Oz, just
prior to being exposed as a fraud).
“These people don’t need to attend three
church services per week. They need a 12
Step Program.”
Looking back, I can see that the
person who said this was right. I wasn’t
able to accept it at the time because, whether intentionally or
unintentionally, she was talking about me.
God was moving. The church services were powerful, and the
presence of God was so thick as to be almost tangible. The congregation was excited to be a part of
what God was doing on the earth, and we threw ourselves into what we thought was
God. We enthusiastically gave our
hearts, souls, strength, and treasure to pursue after Him. Imagine our disappointment when some of us
finally realized that--rather than pursuing God--we were enabling a religious
system that was being built to contain, control, manipulate, and merchandise
the move of God.
We were being led astray by the
church leaders from Oz.
In the movie, The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy and her friends are sent on an adventure
by a “wizard” who claims to be all-knowing and all-powerful. He promises to grant their requests if they
are able to perform a suicidal quest to prove their worthiness…without his
help. (Take another look at Luke 11:46
and Matthew 23:4 sometime.) Unbeknownst
to our heroes, the wizard is a phony who is hoping they will fail in their
quest so that his cushy gig as the wizard in Oz will be preserved.
And he doesn’t care whether they
live or die. Just so they fail.
After succeeding in their quest,
Dorothy and her friends go back to the wizard to receive what has been promised
to them. The wizard tries to put them
off to another time. When this doesn’t
work, he resorts to intimidation and threats in order to dissuade them from
pressing their demands. In the midst of
his rant, Dorothy’s dog Toto exposes the wizard as a fraud. The wizard blusters out his final bluff: “Pay no attention to that man behind the
curtain!” But it’s too late.
Game, set, and match. What does this have to do with church?
In Ephesians 4:11-16, the apostle
Paul lists 4 or 5 (depending upon your theological persuasion) ministry gifts
and describes their function. Although
the gifts vary, they have a common purpose.
The function of the apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher is
to equip the people of God for the work of the ministry and building up of the
Body of Christ. This equipping is to
continue until the saints are fully matured.
Any apostle, prophet, evangelist,
pastor, or teacher who does not equip the saints is a fraud. “But wait a minute,” you say, “I don’t know
any of these people who are equipping the saints! Are they all frauds?”
Bingo! (Church leader, if you only have gifting, you
are a fraud. A phony. A humbug.
You are not called to be gifted.
You are called to be a gift.)
And these phony ministers are not,
typically, even bad people. When Dorothy
accuses the humbug “wizard” of being “a very bad man,” his response is: “Oh, no, my dear! I’m a very good man. I’m just a very bad wizard.”
Wow.
These church leaders are not bad
people. They are needy people. They are insecure people. They are fearful people. But they are not bad people.
They are just bad leaders.
It is an obscenity when good,
gifted people are co-opted by a bad religious system to take the spiritual
gifts God gave them to equip others, and use these gifts to perform spiritual
tricks for money in a religious dog-and-pony show.
And we pay them to do it while we
watch!
Attending the average church
service, or watching Christian television for that matter, typically amounts to
little more than Christian voyeurism. It
is a kind of porn. But instead of
watching people copulate, we watch them worship or dazzle us with their gifting. We get our thrills by watching something that
someone else is experiencing.
And so we go along on the church
treadmill being neither equipped nor transformed. Yes, we are changed from what we were, but we
are not becoming what we have been called and anointed to be. Even in a move of God, we are hounded by our
sins, failures, ambitions, selfishness, wickedness, and personal demons. We come time and time again for prayer to
overcome the same problems.
And in the end, we are little
better.
If God is moving, and if we are
growing in Him, shouldn’t we be getting better?
Shouldn’t we be experiencing some deliverance and healing over the
things that torment us? Instead, we get
just better enough to be useful parts in the church machine, but never truly
whole in Christ. And the entire time our
“wizards” hammer home the same message:
“God’s good. You’re not. Try harder.”
What a mess!
So we go to multiple church
services and do other religious gymnastics, believing that doing the same
failed thing more often will bring success.
Hence, my friend’s observation:
“These people don’t need to attend three church services per week. They need a 12 Step Program.”
Even AA groups don’t usually meet
three times a week…and they actually accomplish something worthwhile.
Too many of us, under the
supervision of our leadership from Oz, find that in the end we’ve merely
exchanged one form of addiction for another.
Where we once pursued whatever it was that bound us, we now just as
vigorously pursue religious activities.
We seek to be accepted, admired, and valued based upon our devotion to
the church system. We think we are
growing in Christ when in reality we are merely becoming useful cogs in a
religious contraption.
I have an idea. How about we admit that we have a problem?
(Step 1)
Let’s pursue God and a personal,
intimate relationship with Him. Let’s
run after Him until He catches us. He
wants us more than we want Him. He desires
to deliver and heal us from the things that are keeping us far from Him. And let’s seek out godly and gifted leaders
who will equip us to become what God made us to be. We’ve submitted ourselves to leaders who have
taken advantage of us and abused us. How
hard can it be to submit ourselves to leaders who will love us and be concerned
about our welfare?
And, please, do pay attention to
that man behind the curtain.
Responses to this article are welcomed. You may contact the author at drdave1545@yahoo.com
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