The Perfected Church
The Perfected Church is an alternative to Catholicism, Protestantism and Orthodoxy. The present forms of church are not ‘wrong’, they are embryonic or early-stage churches. Perfecton (The Perfected Church) is the solution to the lack of places for the spiritually mature Christian to do works of faith in. Christianity has lots of churches providing introductory courses to the faith, but no graduate courses for Christians who want to move past the praise of words to the praise through works of faith.
Christians are called out to add value to the assets of God in keeping with the principle of Dominion and our own need to build an advanced civilization.
The religious leaders of these churches are akin to day care supervisors. They live lives embedded in churches that survive through compromise. One stipulation they have agreed to, is to never graduate any of their pupils. Believers sign in but they never graduate out.
Because of this, the church never separates from the world, the student never achieves perfection, and the neophyte enters as a spiritually immature Christian and regardless of how many years he or she attends service, is never promoted into spiritual adulthood. We remain part of the world of the flesh as our churches are institutions of this physical world. They all compromise to survive. The pastors of these places never seem to be concerned about the cost of their compliance.
The life of a Christian is spent in the world, at work, so we can drop a portion of our earnings into the collection plate. We are no light on the hill. No one asks us for the reason for the faith we have, unless it is to mock us.
But let’s get serious, anyone can claim to be anything they wish. Anyone can claim to be saved, or Christian or even spiritually mature. No one holds anyone accountable in the church. We are as likely to sue our fellow believer as an atheist. There is little or no discernment.
You might feel to identify as a police officer or surgeon or teacher. In virtually every case but one, your claim must be independently verified. In ever situation but one, ones standing has to be validated. No church tries to catch the wolves infiltrating the flock.
This suicidal empathy for the devils own, and our reticence to challenge a person’s identitarian claims, is becoming more widespread, perhaps due to the moral turpitude of Christians or because we fear our own faith being questioned.
Apriorists have a mission. Our church is a ministry composed of missions. Our ministry is to feed the sheep, and our mission is to create sheep.
To feed the sheep requires us to bring one another to perfection in faith. There cannot be any other ministry. If we are ministry orientated and if we are engaged in ministry work, we are perfecting the church in faith. We are creating spiritually mature believers. There cannot be anything else that replaces, minimizes or subsumes our ministry into anything larger or more central.
Our mission is to direct people into ministry and that ministry is the perfecting of faith.
Our purpose is to prove perfection is possible. That is the reason for the faith we have. Our faith gives us a path to perfection. We come to perfection through a ministry done in small groups.
The Apriorian Small Group has a two-fold function. Apriorian ministry requires us to do missions outreach into the community. We seek new believers who can then be brought into ministry. It is through this process we mature spiritually and achieve perfection.
We are to take up our cross. Christians seem to think that means we need to become a Christ-like figure, teaching and preaching and instructing everyone how to be more like us. But Jesus worked to save us. He desired perfection in us. To continue his work is to continue his work on ourselves. We need to continue his ministry. This means we need to work on perfecting ourselves, as he was perfect and made in the image of his Father, so it is pursuant to our faith to continue this work of reform. We do his work and take up his cross as we becoming perfected in our faith. It is not up to us to perfect other believers. That stake in our own eye is our first concern.
Far from being a church that is concerned with reforming others, what we need to do is to be a ministry that helps believers be accountable. We bring people into faith so they can begin the journey to perfection, but in the process, we hold them accountable as they hold us accountable.
Our ministry is our cross, and our cross is our work of perfecting ourselves.
“And he gave some, apostles; and some, prophets; and some, evangelists; and some, pastors and teachers; For the perfecting of the saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the body of Christ: Till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ: That we henceforth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight of men, and cunning craftiness, whereby they lie in wait to deceive; But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ: From whom the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth, according to the effectual working in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in love.” (Ephesians 4:11-16).
The church prepares believers for the perfecting of the saints. The perfecting is best done in small groups. We are to become versions of Christ. But what does this mean? What is the measure of this? For Christins have for too long decided that their entire role is to agree to have Christ die for them, in place of them, to accept his death as the full payment of their sins. If they are gracious enough to do that, then the rest is up to Jesus.
Christians take faith as something stagnant. The thief on the cross was saved but he died at the moment of his salvation. We almost gloat in realizing the thief had no time to make himself good nor to do any meaningful works, but we seem to miss the fact that he died, he did not live another fifty years as many of us do.
Faith saved him but his death also saved him from the need to take up his cross, for any longer than a moment.
If we were saved by faith and not by works in the way that Christians claim, we would never have had the opportunity to become Christians. The early Christians would have remained in their upper rooms and never have come down to the street to profess the risen Christ. Why would they?
If we are to do ministry, it must have a purpose or objective. It cannot simple be random activities. There needs to be some overarching unifying theme, to what we do.
In a general sense we have said ministry results in missions. When we work together to build the church and perfect our faith, we produce missions.
The church is akin to a nation whereas the ministries are the occupations that build and prosper the nation.
Missions are the dedicated efforts of missionaries to spread the faith. Missions tend to preach the gospel whereas a ministry employs the teachings of Christ. We might even condense the comparison down to ministry being works whereas missions exemplify faith.
Ministry being works needs to bear fruit. By our fruit are we known suggests it is by the nature of our works, that we are identified. This can be as prosaic as the job we do, our occupation if we do this for God.
Capitalism works because it mimics ministry. It causes harm because it also diverges from ministry. This is why socialism needs to be implemented even in the most libertarian countries, because capitalism diverges from the gospel by too great a degree.
For A Christian the choice is to do ministry through capitalism and missions in the church. Or to go the ecumenical route and abandon capitalism and the rest of this system. If we reject capitalism the church no longer needs the state or the socialist left. But there is a choice we need to make if we want salvation. We need to defeat parasitism, and we cannot do this within a system that is parasitic.
The choice is simple; we either pay our own way or not. If we do pay our own way, then we need to understand that enabling others to be parasite is damning them.
We know love is not living off of the love of others and if this is so, love is not permitting others to live off of us or off of other believers either.
The perfected church is not a building nor a congregation. The church is a ministry designed to prove perfection is possible. If this is so then God must exist as the embodiment and ultimate manifestation of perfection.
Implementing a perfect religion requires the use of a perfected politics. We will look at a new political party created to implement a perfected Christianity, in Part II of The Perfect Trilogy.