By Jeff Goins, Editor
The first fifty pages or so of Megashift absolutely enthralled me: tales of people being raised from the dead (and these weren’t Bible stories!), miraculous healings, and mass conversions to Christ awakened my sleeping spirit that was accustomed to letting God off the hook. I had been downplaying the call of Jesus to his disciples to go and bear witness of the power of this new way of living, and it was a welcomed stirring of my soul.
The book had been recommended to me by my spiritual coach Seth Barnes.
Rutz tells the stories of unbelievable miracles in a way that is irreligious and refreshing, something else that was welcomed by my cynical mind. He documents each account with plenty of impressive endnotes, saying that he himself expressed doubt at the first time he heard of someone being raised from the dead or of a limb growing back, but after many times flying to remote locations all around the world (including India, Mexico, and Africa) and investigating these various stories, finding all of them to be true, he let go of his doubt and just started believing.
The book attacks Western rationalism in a way that is offensive to Americans and other Westerners who think they’ve got some sort of corner on the God market. It appears that the Holy Spirit is doing a great deal of work amongst those “undignified” to expect God to come crashing through their empirical world in inexplicable ways.
For example, Rutz tells the story of a Buddhist mink named Athet Pyan Shinthaw Paulu from Burma (now Myanmar). Paulu died in 1998 and at his funeral, he sprang up, screaming at hundreds of people: “It’s all a lie! I saw our ancestors burning and being tortured in some kind of fire.”
Though he had no biblical knowledge nor had he ever even heard of hell, Paulu described the place in detail corresponding to the biblical description and warned others to listen to the Christians, because they were the “only ones” who knew the truth. Paulu has allegedly converted over 300 monks. Rutz tells his readers to investigate the story by reading a condensed version of it from the Friday Fax or sending an email to [email protected] for the full transcript. Just leave the subject blank and write in the body of the email (include hyphens, but not quotes): “joel-news-international buddhist-monk-story.”
I expected this to be a book chock full of miracle tales, and I’m sure it could have been, but the author quickly changes focus from what God is doing all over the world through the faith of his people to why home fellowships are the best way to do church.
He lingers between the two themes for a few chapters with the evidence of why this is the most powerful time for Christians to be alive. The shift from miraculous to small groups is a bit drastic and threw me for a loop.
Nonetheless, Rutz has some good things to say about the explosive power of house churches and some very negative things to say about traditional pastor-led churches. Somewhat disappointingly, he doesn’t back up his advocacy for the “apostolic” movement with as many anecdotes as he did for the aforementioned miracles.
He does cite a few sources such as House2House, a home-church-planting network, but by and large, much of his reasoning is based on opinion and personal experience (you can see this in comparing the average of over 130 endnotes for the first chapter and an increasingly dwindling amount for each subsequent one).
Though there is some heavy criticism of the early Church Fathers abandoning Christ’s example, Rutz is passionate about adhering to the biblical model of church, which he opines has little to do with offices and statuses. In his eyes, it is a loosely-organized movement that is more organic than hierarchical.
He illustrates this with ideals, such as promising that in this “new Christianity,” 100% of a “congregation” will participate in church, and fictional anecdotes. Though his argument is a compelling one, it would have been moreso had it been based on real-life accounts, as the miracles of the first section of the book were.
All in all, Megashift was a good read that opened me up to some amazing insights into what God is doing around the world and called me to question some of my traditional assumptions of what a church ought to look like.
For more on James Rutz and Megashift, check out the Megashift Ministries Website.
If you liked this article, check out: Whats Wrong With Church – Me
If you liked this article, check out: Whats Wrong With Church – Me
Jeff lives in Nashville, TN.