Hillsong London, Grace, Principles and Having Fun – Part 2

The Lure of Principles

There is something about the teaching of principles that gets people excited. There is something compelling about being given a challenge in relation to a Biblical principal. Just like the Jews with their Ten Commandments, Christians often adopt the attitude of wanting someone to tell them what to do. It seems so easy to be able to follow a set of rules or principles. But it is only when you attempt to do these things that you discover that you don’t have what it takes.

The Transition from Law to Grace

I think every grace Christian goes through a transition period from law to grace. During that transition period you are likely to attend church and make excuses as to why you do so. You will convince yourself and others that you need the fellowship of other Christians via the church; you might tell people that God has called you to be the voice of grace to your religious church. But there comes a time when you just can no longer mix the two and you make a clean break. This is often signified by a decision to leave your church – but not always and there is no “law” about that. I remember some of my grace friends on Facebook making similar excuses and announcements. I recall in my own life, not so long ago, when I made this clear-cut transition from law to grace: I stopped downloading Joyce Meyer’s podcasts and I made the decision to get rid of most of my Christian books.

Mega-Church Sensationalism

I do wish that there would have been some people in Hillsong that I could have shared this journey with. I would describe most of these people as “grace-oriented” and I would not say they were religious at all. But I think what prevents the Hillsong crowd from embracing the grace message with gusto – is because they are more interested in “fellowship” (in other words, social networking) and they just get swept away with the excitement in the church – the “razzle-dazzle” as I sometimes call it.

In fact, I wonder to what extent the people at Hillsong are Christians because they believe in Jesus. I think there are a lot of people in the church who said a sinner’s prayer under the threat of hellfire and damnation. I think nowadays there are probably an equal number of people in the church, especially mega-churches, because they were promised wealth and power. I wonder how many people go to Hillsong church because of all the sensationalism. Darin Hufford wrote a blog about these kinds of things, called Speaking Shoat. This is just observation and speculation by the way – I’ve no idea about solid facts and statistics when it comes to all of this. I’m not even going to touch on that delicate subject of how many people in church are actually saved. But I mention these things here because it really does make me wonder.