Monday, 19 January 2015

A History of Tikkun: A Network of Congregations

Tweet

In 1984 Asher Intrater had a very strong sense from the Lord that we were to form a network of congregations. He would go and plant a new congregation out of Beth Messiah which was our main congregation in Maryland. And Moshe Morrison was planting in Baltimore, and Michael Rudolph at the same time planted in Washington, D.C.

So we started with four congregations in the network. Why did we start this network? We started it because we had a common theology that is unique to the Messianic Jewish world. For one thing we all believe in the continued call of the Jewish people to live and identify as Jews when we came to faith in Yeshua. So that placed us within the mainstream of the Messianic Jewish movement.

But we also believed that as we live out Jewish life based in scripture that we also are called to embrace the fullness of the power of the Holy Spirit and all of His gifts. Well, that made us somewhat part of some of the mainstream of Messianic Jewish movement because the MJM in terms of that issue in the United States is about half and half.

But then we embraced another truth that was being restored and that was that we needed to recognize different kinds of callings to the ministry. First there are leaders who are called to network congregations and who can lead movements. We call them apostles - with a small "a" not a big "A". We're not talking about writing scripture, we're talking about network leaders and there’s always been such kinds of leaders from Wesley to Calvin to other leaders in the history of the Church even though they didn't use the term. And we don't need to be concerned about the term; it's just that there are people that are leaders called to leadership of more than one congregation.