End TimesRecession ProofRecession Proof Communities

A community cannot be built on our own backs or by our own efforts. If it is carried by human strength it will be held up by human strength, and the day that strength fails, the work fails with it. But if God is for it, He will back it, and He will back its vision. What He authors He also sustains, provides for, defends and finishes.

Many brothers have the experience and the skill to build community. Many carry the knowledge and years of hard-won practical wisdom — land, water, timber, stock, finances, order. That skill is a gift and it is needed. But skill alone has never yet produced a witness. God has to be in it for the vision to be a necessary vision. It must be led of God and not of man, or we will only build something well-made and lifeless.

“Unless the LORD builds the house, they labour in vain who build it.” The order is never reversed. First the throne, then the plans. First the mind of the Spirit, then the mobilising of hands. Man's counsel can lay out a village; only God can make it a city set on a hill.

So the tools that fool-proof a witness are not tools of timber and steel. The proof from God that He is behind a work — and the witness a community carries to the wider community — must come by the unction of the Holy Spirit and by prayer. It comes as a prompting in the hearts of men who are given to prayer and to seeking the Lord, until what is stirred in the secret place is confirmed in the counsel of the brethren.

Then, and only then, massive action. Once God has spoken and the witness is settled, there is no place for slowness or half-measures. Pray until you know; then move with everything you have, together, at speed, in one accord — because the God who gave the vision has already gone before it.