Sid: My guest Marc Lawson is red hot for the Messiah. He’s Pastor of North Gate Church in Woodstock, Georgia. And I’m interviewing him on his book the title is “It’s the End of the Church as We Know It.” What do you mean by that Marc?
Marc: Well, I had a series of visions they are all kind of progressive for different times of a fast forward to the church in 2000 this in the year 2000 on New Year’s Eve, then I had a fast forward seven years forward to 2007 New Years Eve, and New Year’s Eve 2012, and New Year’s Eve 2015. Basically it was just a progression of watching how the Lord was going to demolish the way church had been operating. It was like a landscape, a cityscape of a giant city and buildings were coming down and new things were being constructed and I asked the Lord what that meant and He said that it was, “It represented the disassembling of the church as we knew it to go from a pastor centric where a body of people go to watch one person do what he does and do his ministering while they simply spectate and don’t participate,” except in maybe a service where it grows to where the body does all the ministry, they do the healing and the equipping and they don’t do it in a service, they do it 24-7, seven days a week in Wal-Mart and in their job. And then we realized that we can’t just let it accidently happen as people are on way to hear that were there we have to have strategic and intentional times so we set up, the changed our whole church schedule. Our church schedule is Monday’s off, but we have Tuesday night, Wednesday night, Thursday night, Friday night are football games, Saturday we go down to a place called Jonesboro and preach in Tenements’, and neighborhood there. And then Saturday night we’ll go to Wal-Mart and we’re there’s a youth gangs at a certain big Wal-Mart parking lot and there’s like 2 to 400 young people there for Saturday night.
Sid: Now do you get about 5% of the church to participate this or do you get all church to participate?
Marc: We talk, the way we started this a few years ago, we just took up, we said, “Let’s get a few to do it and see who wants to do it.” And we learned instead of trying to pull everybody to the same place we worked with the people that were hungry, the people that were eager and early, the people that showed up early wanted to do it, they were eager and the people that were hungry for God jumped in on it. And at first it was just my son, Ryan and a young man named David, and then we added a few then a grandma named Linda Ruby started going and then we’d have different people go. We’d have a soccer mom come and a single lady with her two kids come. And then the next thing you know everybody has been gone through the crucible of going to one of these outreaches, and some are still doing them strategically. And they have one man named Nathan, I think twenty-eight, he’s got two house churches going in one neighborhood. He went in and knocked on doors, went to a certain lady that had a miraculous remarkable healing got her saved and her whole family saved. Now they have house church’ there where they have fifteen, eighteen come every week. And now that has grown to where he passed that off to the people that he went to at first and they got saved and got disciple. And now there leading it and he went and one of the ladies that came to the house church said “Can we do this in my house too?” So we’re doing it there as well, so there are just body people, these are normal people in the body everyday people. But they’re taking church out of the church building, not that we needed church all the time, but it’s not we don’t meet it’s just that we take what God does here out on the streets, we take it to where we go. And it’s taken about four years to change the whole culture to where everybody does outreaches, everybody can heal the sick, everybody can prophecy. We have new people we had thirty-five new people come to a class and a luncheon the other day, they want to be members of the church. So we do this maybe three or four times a year, and we take them and envision them and we can all do and we encourage all of them to go through this to go to some outreaches, learn how to do this.
Sid: Now you have some unusual decor on the walls of your church building, what do you have mounted?
Marc: Well, one of the laws we started a few years ago we had a meeting and we got a lady out of a wheel chair. When I say a meeting, I mean a church meeting. We had a banquet for the poor there, every year we do these things called the Lord’s banquet around Christmas time and we have a bunch of people we’ve been preaching too all week into these meetings. And one of these ladies had gotten out of a wheelchair. So she let us keep the wheelchair, so that is on the wall and then we started to add to it. We had a young lady at sixteen was with her dad and was at a conference and she was manning a booth, she and her sister and she was sixteen and her sister is fifteen and manning a booth. A guy walks by them with a military man from Iraq, back from Iraq; he had crutches. She and her sister prayed for this man in the lobby of a hotel of a business conference. He was just walking through there, she got him healed, prayed for him twice. The pain left and he gave her the crutches and he walked away, so that was one of our first crutches. So we have crutches, we have wheelchairs, we have neck braces, arm braces, there are things that you wrap around your leg. So the building is covered one whole wall is covered with trophies of these miracles.
Sid: Now, you have some interesting terminology in your book, you talk about the welfare system of Christianity, what do you mean?
Marc: Well, we created a welfare state and we knew, we found out in the 90’s when the Federal Government abolished welfare and realized that you got to get people a job, they have to work. You have to have full employment, Matthew 20 talks about this, how they went out to get some people to work in his father’s vineyard, the man went out to get the people to work in his vineyard. He went out that morning, hired some people, he went out a few hours later, hired some more. But nobody was hiring anybody, and I think that’s kind of where we’re at in our nation today in the church. The church is a system where a few do all the heavy lifting, and the body does no work, they watch. And we have told people that they’re too sinful to be operating in this, they are not holy enough or they are not qualified enough or their not righteous enough, and the Bible’s real clear that’s not true at all. Jesus said, in John 14 “Greater things that these you can do.” So we preach our people that the minute that you’re born again, and the minute you have an encounter with the Holy Spirit like I did when I got born again, when Jesus is in you, Christ is in you the hope of Glory is in you you can raise the dead, heal the sick, everything Christ did you can do; He said that. And He said He wants us to do that and we’re responsible to go to the highways and the byways, and compel them to bring them into the Kingdom so it’s not…
Sid: But if someone can do what you’re just described they’ll get their own television show, that’s not normal, that superstar.
Marc: Well, I think that God wants to demolish the superstar thing when you have everybody in your church healing the sick like televangelist do now, and you have people that regularly, when you have everybody is operating in the gifts, what happens is the water level, the supernatural, the glory level in your church goes up markedly. Or you might have a few gifted people leading everything and doing all the ministry you might have a great anointing in that church but when everybody starts doing it everybody’s water level goes up; everybody gets saturated; everybody gets blessed. And I think that’s what Ezekiel 37 talked about Sid. It said, “What do you see?” And I think that what they say to the church now, it’s like a welfare project where nobody does any work everybody is unemployed; nobody is doing anything and that doesn’t work. You have to get people employed in their ministry so we try to find out through prophetic ministry what everybody’s ministry are, and we try to train everybody. Andy believer can preach whatever your gift mix is, your apostolic, your prophetic, you’re a teacher, you’re evangelistic or you’re prophetic; you can preach and bring the kingdom to them through your gifting and so we release them and give them opportunity. We changed our schedule we don’t have programs in our church, our programs are the whole body is getting trained all the time. So that’s our program, equipping the saints.
Sid: Do you find more miracles take place outside of the church than inside of the church and why?
Marc: Yes we do Sid and the reason for that and we do have miracles and we do have testimonies; most of miracles in Sunday gatherings and our body gatherings, or Wednesday gatherings of the body are testimonies of what the Body has done during the week; the other hundred and sixty-six hours. I wrote the book, “The End of Church as We Know it” the one-sixty-six factor that the one hundred sixty-six hours, the one sixty-six factors are the hours that we’re not in the church building for those two hours a week and doing it.
Sid: Well, why are there more miracles outside of the church then in the church?
Marc: Because Jesus told us to go to the needy, He didn’t tell us to go the, didn’t say find the found, He didn’t say, preach to the preached you know. Most of the church the system, the church system is the problem. It’s not the people don’t want to do it, or that the leader don’t want to do it; it’s just the wheel operating with the system that’s broken that has to be fixed; we have to change it. We have to… this is as great a reformation to get the body to start doing the ministry. As the first reformation where we got the word of God into the hands of the people, now God wants to bring another reformation to bring the ministry into the hands of the people. And the leaders, the apostalolic leaders that released people to go and do this, you will see great works out there because the body is suppose to do the works out in the highways and byways. Our ministry, the field is the world; the field isn’t in a church building or a two hour church service. And so most of who we’re called to minister to we haven’t met yet and so we have to send our people into Woodstock into our local community.
Sid: Do you know what the problem is and you said this on the tape that we’re offering, we’ve got too many doctors, too much alternative health, too many vitamins, we don’t have to rely on God.
Marc: And so we go to people that don’t have health plans; they don’t we go to the poor, we go to the needy, we knock on their door.
Sid: Oops our time is slipping away.
Tags: It's Supernatural, Sid Roth
Tags: It's Supernatural, Sid Roth