{"id":40459,"date":"2016-02-23T08:00:09","date_gmt":"2016-02-23T16:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/redeeminggod.com\/?p=40459"},"modified":"2017-10-22T13:12:33","modified_gmt":"2017-10-22T20:12:33","slug":"internet-and-the-spirit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redeeminggod.com\/internet-and-the-spirit\/","title":{"rendered":"The Internet and the Movement of the Spirit"},"content":{"rendered":"

I recently had a conversation with several guys about church and ministry, and we were talking about how there are so many people who seem to entering into a way of being the church outside of the four walls of institutional Christianity. By many estimates, there are now more people who follow Jesus outside of institutional Christianity than those who follow Him inside. I wrote about this a few weeks back<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As we were talking about this, one of the guys wondered why this is happening now … why we don’t see this sort of movement away from “Sunday morning congregational church” anywhere else in history.<\/p>\n

My answer was “the internet.” <\/p>\n

I believe that the movement away from Sunday morning congregational church has always been happening, but we only hear about it more today because of the internet.<\/p>\n

\"internet<\/p>\n

There are three reasons the internet is helping us see what the Spirit of God is up to in the world today.<\/p>\n

1. The internet helps us see the worldwide movement of God into a more relational Christianity.<\/h2>\n

Due to blogging and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, we can now connect with people all around the world and see that what is happening in my heart and mind is something that seems to be occurring in the hearts and minds of millions of people elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Have you ever had a thought or an idea about how to be the church, how to follow Jesus, or how a particular passage of Scripture can be understood in a way that undermines what religious Christianity has often taught? And then you get online and discover that someone on Great Britain or South Africa or Brazil has just posted exactly the same thing on Facebook?<\/p>\n

It happens all the time! The only real way to explain this is to recognize that the Spirit of God is teaching similar things to similar people all around the world. The Spirit is fanning the flames of a worldwide movement, and the internet helps us see this movement of God in real time.<\/strong><\/p>\n

2. The internet helps those with doubts and fears know that they are not crazy, that they are hearing the Spirit correctly.<\/h2>\n

\"HolyOne exciting benefit to seeing that other people in other parts of the world have similar thoughts and ideas to our own is that it helps us realize that we are not crazy heretics.<\/p>\n

When I first started to question and challenge everything I had been taught, I literally wondered if I was become an apostate. I started to ask “Why?”<\/a> about everything I had ever been taught and everything I had ever done in the church. It scared me.<\/p>\n

And that is one reason I started this blog. I started it to hopefully get feedback from other people around the world who might be able to either<\/p>\n