The Perfect Storm
Connections, The Perfect Storm

Posted by jjb on 4/6/2005, 4:39 pm, in reply to "Re: To Connect Or Not To Connect....."

I've been holding off on posting this. I can see that many people are still hurting from the connections fiasco and may not be ready to see things any other way just yet. But that's between them and the Lord. Still others have dealt with the past but are still convinced that ALL that happened was wrong and should be repented of and should only be anathematized forever.

I doubt that what I'm going to say is totally new to anyone, but I didn't go back to the archives to see what was said in the past. This is just my perspective on connections.

Keith made the statement that "Basically I don't and can't write it all off as 100% of the devil or 100% of man". He went on to say that he thought there was a point to connections, implying that the Lord was doing something with it.

So on that note my question is, 'what if connections, in their purest, unadulterated form, were really from the Lord.' Why would He do this knowing full well that it would destroy the church? Why would the Lord bring something we couldn't handle knowing that a lot of people would get hurt, and some of them, like the children, would be totally innocent?

I think there might be many reasons for it, and the Lord in His wisdom killed two (or twelve) birds with one stone.

    * I think that the chapel had become something it wasn't intended to be. While the Lord intended for the foundation to the Lord and His Word, it shifted over and was built on something else. I believe that it began with Don becoming Head Pastor For Life. Among other things this caused Don to protect his undeserved position like Saul protected his when God gave the kingdom to David. And the heavy-handed approach that Don used caused a lot of pain in those who were closest to it, just as Saul lashed out at Jonathan and tried to keep him close to himself instead of allowing him to forge a friendship with David.

    * Although Don's (and others') immorality wasn't taught as being acceptable, it had a spiritual impact on the entire body. I still disagree with what the elders did in splitting the church, and how they approached the issue of Don's immorality. But when they finally exposed it to the body (even though they should have left others out of that step) it broke a spiritual weight that was over the entire assembly. It should have been done long before and it should have been done by people who weren't involved in the same things. Some of the elders should have applied the same rules to themselves that they applied to Don, instead of flaunting their hypocrisy.

    * I don't know that the Lord could have gotten us to leave the church in Burien any other way. For a long time I was stumped as to why someone like Mark Yokers wasn't out in the ministry somewhere. I've never seen a better example of a pastor's heart. He wasn't the only one I wondered about.

    * He needed to get us apart so that we could examine our lives, our beliefs, our values without the inescapable influence of others with the same problems. The pop-psych term for it is 'enabler', and that's exactly what we did to each other. The legalism, exclusivism, arrogance and narrow-mindedness were reinforced daily by people around us.

    * What we could gain from the flawed model of a Christian church that the Chapel became was exhausted. From that point on we would just be building an edifice, a tower that would reach to heaven and become an idol to us.

    * He knew that we needed time to prepare for what was to come, and the preparation would take time. We needed time to heal, to reassess and to rebuild our lives without using any of the flawed materials we were given as a result of the Chapel getting off track. One of the biggest problems that needed to be removed and reversed was that line of bull called 'Family Relations'. All of that material was predicated on the (hugely) erroneous idea that Don and Barbara's marriage was and ideal Christian relationship. The ideas promulgated from that mess affected everyone in the church, either in selecting a mate based on erroneous criteria, or in building a relationship on ancient middle eastern values of women in society.

    * He knew that connections would be more than we could bear. It's weight could not be supported by the flawed foundation and structure that the church was built with. The dependance on one man's ideas would be exposed as cracks in the foundation. The marital problems caused by that imbalance would be exposed as cracks in the structure. The facade of superiority we put up would be seen for what it was, the emperor's new clothes.

    * We needed to see and hear the input of others. We had isolated ourselves and closed our ears and covered ourselves from the examination of outsiders. We needed help looking at ourselves just as anyone needs help from their friends who will tell us when we have bad breath or our zipper is down.

    * The truth and other good things that we gained there were outgrowing that little greenhouse. These things needed to be examined in other contexts. They needed to be examined by all of us instead of just the Don's inner circle which made all the determinations of right and wrong for us. These things also needed to be examined by others who would never set foot in the Chapel.

    * Which brings up another point, we needed the experience of thinking for ourselves and accepting both the rewards and consequences of it.

Connections was the perfect storm. It brought a convergence of weather systems together that produced the desired results in so many areas. I sincerely doubt that any other problem would have been able to shake all of these things apart the way that connections did. A smaller disaster might have only addressed one or two of the problems that needed to be dismantled. We might have been able to escape with our legalism, or our pride, or our relationship problems, or our authoritarianism, or any of the other problems still intact in our lives. We needed the complete rebuild, which meant a complete demolition.

Connections exposed the flaws in every part of what the Chapel had become. The foundation, the structural walls that supported the edifice, and the cosmetic walls that kept us from being exposed to the elements and the eyes of onlookers.

I still agree with Don's scriptural support of connections, which lasted through about three of the more than one hundred sermons he preached on the subject (after that it was all so much drivel). I believe that connections, in their purest form are both scriptural and Godly.

It's not the first time that God gave man something and man managed to corrupt it. All the arguments against connections that are based on what people did are basically irrelevant. What they did is relevant to other issues and questions. Those things just don't apply to the question of whether connections were from the Lord or not.

At this point I think there is one more important thing that connections gave us. We learned a valuable lesson about what can go wrong when God gives us something we're not prepared to handle. This is a lesson that none of us will soon forget (well, most of us, a few will continue making the same mistakes). Having the kind of impact on another Christian that connections allow (I'm deliberately not speaking in the past tense) means that you have to have your heart right and your life together or it will destroy both you and them.

Now, assuming that connections are from the Lord, let me conjecture one more thing. If the Lord is going to make the Body of Christ complete and fully together, and He intends to use what we know as spiritual connections as part of that process, than He will need people who are prepared to deal with it and to help others deal with it. How better to prepare a group of people for it than to allow them to make all the mistakes at once [hyperbole intentional]?

If what I'm saying is true, that the Lord is going to bring spiritual connections (His version not ours) to a larger body, than we have a huge responsibility to not only be prepared but also to be ready to prepare others for it. We've learned the lessons, now we need to prepare to teach them to others.

I don't think that, if what I'm saying is true, we will be prepared to help others if we become nay-sayers and deny that this was (or at least could have been) from the Lord. If the time comes that the Lord brings this to others they'll be about as prepared as we were when we first got it, although hopefully not as arrogant. At that time we would become yet another encampment along the church's path to the promised land, and they would move on unprepared for what they would face.

I believe we have a responsibility to shake ourselves off, clean ourselves up (inside and out) and be prepared to give an answer for the hope that lies within. Part of that hope is the communion of the saints in heaven where we're not hindered by carnal bodies, but can freely 'connect' with other's souls and spirits. I believe that connections (again, God's version not ours) to be yet another foretaste of what's to come, just as the baptism in the Holy Spirit is the earnest of our inheritance.

I, for one, will not shirk my responsibility to learn from what I've experienced and be able to help others when they experience the same.

Now, putting this out here has some consequences. I'm taking a risk by putting something like this out here. It's here for all to read and hold against me. But I believe it's critical that we do not reject anything that the Lord brings to us. If I'm wrong there's still time for me to learn and change. It also makes it important that I be doubly critical of anything that represents itself as spiritual connections. Just as we saw before, people used it as an occasion for the flesh. But that's what lessons learned are all about.
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