Apostle / Apostles and Apostolic Networks --A Few Pros & Cons

The Lord is involved in networking. His first disciples "worked nets" before they became networkers. By word of mouth the Lord used men to saturate the known world in the first century with the Gospel. Through chains of myriad contacts, scraps of paper were passed throughout Christiandom until all churches had fragments of what was to become the Holy Bible. God's network is supernatural and is above our human concept of networking. Sometimes, we are unwitting links in the fabric of God's design. The Lord used the Catholic monasteries to gather and preserve the Scriptures ultimately for the Protestants who produced the Bible in English, though the Catholics resisted the translation into English.

In this hour, the Lord is weaving link by link a massive worldwide dragnet to bring into His loving arms the last prodigious harvest of souls. Through apostolic ministry He is birthing and raising up sons and daughters in all domains and stratums to proclaim the name of Christ and to manifest the marvels of His glory with signs and wonders following. This universal network shall be joined in speech, purpose, faith, Spirit; and above all, there will be evidenced a consuming love for our God, the Lord Jesus Christ, and an unquenchable love for one another. These interlaced multi-stranded cords shall not be severed by the onslaught of the enemy, though our outward bodies perish.

This global network is composed of network organizations, denominations, local churches, Christian ministries, home meetings, and individual believers.

It is God's plan that all believers be a part of a local church. All ministry emanates from the local church, though all organizations may not define themselves as such, using the word, "church."

As history races to a climax and knowledge increases, Christian national and international networks have arisen in order to share ideas, finances, materials, personnel, and to facilitate the communication of life-changing revelations. It is now being revealed that the Lord is restoring the offices of apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher in the local churches for the purpose of progressively reforming His Universal Church into an army of apostolic people.

God wants to bring his local churches back into the Biblical fivefold pattern of apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastors and teachers under the covering of the apostle. As this revelation is in its infancy, many churches are functioning with only a fraction of the oversight due them. Although the Lord ultimately wants ministry to go forth from the local level out into the highways and byways, during the interim God is using apostolic networks to spread this restored knowledge in regions of darkness where there formerly was no light on the apostolic. As networking apostles carry this news, apostles in training will be produced at the local level. The prophetic word will establish individuals in their respective callings. Fivefold ministers who were uncertain of their office will receive words of direction that will either confirm their office or shift them into the office for which they were chosen by God.

When a network is functioning properly, it conveys helpful Biblical foundational principles without proselytizing unique churches toward conformance to a rigid stereotypical mold.

It is essential that these networks emphasize commitment to the local church, and not commitment to a network. This is only possible if the network leaders are grounded in and emanate from a local church themselves. They are accountable themselves to oversight.

The network must operate under the premise that the end goal is to loose the local church to a state of autonomy. The Network should NOT have the "chiropractic" mentality of continually administering just one more treatment with no end in sight. The local church should not be misled to believe that its source of Spiritual food must indefinitely be supplied through an outside covering. A characteristic of life is that life is self-sustaining and regenerative. When local churches spring from the apostolic seed, they flourish upward and outward, producing native fruit to export to the nations.

In the same fashion, apostles are called to be Spiritual fathers. It is the goal of the parent to mature offspring to the point of maturity where the progeny are in turn producing children of their own, the third generation.

In the financial realm, it is not the children's duty to lay up for the parent, but the parent for the children. As the children mature, the apostle will eventually reap both material and Spiritual benefits from them. Apostolic relationships must be based NOT on contracts, but on covenants.

In the final hour, as anti-christ forces usurp standard methods of travel and communication, networks as we know them today will go through revolutionary changes. Some will dissolve, others shall evolve from diverse mechanical entities, being absorbed along with the local churches into one homogenous supernatural pneumatic organism. We will be one body containing many organs composed of myriad molecules made up of innumerable atoms in perfect synchronization as a whole, a supernatural network of divine design, unconceived by the human mind.

What the Main Goal of Apostolic Networks Is To Be

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