The Starfish Publishing Agreement
This book is free - but it will cost you!
Starfish Publishing is a new resource function carried by contributing authors committed to this present reformation. It is the publishing arm of the “Starfish Partnership”, a global, informal network of followers of Jesus Christ, with the goal of seeing half the planet discipled through the starfish-type multiplication of organic/simple house churches, regional apostolic networks and a return to Kingdom economics. Starfish Edition exists to make vital materials towards this goal easily accessible and globally available for the empowerment of anyone.
Starfish Publishing is a decentralized network and is based on the philosophy of a Christian gift economy. In the Kingdom of God, there is no buying and selling, but giving and receiving. Starfish materials are therefore not for sale. We loan them to you, and they become yours if you can honor the following risk-free moral agreement:
If you like the material,
please “pay it forward” to at least ten others; secondly, strive to give to the world without copyright whatever God has given to you; thirdly, money is needed, but instead of simply buying another product, we invite you to invest financially into the Starfish Vision. The Starfish Foundation serves as a financial instrument to facilitate this (more in the appendix section).
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Postal address: Starfish Verein, Postfach 1248, D-79397 Kandern
Foreword by author Wolfgang Simson
Whoever wishes to follow God will do it either God‘s way, or his own way. Many have boldly declared their own ways to be God‘s way, without asking his permission. In kind, God is doing something in our days without asking anyone’s permission. Those who sense it respond and either become revolutionaries, reformers – or rebels against their own King. The focus of this book is on the revolution that is happening out there. And it is causing those that watch it from inside established Christian systems to wish, believe and call for a reformation in their own camp. A revolution is a complete replacement of a system with a new one; a reformation, in comparison, merely changes and reshapes – reforms - that which already exists. However, I see the current Kingdom revolution, instigated by the King himself, as a benevolent and gracious act, calling both revolutionaries (the builders of new systems) and reformers (the re-shapers of existing ones) to march arm in arm, under the directives of their common King, Jesus Christ, into a common future. Today God’s revolutionaries inspire, challenge and dare all of us to go were no-one has gone before; in-house reformers restore their churches, Missions and networks, while at the same time they help to redeem the rich spiritual legacy and heritage that each church and movement has accumulated in the past, striving to introduce their own spiritual gems into the public domain.
When Karl Marx published his Communist Manifesto in 1848, the founding document of Communism, he opened it by saying: “A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism.” In today’s world, God’s Spirit is haunting all of us; but not in the form of some ghostly phantom threatening to destroy and overthrow, but the Spirit of Jesus rallying all of us with striking, personalized invitations to individually and corporately engage in the biggest and most exciting endeavor of all of human history: the culmination and ultimate fulfillment of God’s
purposes with mankind before His New Age begins.
In 1996, I sensed I needed to start preaching, teaching, and writing about an imminent reformation that gradually starts by the return of house churches as a new, but actually age-old format of ekklesia. Since the book Houses That Change The World came out and was translated into nearly 20 languages, we have had a never ending stream of visitors at our house telling us we were expressing something that they had felt in their spirit loud and clear, something unspeakable they somehow felt was put into words by that book. Since then, hundreds of thousands of new house churches have been born around the world, and if research serves us right, it looks like this is only the beginning. The Starfish Manifesto is probably the last book I will write on the issue of ekklesia, and in many ways, it is the Big Brother of my former book on house churches.
CONTENTS
PART I: INTRODUCTION AND VISION
Starfish Publishing Agreement
contents
Foreword by Anderson Williams
Foreword by author
1 I spy something 14
2 The Tale of the Mosquito Net 24
PART II: THE PROPHETIC DIMENSION
3 Spiritual Intelligence 30
GPS: God’s prophetic system
Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution
Prophetic pictures
Prophetic warnings
4 Prophetic Signposts 50
Houston: The split pulpit
Esther of India
River Aare in Thun: the flood of the Holy Spirit
Toronto: The disarmament of the Christian Militia
Original purpose
Erich’s vision of trees and the storm “Lothar”
Why, God, such a massive Tsunami Devastation?
Rain and gold
PART III: THE PROBLEM
5 Unmasking the Problem 70
6 The Covenant Principle: - or why we got deported to Babylon 92
7 Blessing: The Power of God to be Fruitful, Multiply and Fill the Earth 104
8 Where Do We Go From Here? 112
9 Apostolic Migration 120
10 My own story 126
PART IV: THE APOSTOLIC DIMENSION
11 Apostolic Architecture 144
12 The Blueprint question – How does God build? 154
13 The Empire of God 168
14 Ekklesia: The Kingdom visible around Tables and in Stadiums 196
15 Apostles – The Master Builders of God 220
16 History of the Restoration of the Apostolic 270
17 False Apostolic Patterns: The three Apostles of Mammon, 298
Dominionism and the Dream of Social Transformation
PART V: APOSTOLIC BUILDING PATTERNS
18 Identify God’s Master Builders today 322
19 The “Tarsus Principle” 328
20 Divine Romance – matching the Apostolic with the Prophetic ministry 336
21 The Gardens of God 350
22 Apostolic Finance Principles 364
23 Modeling the Kingdom 380
24 Apostolic Diaconia 396
PART VI: IMPLICATIONS AND APPLICATIONS
25 Repositioning from Within 426
26 Immediate Consequences 432
27 Organic Servanthood Development 466
28 Transitioning into an Apostolic Order 492
29 The Toolbox 508
30 The Starfish Partnership 520
Appendix 540
