Thank God It's Monday

Everybody is a well-digger

But what if we decided that instead of having just one big well on Sundays, that everybody has the opportunity to go and dig their own wells during the week? In other words, what if we focused more on empowering our people to go out into the local community during the week to dig their own smaller wells in their workplaces, schools, universities, homes, and so on. What if we didn't get spiritual only on Sundays, but we all went out and did what we naturally do Mondays to Saturdays under the anointing of the Holy Spirit? So when we have conversations with colleagues at work on Monday, we intentionally provide them with an opportunity to drink from our individual well.

What if we all were to become well-diggers in our community? So rather than relying heavily on having the big, deep well on Sundays and trying to get people in the community to come to that well, what if we empowered everybody in church to become well-diggers themselves? I think more people would begin to drink from these spiritual wells out there than from the one big well on Sundays. I think we would see people who don’t normally turn up at the one big well turn up at the smaller, individual wells. Many people who have never come to drink before would end up quenching their thirst through those individual watering holes out there in the community. They would experience something amazing and supernatural through those individual, private, intimate experiences with Christians from Monday to Saturday.

This would break the normal cycle we go through—earning an income Monday to Saturday, coming to church on Sunday, giving our tithe, then going home thinking that’s our contribution done for the week. We tend to think that that's the end of our weekly contribution to bringing the Kingdom to this earth. But what if we began to recognise that where we find ourselves most of the time—Mondays to Saturdays—is where we’re called to dig a well that produces living water. People who may never come to a Sunday church service can find themselves coming across our path during the ordinary week and having the opportunity of drinking supernatural living water from the wells we dig. People in the community will be able to interact with us, buying our products, paying for our advice, sitting in our classrooms, drinking coffee at our cafes… and coming to our church services.

What if we all recognise that we are there in the community Mondays to Saturdays to provide a well for these people we come across in our everyday lives? Can you see that in this way more people will have the potential to drink something supernatural from more wells in ordinary places?

Compare that scenario again with the way we sometimes focus on getting just one or two ‘stars’ from within our congregation to influence as many people as possible in key areas of our church and community. We think that somehow we will transform our community by simply working with a few gifted ‘stars’. And most of the time we—as pastors—are those ‘stars’ too. We are the ones who are seen to have the Midas Touch, meaning that we have the golden gift to influence the masses. We go out and meet with the mayor and a few members of parliament. We have lunch with influential business people in the community. Our church then prays for us to continue to have amazing influence over our city because of key relationships we are building in boardrooms, city halls and halls of parliament. In this way community transformation is funnelled through just a few people at the top. It’s a seductive thought.

But here’s the problem with this method of influence: Those few ‘stars’ do most of the work and the rest of the church takes it easy because they haven’t been valued or chosen for a task and it leaves them feeling unempowered. The downside to this is that most of the church may begin to believe they have little worth in community transformation. What a tragedy! What untapped potential when only a few are involved and most of the people aren’t!

The ‘law of the many’

I think it’s time we focused more on the ‘law of the many’. We cannot continue to build our churches around the star people at the front. We cannot continue to believe that if we can just position our key influential people in the right places that our community will be transformed.

Today we live in a world of mass-empowered people. Today ordinary citizens are rising up in their masses and trying to influence their communities and nations. Revolutions are taking place in cities and nations where revolutions were previously considered impossible. Look at what the media called the ‘Arab Spring’ in which from 2010 to 2012 a wave of demonstrations heavily fuelled by social media shifted the axes of power in the Arab world. By the end of 2013, rulers had been forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen and civil uprisings had erupted in Bahrain and Syria.

The power of ordinary people is returning in the dawn of this century and it’s largely being enabled through social media. Today we live in a networked society that is giving power back to the everyday, ordinary people who use Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to change their world. The power of the traditional media, global corporations and of governments is diminishing and is giving way to the power of ordinary people who are coming together in their masses through social media networks.

This is the day of the ordinary. And this is the day where every single ‘ordinary’ Christian is being called by God to transform his or her community.