Friday, June 17, 2022
On January 17, 2021, I experienced the word of the Lord coming to me and asking me to resign from the vocation of pastoral ministry. At that time, I had been a credentialed pastor in the Church of the Nazarene for sixteen years. My last day as a credentialed minister was February 28, 2021.
Over the last year and a half, the Lord has been discipling me, and I have been coming to understand slowly why I had to leave the vocation of pastor and what the Lord intends next.
This message of clarification is for those who have been journeying on a similar road. Some of you I know; some I don’t. But we all share in common a sense that the season of God’s mercy is at its end, and a season of judgment is falling upon both the Church and the nations of the earth.
At the time of my resignation, I declared a call to repentance for the Church, which I still believe I did in obedience to Jesus. That call can be found in a message entitled “Words.”
I would encourage any who share my concern to listen again to that message, asking God in prayer to confirm or to deny its call to repentance.
As I have continued on this journey out of ministry and into discipleship to Jesus, I gave another message in August of 2021, entitled “Signing Off.” In that message, I tried to explain the work that the Lord has been doing in showing me that the call to ministry I had followed and the ambition that I was still cultivating to accomplish something meaningful and lasting for God were idols, infested with false spirits, calling me (and others like me) to service and to significance, but not to the way of Jesus.
Again, I would encourage any who share my concern to listen or to re-listen to that message again.
And yet, though at that time I stepped back both from preaching and from my attempts to build a ministry platform on social media, the Lord seemed to give me intermittent assignments, which required me to remain engaged in ways I thought were to be left behind me. I released several videos, and then I felt the Lord asking me to produce a series of messages revealing to His people the true nature of His judgment on the world. The result was a podcast series entitled, “The gods of the West.”
Links to that podcast series can be found at the following link: https://shadowofthecross.org/the-gods-of-the-west-series/).
Then, near the end of 2021 I was asked to serve as an interim minister of the church I was attending, and I knew that this assignment was also of the Lord. So, I accepted, and since February of 2022, I have been preaching again every week. The Lord asked me to lead that congregation through the book of the prophet Amos, which included more explanations for why God brings judgment along with more appeals to His people to repent. So, despite having signed-off in August, the Lord has not yet released me to step away fully.
I have come to understand this delay in my departure as the mercy of God. Still God’s people have not repented, and still He is making His appeal, both through me and through others similarly commissioned. I expect that my commitment to signing off was personally necessary in August of 2021, but the actual finality of it is still yet in the future. I am preparing for it, and when God wills it, I will obey. But, God seems to have delayed my departure from public ministry temporarily.
In recent days, the intensity of God’s appeals have been increasing. On April 22, 2022, the word of the Lord came to me and instructed me to warn His people that the Church was, in fact, the harlot of Revelation. This I did in a message entitled “The Harlot of Revelation.”
Then on May 27, 2022, the word of the Lord came to me, assigning me to contrast the teachings of the Ten Commandments and Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount with the institutional, ritual, and ethical practices of the Christian Churches. This I did in a message entitled, “The Calling Out of the Church.”
And then, on May 31, 2022, I experienced the word of the Lord coming to me again, assigning me to communicate His will to His followers that it is now time to leave the institutional churches. I obeyed in a message entitled “It’s Time to Go.”
Again, I’d encourage all who share my concern to listen afresh to these messages.
This progression all makes sense to me, but perhaps it has left some of you who are journeying with me confused or perplexed. I received questions from some of my Christian friends asking me if this meant that I would be leaving my current ministry assignment. Others have indicated that there is nothing wrong with the institutional church that cannot be corrected. And others have assumed that I have been taken by some sort of an anti-institutional spirit that is inconsistent with the Scriptures.
I’ll do my best to explain what I understand. God’s judgment is not coming on the Christian Church because it is an institution. God’s judgment is coming on the Christian Church because it has institutionally aligned itself with the spirits in rebellion against God.
Jesus’ kingdom is not of this earth (John 18:36), nor is it to be built the way earthly kingdoms are built (Luke 22:25-27). Jesus required no buildings, instead, the Apostles spoke of the gathered community of faith as the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 3:16). Jesus required only small gatherings—instructing His people that they required only two or three gathered for Him to be with them (Matthew 18:15-20). The earliest followers of Jesus incorporated study of the Prophets and Apostles, Prayers, and Table Fellowship as the only components of their gatherings (Acts 2:43-47).
Today Christians are enthralled with Nephilim—that is, with people of great talent and great accomplishment. We pursue excellence, seeking the most gifted and talented to worship for us and to enrapture us with their supreme efforts to honor God. Through them, we have come to believe that we can connect with God and enter into His presence. As far as I can tell, this is pagan. It was to avoid this that the early church prohibited musical performances as part of Christian worship for nearly the first two centuries of the faith. It was also to avoid this that Paul warned the first century churches to be wary of super apostles who entertained the masses with their eloquent rhetoric and charismatic presentations.
And, perhaps, most lamentable of all, is the Church’s caricature of the Gospel itself. Long forgotten is Jesus’ call to deny ourselves, take up our crosses, and follow Jesus. The Gospel, today, insists that Jesus denied Himself so that we do not have to deny ourselves, that Jesus took up His cross so that we do not have to take up crosses, that Jesus was obedient to God because we will never be obedient. In this Gospel, Jesus fulfilled all God’s hopes for humanity, so that those who believe in His work do not have to please God or do His will themselves. Long forgotten is the promise of God delivered to the Church through the Apostle Paul:
12 Therefore sin is not to reign in your mortal body so that you obey its lusts, 13 and do not go on presenting the parts of your body to sin as instruments of unrighteousness; but present yourselves to God as those who are alive from the dead, and your body’s parts as instruments of righteousness for God. 14 For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under the Law but under grace.
Romans 6:12-14, NASB
If I am hearing God adequately (and time will most certainly reveal if I am), then God’s word to the Church today is two-fold:
15 “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one proselyte; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves.”.
Matthew 23:15, NASB
And…
“One thing you still lack; sell all that you possess and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.”
Luke 18:22, NASB
So, it is time to leave. It is time to sell all we’ve accumulated, and give it back to the world from whence it came. It is time to leave behind our legacies and our bylaws and our buildings and our savings accounts. It’s time to leave Egypt and follow God into the wilderness with the Scriptures alone.
And I, too, must repent. In fact, this last year and a half has been the beginning of my repentance. Why? Because pastors like me are part of the reason the Church has become irredeemably corrupted by the world.
When God called me to feed His sheep, I wanted to do nothing else. I wanted that to be all I did with my life. I wanted that call to be a career to which I would devote my full-time. To do that I needed an institution to support me, tithers to support that institution, and on and on. I needed a kingdom on earth in order to have the future I was pursuing.
For me, and so many others like me, we can’t repent because too much depends on the survival of the institution as it is. From Christian schools, to Seminaries, to the contemporary Christian music industry, to Christian media outlets, to parachurch agencies, to Church hierarchies and administrative organizations and staff, to clergy, to local churches it is nearly impossible to calculate how many of us depend for our living on the survival of the Church as it is.
I am coming to understand that this is why I had to forsake my calling…because my calling was part of what is keeping the Church from returning to Jesus and to the simple worship of the first believers. So, I repent. I am sorry both to God and to believers for trying to make my living off of the Gospel. I have left. And though the Lord has asked me to serve temporarily in order to make one more appeal to His people to repent, I will soon leave for good.
But, this is not to leave Jesus, nor to leave the fellowship of believers. It is simply to leave an institution which has been designed to preserve itself and to raise up disciples who will preserve it indefinitely. The institutional church has become too big to fail, and so, its corruption is now no longer a bug, but a feature.
It is time to begin again…with just the Scriptures, prayer, and table fellowship with two or three gathered. And for those concerned there won’t be enough checks and balances to protect the church from heresy…look at where we are and ask yourself if all the institutional checks and balances have truly kept the Church from apostasy.
Perhaps it is time to believe that God is actively involved in preserving His own Truth. Perhaps it is only in our arrogance that we have assumed that God needs our institutional help to protect His investment in the world.
To those who have ears to hear, it’s time to go.
~ J. Thomas