Cloners Beware
Recently I had a dream, a dream I believe that relates not only to me personally but to much of the state of the church. I will first describe the dream then give what I believe is its interpretation. The second part of this article will be much more theological and attempt to expound what I believe God has shown me to be the solution to the problem raised in the dream.
In this dream I entered a large house, the inner part of the house was not easy to enter, I had to go through contorted lane ways and encounter various dangers, the crowd standing outside the house did not expect me to be able to penetrate its inward parts. There was a shared sense that once a person was within this building it was somehow impossible to escape.
Once inside I entered a spacious room where I encountered two young women of identical age and appearance; instinctively I knew however that they were not twins. All in all there were six pairs like this, both male and female. They were in fact six pairs of children belonging to the one family. Shortly their father appeared, though their mother never did. The father was a real person known to me from the local church I attend. I proceeded to question him about this strange phenomenon of how the pairs of children could be identical without being twins.
The solution was that one of each pair was a clone; though no-one but the father knew which one. The father had initiated the cloning without reference to anyone but himself. The clone was able to appear identical in age to the original because in the symbolism of the dream the copy represented the “principle of sameness”. Now I will interpret the meaning of the dream.
The large house represents the church. The inner recesses of the house stand for the power centre of the institutional church. Not everyone is allowed to enter this privileged position, and it is assumed that if you become part of the system you will remain locked in to its culture. The father of the children represents those with authority in the institution, the children are those whom he/she is “set over”, such as members of a congregation or a para-church organisation.
Central to the dream is what I have called the “principle of sameness”. By a sovereign decision of the church/ministerial authorities it has been decided that the “spiritual DNA” of members of their organisation should be identical. That is, they need to subscribe (rather unthinkingly) to the group vision and practices. New people added to the institution are paired or matched to the existing state of affairs. These sort of spiritual parents want their children to replicate the spirituality of their inner selves from the time of the children’s rebirth.
This is not a process that begins in churches, it begins with the inevitable human disposition to ask immediately after the birth of a child, “Who does he/she look like?”. Similarly, husbands and wives usually want the other person to be like them in taste, personality and so on.
The whole relational and institutional apparatus, which, like my dream, operates more at an unconscious than conscious level, is sustained by the fear of rejection. If one conforms they are accepted, if they are non-conformist they expect rejection. This complete series of expectations corrupts the image of God.
How then does one escape from this enmeshed reality? Usually one doesn’t – all their lives most people never truly discover who they are. For Christians, this means a discovery of who we are in Christ. It is Jesus, the one always secure in his identity as the Son of the Father, who alone has secured “the great escape” for us all.
He has done this in the place where he was subjected to the most extreme pressure to conform to the popular expectations of who the Messiah-King should be. This place is the cross, where the crowds challenge him to act like a true Son of God (Matt 27:40) and be powerful. More than this external challenge to conform to group expectations, Jesus inwardly secures our true identity by entering into the depths of our identity confusion. His confused cry “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34) is a cry for us. Passing beyond such confusion, Jesus’ resurrection into the glory of the Father means that in him we can learn to be fully ourselves.
What this requires is our accepting and sharing the love of God with one another in an unconditional manner (John 13:34- 35). This is to love as God loves, without pre-set expectations of how others should be. (This is something that we need to leave to God.) Consistent love like this infallibly sets people free to become who God alone knows that they are.
The endless labellings that have gone on over the centuries of church culture (“sinner”, “backslider”, “rebel”, “immature Christian”) are not much more than vehicles of Satan to stop the emergence from our deepest hearts the truth of who God our Father knows us to be.
The progress of this “the great escape” depends in a special way on prophetic insight. The role of the prophetic is to discern the plan of God for individuals, churches, ministries, nations and the world in bringing us into the fullness of who we are meant to be in Christ. May God be pleased to raise up fearless dreamers and prophets in our time.