THE LEADERSHIP OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

Neue is a journal published by Relevant magazine. Recently they published an article by Scot McKnight on "The Copy Cat Church." Some wise counsel to any church seeking to follow the leadership of the Holy Spirit to become an outward focused church (including commentary by Will Mancini):

Every local congregation should think through their local context and their particular calling from God. And when they do, the articulation of their identity and direction will be stunningly unique! Scot’s emphasis is that even the inspired biblical authors didn’t copy each others words. Therefore, and even though we have the foundational revelation of Scripture, the Holy Spirit still creates new articulation of the Gospel through his people for different places and times. Here are some quotes from the article.

• Imitation has its place, but one thing imitation doesn’t promise is results. Unfortunately a lot of church leaders don’t get that fact.
  
• You can’t imitate Spirit-empowerment. You either have it or you don’t.
  
• There is one thing that’s clear: There is no movement of God apart from God’s empowering Spirit.
  
• The New Testament suggests that Spirit-empowered movements articulate the Gospel for a particular context for that day.
  
• Spirit, context, Gospel, word. Those are the elements of a genuine movement of God.
  
• The apostolic witness is the foundation of the Spirit-shaped truth of the Gospel. However, this does not mean that we simply puppet, or imitate the words of Jesus or Paul- for the New Testament does not do that itself.
  
• What we need is less imitation and more discernment through God’s Spirit